Rigid Heddle Cats

Day 155: Between the linen cupboard and the door into the bathroom, there is a six-inch wide bit of wall which hosts an assortment of changeable bell-pull style fiberarts acknowledging the changing of the seasons. Aside from Christmas, it's the only seasonal decorating I do. Not all the pieces match to a specific holiday, but examples of those which do would include krokbragd sheep for spring, tvistsöm or woven birds for summer, satin stitch/hardanger acorns for autumn, and hardanger poinsettias for winter. Having developed a rigid-heddle pattern for cats, I thought it might be nice to acknowledge Merry's birthday with a cat panel. That said, the grey cats in this little design have tails. Merry only has a stub. Working at 15 epi using 8/2 cotton, the piece was woven with a pickup stick on alternate rows to provide the cat pattern. In between, I wove white tabby (over and under), using floating selvedge threads. The pattern threads must also be taken out to the edges, passing over or under the floating selvedges as appropriate. I had to place dividers between the cats to keep floats on the reverse from being too long. I found that taking both floating selvedge threads either "up" or "down" on each pick worked best for this design. Given the nature of the weave, sometimes a grey thread would get trapped under the tabby pass as they occasionally do in any overshot, but these were easily brought to the surface with a yarn needle and should not be problematic once the fibers have been fulled by washing (not yet done in the image).