The Not 2 Square Weavers have been meeting through the magic of Zoom for several years. This really bites into our ability to handle all the lovely textiles that members have woven, but we still have the pleasure of looking at the colors and hearing the stories of how they have been created.
This past month, Karen W. talked to us about her adventures with a color trick on a turned twill design that she she wove. She was eager to use up bits and pieces of yarns from her stash and fished out four colors she thought might work with a draft that another member (Wendy-Marie) had shared with the group.
And really pushing the envelope, there are 14 different colors in this towel. The optical illusion is that this towel has been turned on its side in case you were wondering how the colors rearranged themselves!
Just so you can get a really good look at what is happening, here is a close up photo.
This is such a neat trick to make a design look very complex and we wanted to share it with all of you. What a fun way to use up stash odds and ends and get a lot of bang for your buck!
The draft, shown above, isn't a complete repeat of the design, but the trick is in overlapping colors in both the warp and the weft. As you can see from the draft above, you don't keep the colors strictly within the blocks. The little color trick allows you to get more visual blocks in your design. Karen kept her color sequence in the warp and the weft the same, so that her overall design was symmetrical. This is one choice. You could do a free form design, but warping stripes of various colors in no particular width, then weaving in a similar fashion by either using the same colors as are in the warp, or different colors. Hint: Click on the draft photo for a larger view of the details.
The source for this draft is Handwoven Nov/Dec 2013 pp.38-39 by Yoriko Oki with Vicki Robinson. Their article shows the draft with separate instructions for the color placement. With these instructions you can weave the pattern and their article indicates the resource they used was a great article by Alice Schlein in an older Handwoven issue (Mar/Apr 2001). Alice's article starts on page 38 and has a clear draft with the color placement on the draft itself, making the process much clearer to me. Once you have the concept in mind, you can alter color placement to make many more interesting twill plaid designs.
Another way you might tweek your draft would be to vary your tie up. Look at this article for ideas https://bannermountaintextiles.blogspot.com/2024/02/two-block-twills-with-multiple-tie-up.html
