Bateman extended manifold twill

With the 8 shaft countermarch loom conversion now complete, I am determined to design my own weave. After lots of reading I ve become interested in the work of Dr William Bateman. A former chemist who in the 1950's turned to weaving and created many new weave structures.  His extended manifold twills particularly captured my imagination. 

Numerous software packages are available to help weavers design and after some exploration of the alternatives I plumped for Fibreworks. I think Weavepoint is more powerful but also a lot more expensive. The program is fairly intuitive and after a lot of experimenting I finished my draft. I had to make decisions about yarn and sett, something I'm still in experienced about. I plumped for 8/2 cotton warped at 24epi (with some 10/2 blue warp threads left over from the last project). The pattern weft is also 8/2 cotton with the alternating tabby in 16/2 cotton.

the draft in Fibreworks

After winding the warp (7m of it to make curtains for the kitchen), I began dressing the loom front to back, but soon realised I'd missed out the blue warp! I had to wind a spool for each thread and suspend them from various bits of string when it came to eventually wind the warp on the back beam.  It wasn't easy but thankfully it worked.

The draft requires four different colours of weft so four shuttles. Another new skill is learning to keep them all to hand, without them falling on the floor or getting tangled. Yet again, my tie-up is upside down so the face of the fabric is not visible as I weave, only when it reaches the cloth beam.

It took quite a while to weave the 7m of fabric and the loom bring set up in the spare room meant a few hours of weaving each evening. Once the 7m was complete, I experimented with some different coloured warps and treadling patterns to make some fabric for the curtain tie-backs.

Off the loom I washed the fabric and realised that I'd forgotten to allow for shrinkage in my calculations! The curtains are consequently not very full - in fact they barely reach in the middle. One day I ll have to weave some more fabric and extend them. Despite the 24epi in 8/2 its still a very drapey fabric.