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."