Tvistsöm

Day 48: What accounts for the popularity of some forms of needlework over others? While tvistsöm is really just a long-armed version of cross-stitch and almost as easy to work, it has never achieved the same distinction as its cousin. It gives a more highly textured appearance owing to the fact that it is always worked in one direction (left to right or right to left depending on your handedness), with the work being turned at the end of each row. Individual rows look braided; side-by-side, they resemble cables. It is a very dense stitch when worked with the correct weight thread, allowing "tails" to be concealed on the front of the work. The back, therefore, is much tidier than that resulting from cross-stitch, and what's not to like about that? Here, I am working tvistsöm on a handwoven table runner with clustered warps. The fabric is not the even-weave on which one would normally work tvistsöm, and I found that I got the best results when working the rows on the length of the cloth rather than its width. It is necessary to treat each three-thread warp cluster (where the yellow floats appear) as a "pair" of threads in order to keep the stitches equal to those in the tabby sections. Where single stitches occur in a tvistsöm pattern, they are worked as cross-stitches.

Three-Shaft Stud Runner

Day 37: And here's the piece which just came off the floor loom. The weave is something I developed on the fly when I realized I'd miscounted warp threads and wound up with one extra between the yellows. I'm sure it's been published somewhere, but rather than searching through books for something which would use a 7-thread repeat, I "re-invented" it, and call it "Three-Shaft Stud." The fringe still needs to be trimmed and twisted, but this runner may get an additional treatment: embroidery on the ends. The catch is that the weave is not square like counted-thread fabrics, so although I think cross-stitch would work, I may play around with tvistsöm ("long-armed cross-stitch") as a means of adding decoration and weight to the end panels. It may be necessary to turn the tvistsöm so that the stitches run vertically, compensating for the wider-than-tall lay of the weft and warp. Tvistsöm is worked in one direction only (left to right if you're right-handed) and subsequent rows give a braided appearance as opposed to the familiar X of cross-stitch.

Three-Shaft Stud Table Runner

Day 1: As a general rule, weaving is a pretty straightforward process. You decide what you want to make, what fibers you want to use and which colours they should be, what draft you want to thread to give the weave you desire. It would end there if it was all about mechanics, but there is a human element involved in the process which sometimes sends a project off on a very different tangent from the one the weaver had in mind. Such was the case when I measured the warp for the October Weave-Along's waffle-weave towels. My brain slipped a cog and I counted out my warp strands with every seventh one being yellow when it should have been every sixth thread. I didn't realize it until I began threading the heddles on my floor loom, counting 1-2-3-4-3-2 and 1 again. The 1s should have been yellow, but because I had six threads of colours A and B in between them in my measured warp, the next sequence was off. The only reasonable solution was to wind a new warp and put it on the table loom since any other means of correction would have resulted in a heap of thread spaghetti. That done, I commenced weaving waffles per the Weave-Along project, but I was left with the dilemma of what to do with the warp on the floor loom. There aren't a lot of weaving drafts for patterns with repeats of 7, and while I could have woven it in a simple over-and-under tabby, I wanted something with a bit more visual texture. After all, that was why I'd put those yellow threads in there in the first place. I spent that evening and a large portion of the night weaving mentally, mulling over what you could do with seven threads and four shafts, and shortly before dawn, it occurred to me that I didn't need to use four shafts. Three would do nicely. By threading the A and B coloured threads alternately on shafts 1 and 2 and the yellows on shaft 3, I could create "studs" of yellow, identical front and back. The treadling sequence shifts: 1, 2, 1, 2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/3...2, 1, 2, 1, 2/3, 1/3, 2/3. This creates a tabby in the A/B with yellow floats. In the weft, I am weaving with mustard until there are 20 yellow floats, interspersed with 3-float bands of rust and mustard until there are three rust stripes, and then repeating from the start. I had thought I might make placemats in this manner, but I like the weave so well that I decided to make an autumn table runner instead. My invented weave has undoubtedly been published somewhere at some time, but I created it from scratch, and I'm calling it "Three-Shaft Stud."