I liked the twills woven at 18epi, so decided to continue weaving the rest of the colourful warp at 18epi using various twill patterns that use a straight draft threading. I looked in “Handweaver’s pattern directory” by Anne Dixon and found several possibilities on pp32-39. I narrowed down the possibilities to those that would work with my 28 thread colour stripes.
The first piece is an extended zigzag (p33, 2nd pattern down). I wove this using the same colour sequence as that in the warp and hemstitched on plainweave. From watching Jane Stafford videos, I tried to use basketweave (12, 34) to hemstitch on so that the fabric structure would stay the same as for the twill. But because I’m hemstitching in units of 2 threads, this didn’t work. So my hemstitching is on plainweave. To check my beating, I didn’t count weft picks, I checked the angle of the twill diagonal – it should be 45° for a 2/2 twill (checked using a piece of square paper folded into a triangle).
I found that I was making a lot of errors because I wasn’t keeping track of the pick that I was on. I thought about tracking the pick on a piece of paper, but decided to try using the weaving software I have for my iPad – iWeaveit. So I setup the pattern in the app (easier to set it up in the desktop version, save the file in iCloud and open it on the iPad so I could track the treadling – it worked REALLY well. The weaving went so much faster when I knew where I was and didn’t have to keep un-weaving!
