Insomniac tonight, so I’ve been playing with doubleweave drafts. Bonnie was kind enough to explain to me how to create intuitively clear doubleweave drafts using a divided parallel threading – this is possibly the coolest thing since sliced bread! I’m learning about block weaves as well – I hadn’t realized it was possible to control the pattern in each block separately.
The gist of it is that top right and bottom left quadrants control the pattern in each set of warps/wefts, and the the top left and bottom right quadrants control which set of warps/wefts is showing. In addition to the photo below (which shows interlacement view in Fiberworks PCW, but should be enough to make out the patterns if you view the larger version). You can view the .wif file here. (For some reason Firefox is displaying it as text – do a “save as” with the .wif file extension and you should be able to open it using your weaving software.)
And now I’m finally tired again, so off to bed with me! Tomorrow is a whole ‘nother day.
Is doubleweave not the coolest thing EVER? And to make it better, last year I learned how to do it on my 20″ SG-20 Beka rigid heddle loom. Oh yes. Warped up with three heddles, I can do anything a 4-shaft loom can do. Only smaller, and I can pack it in a suitcase. 🙂 Anything beyond 4-shaft, though… well, I’m not there yet. There’s a lot to explore just in that right now!
I haven’t done doubleweave since last year – I’ve almost forgotten how they work exactly (I mean how they REALLY work, not just how to read a pattern and make them), but even then I was doing a very simple tabby double weave, not like this monster – er, beauty – you have here!
I find that deconstructing 4-shaft patterns down to weave on my rigid heddle is a good way for me to learn how the weave structure works. I suppose when you have to go so far as to think about how to raise 1-3-4 at the same time, (the answer being, in part, “lower 2”) you really start to understand what each thread is doing!