Ramblings of a Mississippi Weaver
I’ve had a few requests about the rest of the Baltic pickup style patterns I came up with. Like the previous, these are all woven on the same warp, and again, the patterns are designed so that you are always pushing threads down from the upper row and never lifting threads up from the lower row. This speeds up the weaving immensely.
And that’s when I realized that two of the patterns are duplicated, but a little judicious work with a pencil will fix that quite easily. 🙂
So I spent some time this weekend playing with the Baltic inkle pickup warp. The rules of the game were simple: two repeats of the simple diamond with the 4 interior diamonds, alternating with a diamond with some other free-styled pattern.
By keeping the edging pattern between the diamonds and the outer diamond’s dimensions consistent, the band feels cohesive, even though every third diamond is something else. Below are 16 possible variations I came up with, while enjoying a Columbo marathon.
Oh, and just one more thing … there are 25 places where the warp thread can be pushed down, or not, inside the diamond. That means that there are 2^25= 33554432 possible combinations, but I’m guessing that many of them lack pleasing symmetries.
Back of the envelop suggests that requiring symmetry along one diagonal reduces the possibilities to about 2^10+2^5=1024+32=1056 (the places below the diagonal line plus the diagonal line), but then the diagonal line can itself be flipped … But the “S” figures are flipped around a vertical or horizontal line; so there are 4 possible axis of symmetry, so 4*1056= 4224 possible combinations that are symmetric.
In short, back of the envelop suggests that I’m going to run out of warp before I run out of possibilities.
Baltic pickup style inkle is woven using background threads and pickup threads; the pickup threads are usually either thicker, or doubled up. In the threading diagram, you can see how each pickup thread is place between two threads in the opposite heddle; the white boxes representing the pickup threads. In the diagram one row represents the heddled threads and the other the open threads, and the rows aren’t labeled since it actually doesn’t matter which is which in this case, so why complicate things?
The patterns here use 17 background threads; the 5 leftmost and rightmost threads are woven over a green background, while the middle 7 pick up threads lie nestled between dark blue background threads. The plan is to eventually experiment with the Kostrup patterns, since those are 17 cards wide also, but I needed simple patterns to weave while out and about Monday.
The current patterns are simple diamonds, and by weaving them upside down I only ever have to drop threads from the current row, rather than having to pick up. In the pattern (Baltic Diamonds) squares with circles in them are the pickup threads that are high in each row. If a pickup thread is high but has a grey background, then it gets dropped, resulting in the front patterns we see on the left below.
This is what the pattern with the small diamonds looks like; the predominantly green/blue side is what you see while weaving, the white side is the underside which is much harder to photograph while on the loom.
Here I was working with larger diamonds, and experimenting a little with alternate patterns like the diamond in a diamond and the inner cross. Making the outside diamond a little smaller results in a 2×2 grid of the smaller diamonds, or a 3×3 grid of the larger, and then it’s just a matter of dropping a few extra threads here and there.