READING SMITH’S DRAFT

Posted by Peg in South Carolina 

I have finally worked enough with my drafts that I have been able to figure out how to read Smith’s draft.  I am clearly one who cannot think things through in her head but must actually DO something to work out a problem like this.

Anyway, her draft is really quite simply. Or at least, after long struggle, I realize now that her draft is quite simple!  It consists of the following block order:

A B C D C B

A point twill block order. And a threading with only one crackle unit in a block. Block A is omitted from the beginning because it will appear in the threading repeat. 

Well, of course I had to do this for myself, but repeating the units.  There is no way in working with 60/2 silk that I would use only 1 unit per block unless I were striving for an overall effect rather than a design.  And in actuality there would probably be many more.

And, so enlightened, I have designed from scratch my version of her threading.

 

I have used Smith’s block order (A B C D C B) and put in my blocks with their doubled units. This means that there are two units in each block instead of only one, as in Smith’s.  When I checked my version against Smith’s I caught some errors–-primarily points where I forgot to double the threads.  A lot of time passed while I did this…………

PROBLEM IN THE TIEUP

When I was finally satisfied that I had made no errors in my version, I checked the draft for floats.  Whoops, 7 floats.  I finally noticed they all occurred on the first treadle.  That meant that something was amiss with that tieup. I looked.  The first thing I saw was that only three treadles were tied up.  So I needed to add a fourth treadle. 

I looked for a pattern in the tieup to help me figure out what shaft I should tie up to this treadle. I could not see the pattern.  So I experimented with where to put that fourth tieup.  Once I found the right position I saw the pattern and then saw also that one of the other tied treadles was wrong. Had I been thinking in terms of patterns at the time I wrote in the tieup, I would have caught the error immediately.

And here is what the draft looks like:

The draft looks fine except there is some kind of treadling issue.  Just below the center of the drawdown, things look a bit messy.   But checking out the treadling (yet once again!) is for another day.

COMPARING MY VERSION WITH SMITH’S

But then I looked at Smith’s drawdown.  Whoops!  My “brilliant” solution for the first treadle’s tie up was………….WRONG!  The pattern I thought I saw was not there. 

But what does the drawdown look like now, with the corrected tiedown?

 

 

  

Not really much different.   The floats are fine here as well.  And even the treadling mess seems possibly to have disappeared.  Still, I am going to have to check the treadling.  But not now.

ONE MORE PROBLEM:  THREADING

This fresh look at Smith’s version, after having created my own, showed something I had not picked up.  My threading on the first four shafts is exactly like hers.  But her doubling of threads pattern changes in the shadowing shafts, shafts 5-8.
 
In the shadowing shafts, she never doubles the top of the point;  that stays a single thread.  But she triples each bottom point.  I will not understand why until I finish working out my draft so that I can compare results.

Related Post:  Crackle in Parallel Shadow Weave

“Reading Smith’s Draft”  was written by Margaret Carpenter for Talking about Weaving and was originally posted on April 21, 2010. ©2010 Margaret Carpenter aka Peg in South Carolina