I decided to play with rainbow striping in this first piece. I wound all my colours of Ashford 10/2 mercerised cotton yarn onto bobbins and arranged and rearranged them until I had the colours in an order that pleased me.

I had already hemstitched on 2 rows of tabby with black cotton. I can weave about 48cm for each piece, so initially, I wove a simple striped gradient with a straight draw treadling (1,2,3,4) with 4 pattern repetitions in each colour.

After completing a single colour cycle, I decided to try weaving a more complex linear gradient using the same colour sequence. This was much slower to weave as I really had to concentrate on the weft thread order. I used the final radiant orchid (purple) band of the striped gradient as the starting point. So first I had to decrease the amount of purple while introducing honeysuckle (pink), then a pink band, then introducing chilli pepper (red) while decreasing the amount of pink, then a red band and so on until I finished with a purple band. Weft threads were woven as follows:
1 pick pink
3 picks purple
1 pick pink
2 picks purple*
1 pick pink
1 pick purple
1 pick pink
1 pick purple
2 picks pink
1 pick purple
3 picks pink
1 pick purple
12 picks pink
1 pick red
3 picks pink
1 pick red
2 picks pink
1 pick red
1 pick pink
1 pick red
1 pick pink
2 picks red
1 pick pink
3 picks red
1 pick pink
12 picks red
1 pick brown
3 picks red
1 pick brown
Repeat from * with colours in the correct sequence

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When I measured the piece so far, I had 11.25cm of striped gradient and 22.5cm of linear gradient, so I decided to weave a final linear gradient strutting with purple and ending with blue. Finally, I hemstitched on 2 rows of black woven in tabby. This gave me about 45.5cm of fabric.