Weave A Rainbow

Day 185: YouTube often provides me with inspiration for projects, both culinary and craftsy. When I spotted this rainbow pattern, I knew I had to weave it. The draft was not given, so I created one of my own, and am weaving it on my larger rigid heddle loom (tabby, 15 epi with 8/2 cotton, 229 ends). The colour sequence is given at the end of this post. I must have been half asleep when I warped it because I made three mistakes, two of which were fairly easy to fix because they simply involved drawing threads through the wrong slots. The third mistake wasn't as quick to remedy. I had already wound the warp onto the back beam and was halfway through threading it when I came up short by one black and long by an adjacent white, i.e., where there should have been two black and three white, I had one black and four white. To fix it, I had to draw the warp back to the front of the loom, remove the offending thread and install the new one, and then rewind the warp. Fortunately, this did not require re-doing what threading I had already done, and I was able to pick up where I left off. This warp will be enough for a six-foot table runner and one towel, but I like the design so much that I may put a wider version on the floor loom to make another tablecloth. As shown, the pattern pivots on the red/violet stripe and repeats in reverse. It would also be possible to repeat the full sequence from the start. I am using black weft throughout.

Spacers and edges:

White 2, black 2, white 3, black 2, white 2 (plus a white floating selvedge thread on either side)

Rainbow stripes:

Violet 3, blue 3, violet 3

Blue 3, green 3, blue 3

Green 3, yellow 3, green 3

Yellow 3, orange 3, yellow 3

Orange 3, red 3, orange 3

Red 3, violet 3, red 3