When will I ever learn?

Talking with my mother on the phone she said she'd love a little piece just to see what I was doing - so I thought I'd try my hand at overshot for the first time. I poked around the weaving archive site http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/weavedocs.html and found a pattern (in the monographs on miniature patterns by Josephine Estes) that I thought would work with the nice 4 ply weight mercised cottons I'd got from the local hobby store.

Then I had a bright (not) idea - why not use that white wool that I was going to use for the vest as the warp? Why not, because it's got a crimp in it and very difficult to get an even warp tension, that's why not. But a little stupidity has never stopped me trying.

Initially I tried to weave the overshot just using the selvedges to hold the repeated weft throws but with the stretchy warp that was impossible (and with my almost zero skill level a pretty ambitious thing to even contemplate). A disaster made worse by the fact that the pattern was for a down shed loom not the up shed on my table loom. Fortunately it didn't take me long to realise all I needed to do was raise exactly the missing shafts not the pattern ones and also that weaving a row of tabby every other weft would provide the essential stability.

It's not even and the selvedges may yet be declared a United Nations disaster area but if I can persuade Liz to do a bit of judicious hemming it might just make something my Mum will cherish - actually she'd probably cherish any old raggety bit that I made.

Still, the pattern's nice.


Mum's little runner 


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