When you have to have predictability

colourandweaveThere are times when incidental asymmetry in my weaving starts to erode into my imagined feelings of control over things we do and experience in life.  So I’ve recently set up my loom to do some ordered and predicable work, knowing that the more free style ideas will then push themselves to the fore. The Saori loom can do all manner of weaving and it might be of interest to new weavers that have come to weaving through Saori that the loom can be used for any type of conventional cloth weaving.

Colour and weave work is really fascinating.  I’ve got Ann Sutton’s book (Color and Weave Design) with seemingly every different mix of effects which I’ve always gravitated to. So I set up one of the Saori inside sets with a black and white colour and weave, framed with the red to square it all off.  It’s a common design. It uses only two shafts but the patterning comes from the order of the colours used.  This example is woven in 2/22 cottolin sett at 10 epc. This means threading two ends through each dent in the reed (size 5dpc) rather than one. So it gives a balanced weave and the warp is closer than the usual sett in Saori style weaving.  It’s also a good idea, perhaps, to tie the warp ends onto the front rod as the clipping rod may not be sufficient to hold the larger number of threads at times. I have used the clipping rod here but there may be times when you can just tie it on.

warping plan
warping and weft order plan

You can see a plan here.  This is the warping order.  Three red threads, are followed by one black and one white for a specified number. Here is is 27 times but it could be another number.  The black and white threads are wound together on the warping board with care not to twist them. After you’ve threaded the loom and beamed the warp you can begin weaving.  Weave the colours across in the same order as the warping plan – three rows of red, then one row black, one row white for your specified number. You’ll need two shuttles for this weave too.

The beaming unitI used Kenzo’s beaming unit to prepare and beam the warp off loom. I wanted to test it on a more conventional and closer sett.

This unit basically creates a pre-wound warp on a tube which can then be threaded, or kept for later,  as you would a pre-wound warp, but off loom. It beams from back to front, different to the front to back style normally used by Saori. There is no cross but a raddle is used to separate the threaded into bouts which were created in the warping process.  The final threading allows you to thread both the reed and heddles at the same time.  You can also choose to keep the warp to thread later by taping the order of threads across the warp just prepared. Just imagine a warp making and pre-wound warp day for your own warps. Getting ready for your next weaves. Sometimes I take this too far and end up with warps but no weaving for them…at least for a while. But they don’t go off and they don’t need a fridge when they are lying around.

The unit worked well with the more conventional set up but some experienced weavers will prefer a one to one cross to pick up the next colour for threading. If this is the case the cross box and threading unit would be more exact in the cross presented to you for threading.