OVERSHOT AND CRACKLE

Posted by Peg in South Carolina

I have read/heard any number of times how crackle can make use of overshot drafts.  Not the overshot threading, but the overshot block design.  Not one who is particularly in love with overshot (not even with overshot treadling in crackle!), I have paid no attention to this observation.
Until I started trying to draft curves.
At some point I began to realize that there were a lot of overshot drafts with curves in them.  So I got out my books and decided to give it a go.  I picked out a Blooming Leaf variant overshot draft.  I got it from Helene Bress’s The Weaving Book, p. 339. If you want to see the overshot threading, check it out there.*
Here is the first part of Blooming Leaf using the equivalent crackle threading, more specifically the first part of 8-blocks-on-4-shafts crackle threading.

To read the draft, start at the right hand of the top group, read to the left, come back down to the right hand side of the second group and read to the left.  The whole draft consists of a whopping 774 ends.
This translation of an overshot threading to a crackle thread was done at lightening speed at the expense of accuracy.  All I wanted at this point was to see what would happen.  I wanted to find out if it would be worth my time to start playing seriously with this draft or a similar overshot draft.  Here is the result, with all its flaws, some of which are painfully obvious even to someone who has never worked with crackle:

My conclusion?  Despite the errors, I think this promises to be an interesting approach.  But, since I have no interest in using overshot treadling, which is what I have used in this drawdown, I have to try other treadlings to see how they stack up.

*Another version of Blooming Leaf can be found in Davison’s A Handweaver’s Pattern Book, p. 162.  It is called Blooming Leaf of Mexico.  A similar pattern, but simply called “Leaves” can be found on page 118 of Discon’s The Handweaver’s Pattern Directory.  You can also check out Bonnie Innouye’s recent piece for Weavezine, called “Flowing Curves: Overshot and Weaving as Overshot.” It was probably this last piece, lingering loosely somewhere in the depths of my memory, that resulted in curves and overshot being brought to the surface of mind here.


“Overshot and Crackle” was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on August 25, 2009. ©2009 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina.