CRACKLE SHAWL: INITIAL THOUGHTS ON DESIGN

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

My planning in terms of threading is to start with the threading I used for the crackle art pieces last year. Part of that draft is to the left. This is the right half of the draft. The left half is, more or less, a reflection of this right half.

The treadling is not polychrome. But because this treadling shows more clearly what happens in each individual block it should help me with designing this next piece.

Examining the draft shows where the pattern wefts will dominate depending on the treadling, or, more accurately, depending on which shafts are raised. And this is what I have learned so far:

Treadle 3 (raises shafts 1 and 2): pattern shows in blocks B and C
Treadle 4 (raises shafts 1 and 3): pattern shows in blocks C and D; G and H
Treadle 5 (raises shafts 2 and 3): pattern shows in blocks A and H
Treadle 6 (raises shafts 1 and 4): pattern shows in blocks D and E
Treadle 7 (raises shafts 2 and 4): pattern shows in blocks A and B; E and F
Treadle 8 (raises shafts 3 and 4): pattern shows in blocks F and G

The photo to the left shows the beginning of art piece number 5 that I wove last year. This was treadled polychrome style, one treadle after the other. Blue is the background color. Yellow is the pattern color. In the first group (at the bottom of the photo), I have treadled through the sequence four times. I used blue throughout except on treadle 3. There I used yellow. Yellow shows up on blocks B and C.

In the second group, I have used yellow when I treadled 8; yellow shows up on blocks F and G. In the third group, yellow shows on blocks A,B, E, and F when I treadled 7. And in the the last group, yellow shows on blocks D and E when I treadled 6.

This shows one way that I can uses individual units to compose a design motif: I simply repeat the given unit. And this also shows one way I can group motifs to form a larger design. I simply move from one treadle, treadled multiple times, to another treadle, treadled multiple times, and so on.

So an individual unit can be repeated so that it becomes in and of itself a single design motif. Units can be combined with each other. Units can be repeated and combined. And to make life just a bit more complex, I can weave simply background color with no pattern color in order to separate out the motifs along the length of the warp.

Exactly where these blocks show depends on the block design. The block design for my crackle art piece was this:

ABCDEFGHGHFEDCBA

This meant two things:

1. The motifs were automatically mirrored
2. There was the possibility of a long center motif

But before I can work any more with actual designing of the motifs, I need to determine how many blocks I want. Then I need to decide on the block design and that will depend on how I want the motifs to appear. I have some initial ideas based on my sampling at the end of the previous warp, shown at the left. But these are only initial ideas.

Related Post: Art Piece 5 Begun

"Crackle Shawl: Initial Thoughts on Design" was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on January 06, 2009. © 2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina