Puzzle sampler

It’s been hot the last few days – too hot to weave much, despite the best efforts of our air conditioner – so I have been designing instead.  I was seeking a sampler that would be more interesting than plain squares, so I could test all 14 combinations of wefts without feeling too bored.  But (despite what you might think) I am really not very artistically creative, so I played around with the preset shapes in Photoshop and finally decided to do puzzle pieces!

The preset shape didn’t work, so I created my own puzzle piece, symmetric around the center, and made a strip of puzzle pieces in 14 different colors.  Here is a .gif file of the drawdown:

It’s not great art, but it will do for this experiment.

After I weave this up, I will go back to two-shuttle weaves for awhile.  I’m trading my two Bluster Bay mini shuttles for a pair of Schacht end-feed shuttles, but it will take time for the postal service to deliver the new shuttles, so I may be short some shuttles for a week or so.  But there is so much more to explore in Marg’s book (Fit 2 Be Tied) on using Photoshop to draft double two-tie threading weaves that I don’t think I’ll feel too deprived.  4-shuttle weaves come out beautiful, but they are also extremely fiddly to weave – I can do about 4″ an hour at my current rate, and it requires a lot more concentration than weaving with just one or two shuttles.

Tomorrow morning I will check over the draft, and weave it up over the next day or two.  I’m hoping it will make decent bookmarks!