20/2 Silk, Painted Warps, 12 Harnesses, Echo and Jin (this headline has no verb)

Actually, this headline is a list of my favorite things. I love weaving with two painted silk warps: When you beam them together and then thread them A-B-A-B, you can weave fabrics with subtle and beautiful color shifts -- an effect I like to call "color play."

And then there's Jin: a structure that produces excellent drape in your fabric and allows for expressive patterns as well. AND when you use an extended parallel threading, all you have to do is alter your tieup and treadling to get Echo -- a design technique that works beautifully when you want to combine two painted warps on your loom.

In the photo above, the Jin appears in the lower half and the Echo appears in the upper half. To me, they flow together nicely, in part because I used the same treadling as I shifted into Echo. All I did was eliminate the tabby treadling that's needed for Jin and change the tieup. (Easy to do on a table loom, much harder to do on my floor loom, another argument to get a computer dobby loom...)

Here's the Echo drawdown.

Here's the drawdown for the Jin pattern. Basically, I designed an advancing point twill on an extended parallel threading. (It's easy to do with weaving software. In Fiberworks, for instance, all you do is click on "parallel repeat" in the "Warp" menu and choose how many shafts you want between the two different lines of threading.)

On the loom, it played out like this (keeping in mind that I changed my 60/2 silk weft from olive to orange about halfway up in the photo):

I even like the plain-weave treadling (which weaves as a faux basket weave, as you can't achieve true plain weave with these structures).

See the floating warp thread on the right? That error made me think that I should adjust the tieup to give the fabric some serious warp floats, so that I can create an "eyelash" effect in the fabric. My plan is to mix it up when I weave the final yardage, going from Jin to Echo to faux basket weave with eyelash accents.

The takeaway from this blog post is really that old cliche: Sample, sample, sample! By the way, let me know if you want me to send you copies of the drawdowns. Happy Thanksgiving!