Whew!

Three hours of intense concentration this morning yielded this monstrosity:

Since this is virtually illegible, I’ve uploaded a .zip of the .wif file here: triple weave draft, zipped .wif file.  It probably isn’t much more comprehensible, but at least you can see it a little better!

Basically what’s going on is three warps and five wefts (!).  Two of the wefts are thick wefts, and I’ve indicated those in red and brown.  They’re also larger than the others.  One weft (dark blue) is for the middle layer, and the two tabby wefts are white and yellow, respectively.  The black warp is the middle layer, the other two are top and bottom layers.  The first section is solely middle layer, the second section is all three layers but without the thick wefts.  The center section is three layers with the thick wefts.

This is very difficult to visualize since weaving software doesn’t handle three layers gracefully, so here is one of the intermediate steps, a double weave version without the middle layer, shown in Fiberworks PCW doubleweave view:

And since it’s hard to make out any detail, here’s the double weave with plain weave borders zip file.  (Unzip to get the .wif file.)

I’m not kidding when I say that this draft took me three hours.  It was incredibly tricky to put together and I’m sure it contains errors, so don’t assume this is a weavable draft!  It was more of a thought experiment, to rough out the process of creating such a monstrosity, rather than a polished version.  I have no idea whether it would weave up gracefully – I think it probably needs significant massaging, first.  (For one thing, I didn’t think about whether it would weave independent layers, a tube, or connected layers when sequencing the treadles.  Also, the three layers need to be stitched together!)

Having spent three hours generating this, I realized that I was probably going to have to redesign the draft after determining the proper sett for two layers of plain weave and one layer of tied weave.  This one is designed around a sett of 120 epi, and the correct sett for three layers is probably considerably less, maybe 108 or 96?  The odds are that I will have to scale down the design, which would mean having to redo the whole thing.  But I learned a lot this morning, and captured the steps in Evernote, so I don’t think it will take me three hours next time!