Hearts

Today I had the dubious experience of spending 9 hours on a plane, as we attempted to fly from San Jose to Dallas, Texas.  We got to Dallas, but major thunderstorms prevented us from landing, and we diverted to San Antonio.  We refueled there and started for Dallas again, but more thunderstorms developed and we had to turn back to San Antonio again.  After we landed for the second time (and FINALLY got to a gate…we had been on the plane that entire time), the airline decided to ground the plane for the night and start back up again in the morning.  So, after nine hours on a plane, I stood in line with my fellow passengers for an hour and a half to get a hotel voucher, then another forty-five minutes to get into registration at the hotel.  Now I’m in the hotel, and in a few scant hours I’ll have to be up again for the flight, which leaves at the jaw-dropping hour of 6am (meaning I have to leave the hotel at around 4am).

So why am I blogging at this hour?  Well, I did some interesting stuff on the flight, and I thought I’d share.  I was thinking about the draft for the dress (underneath the coat).  It’ll be in 60/2 silk, so I’m assuming the sett will be somewhere between 50 and 75 epi, meaning a 60-70 thread repeat will give me a motif about 1″ square.  Clearly a straight draw won’t do (though a point threading might).  So I was thinking about advancing twills.

In Twill Thrills: The Best of Weaver’s, there’s a pattern for an 8-shaft advancing twill heart.  I pulled that pattern out, altered it until I got an effect I liked, and then turned it into a 16-shaft version with the hearts alternating on a half drop:

That was OK, but I didn’t like the way the hearts were getting cut off at the bottom.  I looked at the draft and realized that it was the twill advance that was doing it, so I expanded the base pattern to 12 shafts and mucked around with the threading/tie-up until I got something I liked considerably better:

I like this one considerably better and am contemplating weaving it up.

Another strong possibility is a draft that Sharon Alderman showed me, which is a series of weft ribs over a plainweave ground cloth.  I managed to locate the draft for the cloth she originally designed sometime during the nine hours on the plane, but didn’t have the mental stamina by that point to puzzle out how to extend the method to do arbitrary patterns.  So I will tackle that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, good night.  The alarm clock goes off at 3:30am, and hopefully this time I will get to Maryland!