Checkerboard swedish lace

I revised the draft developed in the last post to get it back to 10 shafts and 10 treadles. Repeating the treadling at the changing of layers to create a closed selvedge.

At first I was just going to weave a sample but in the end I added a few more warp ends so that the sample could be a scarf.  After the first square was woven I noticed a couple of misthreadings, so corrected them and started again. The yarn is 15/2 silk (14 wraps/cm) so each layer was sett at 7epcm (18epi). I experimented with zquares using weft in both of the greens in the warp and alternating them.

The silk is lovely and soft with the doubleweave giving it more weight. The sett was a little close, the colours a little too similar and the silk too reflective for the plain weave to be seen through the "windows" in the lace, but the lace adds a nice texture to scarf.

Networked doubleweave

 

Gone down a bit of rabbit hole with this. Above is a networked double weave fabric with areas of double and single cloth. Eva Stossel has done some very interesting work with networked doubleweave using yarns with different shrinkage. I ll probably try some similar things or maybe a wool that felts and one that doesn't.

I've been trying in vane to network something with two different structures. Its complicated because ideally you need structures transposed to a straightdraw threading, but the number of shafts becomes too big, even with frequent turning of the draft and using a treadle reducing program. In the process, I came up with a chequerboard design for Swedish lace over plainweave. It reduced to 10 shafts but I added a couple more to try and get a firm border. The lace appears in the opposing squares on the reverse.

Network drafting with doubleweave

Having experimented with double weave using 2 different weave structures in some previous projects (Swedish lace and twill, huck lace and plain weave) my mind turned to networking double weave. This would produce a cloth where rather than the two distinct fabrics changing place instantly, a gradual transition would occur. Some research revealed that this technique is already being explored notably by Alice Schein and Paul O'Connor amongst others. I had seen a recent project by Eva Stossel but hadn't really appreciated ( despite the title) that this is exactly what she was doing.

This paper by Paul O'Connor attempts to explain what is going on. It is rather mind blowing and I am already thinking about possibilities for my next weave!