Ramblings of a Mississippi Weaver
Today is a twiddling kind of day, while watching software install.
I haven’t had the energy to play with the 12 harness loom for a while, but I’m hoping to get back to that soon. Meanwhile here’s one more pattern I can try weaving on Esme when time and energy allow. If it wasn’t for the M-W warping that’s already on the loom, I could just warp threads from 1 – 12, and repeat, and all the chains would face the same way.
It’s a pattern for the Gleann Abhann rampant ram, in all its tabletweaving glory.
So I was recently reminded that lo these many years ago I had woven some rampant rams in a baldric or two in kingdom colours, and someone asked me for patterns.
Now the Gleann Abhann colours are red/ black, and white: the background being red and black, and the ram being sheepishly white. And I will admit my ram isn’t pizzled (although that fleck of black almost hints to me …)
And having found a picture dating back to April 2015, next was to see if I still had the graphed pattern. back then, many patterns were graphed on paper, rather than in the computer, because paper was handy.
And look what I found. Ready for printing. It’s doubleface, the pattern is only 30 cards wide, and will look best if you start weaving the pattern (which is woven from the bottom up) when the white in the right hoof creates a \/\ pattern. If it doesn’t, back up and weave one more row of background before you start the pattern.
This pattern, btw, is free to use to make Gleann Abhann tokens. Attribution would always be preferred, but it’s not suitable for commercial use.
Blathering a bit about designing and iterating a design.
So musing some more about pattern design, and specifically designing for small pouches. I wanted to do something with a greek key design so I started with a simple pattern. (Okay, I was inspired by the thought of thorny rose stems, but then got carried away … It happens) And as you can see below, this is how I usually expand and iterate patterns until I get things I like.
Problem was, as I started knitting it, that the space between the rows was one stitch too large, resulting in an uneven pattern, as you can see below.
So I fiddled some more, bringing the stripes closer together, and then for a final attempt I tried to super impose the stripes, resulting in the following two patterns. Now, of course, I have more pouches to knit, to see which looks best.
