Katrina asked me to weave a table runner for her. After looking at sample pieces and yarn colours, she decided on a rainbow of colours with a pattern like that in the 3rd piece of Warp 17.

After much calculating, recalculating, putting warp/weft patterns into Weaveit software, exporting .wif files and importing them into the excellent Colour Editor function on handweaving.net and fooling with colours and gradients, I came up with the following plan.

Katrina’s table runner is to be 35x145cm. I will make more than one as there is no point in threading a warp for a single table runner.
The colours will be threaded in the warp in a linear colour gradient moving from Scuba blue through to Chilli pepper (red) and back out to Scuba blue in the order laid out in the photo below. The weft will be Jetset black.

All yarns will be 5/2 mercerised cotton. Although, according to my calculations, I won’t have sufficient black to weave three table runners. So I have ordered a cone of unmercerised 5/2 black from Ashford’s (they were out of mercerised). According to a post on the Lunatic Fringe website, this should be fine. The mercerised cotton will shrink slightly less than the unmercerised, but because the unmercerised yarn will only be in the weft, there shouldn’t be any issues.

Project specs:
Warp length = 6.4m
Number warp ends = 325
Width in reed = 45.5cm
epi & ppi = 18
Reed = 10 dent, sleyed 1,2,2,2
Weave structure = 2/2 twill

The warp will be threaded using Wall of Troy pattern, Treadle tie-up will be a simple 1,2; 2,3; 3,4; 1,4 with a 5-thread point twill pattern being treadled.

I hope to end up with fabric that looks like this