Twill Weave

Day 225: The red-white-and-blue (and a little green) theme of this image was unintentional, if appropriate to Memorial Day. The real story is that there are a lot of things going on in the weaving room these days. Some projects are top-secret because they're destined to be gifts, but they have one thing in common: they are all designed around using up my copious stash of yarns and threads in preference to buying more. In this, lockdown and social distancing have driven me to do something I should have done long ago; the sheer mass of fiber in my crafts room was fast approaching critical mass. I'm being compelled to be creative in finding combinations which work well together, both for weight and colour, and this often means breaking out the pocket calculator and the gram scale in order to maximize usage. Last night I lay awake figuring in my head, "If the piece is 24" wide and weaves up at 12 throws per inch, and there are 830 yards in that solitary skein of slubby black-and-white cotton, how many inches can I weave if I use a different fiber for the warp?" The answer was roughly 2.5 yards, but it wasn't easy to reach in the wee hours of the morning when any person of normal habits would have been sleeping. More to the point then, the photo above shows two possibilities for colour pattern using the same threading. It is a simple 2/2 twill, meaning that the weft thread passes over two threads and under two, progressing on a diagonal as the sequence is treadled. The plaid repeats 16 blue, two white, two green, two white in both warp and weft, and the houndstooth is four by four, alternating white and red. Both pieces are standard knitting worsted.