Taqueté

After thinking things through carefully, I think I’m going to try weaving taqueté rather than lampas.  (For more on taqueté and designing taqueté, see Lillian Whipple’s article in WeaveZine.)  Lampas turns out to be a variant of doubleweave, and as such requires a doubleweave sett.  The only way I can get a sett that close, given that I’ve already beamed on at 40 epi, is to wind additional warp chains and hang them off the back of the loom, which would be a real pain, so I’d rather not.  And taqueté enables me to use multiple wefts, which would allow me to play with optical color mixing (lots of little dots of color blending visually to give the appearance of a single shade).  I really liked the color blending in Alice Schlein’s Double Twill seminar at Complex Weavers, and it occurs to me that taqueté allows you to do the same kind of blending on fewer shafts.

This means that I will probably want a double two-tie threading, which is just as well since I’ve also wanted to play with Marg Coe’s techniques from her book Fit 2 Be Tied, which is all about the wonderful things you can do with Photoshop and a double two-tie threading.  And can try all sorts of other cool stuff.

I had been thinking about making either bookmarks or Christmas cards from the fabric.  Lillian Whipple does lovely handwoven Christmas cards, and I think it would be fun to do some to tuck in with this year’s chocolates, or else to include with Christmas gifts.  I also have a guild challenge for which I need a striped fabric.  Any of those would work with either straight draw or point threading…so, it is really up to me to decide.  Also to decide what image I want to create!

Dyeing proceeds apace, dyed two more colors this morning and will do more over the weekend.  I also need to dye more colors for the taqueté wefts, as my color range is somewhat limited.  The specific colors I need depend on what imagery I want to create, so I will be thinking of designs today.

If you could create a symmetrical image 20 pixels wide, what would it be?