365Caws is now in its 14th year of publication, and was originally intended to end after 365 days. It has sometimes been difficult for me to find new material, particularly during the winter months, but now as I enter my own twilight years, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to provide daily posts. It is my hope that along the way I may have inspired someone to a greater curiosity about the natural world. If so, I can rest, content in the knowledge that my work here has been done.
Saturday, October 2, 2021
Krokbragd Sheep
Day 354: Debby Greenlaw's marvelous book "Krokbragd: How to Design and Weave" contained a draft for sheep which I dearly wanted to try. There was only one problem. It required an 8-harness loom, and both my floor loom and table loom are only 4-harness. I thought I might be able to effect the same thing on the rigid heddle with multiple pick-up sticks, but that proved to be more bothersome and time-consuming than it was worth. The pattern kept rattling around in the back of my head until a few days ago when the light bulb lit: the sheep were only three throws. The additional sheds which necessitated the extra harnesses were there only to weave more green between them! That had bothered me from the get-go. Sheep are not creatures who take well to social distancing, and having them a full sheep's-width apart seemed contrary to their herding nature. By changing the pattern up just a little to eliminate unwanted sheds (weaving sheds, not housing structures), my sheep were compelled to pasture in closer proximity. Satisfied that I could now make sheepie inserts at the ends of towels, I then went on to figure out how to do plain tabby weave on a krokbragd (three-point twill) threading. Yes, it can be done on a rigid heddle (white band at the top), although it leans toward being weft-faced instead of balanced. It's a small trade-off, and one I can accept. Next in my list of experiments-to-be-performed will be to turn the sheep 90 degrees so that I can weave them on the inkle loom: "warp-faced sheep," if you will, a whole new breed engineered for weavers.
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