First honeycomb samples

So I took up Laura’s challenge to bring woven samples when I visit - .

The original Maja draft looks like this:

It calls for cotton 30/2 set at 22 ends per centimeter.

As I wanted to experiment with giving it a useable reverse side, I needed a “back” warp, which meant I had to have 44 ends per cm. (That means 44 x 2,5 = 110 ends per inch, so my american readers don’t have to convert... :-)

I wound some 800 ends (lost count somewhere after 825) to the shortest warp I dared put on the AVL – 2,5 meters, about.

Threading was ok, sort of. I made several widths of cells, from Maja’s 10 and 4, to max 40 and 40, to see if/how the width would influence the results. I ignored the selvages.
Then came the sleying... After some thinking, I decided to sley 9 ends per dent in a 50/10 (metric) reed, which would give me 45 ends per cm. With the odd number, it meant I have an average of 22,25 epcm and “layer”.

It turned out I made two sleying mistakes, but I solved them the alexandrian way: I just cut out 9 ends at each place. (It is a sample, after all, so it doesn’t really matter.)

Then I started weaving. Too soft tension. After several tries I had a tension so I almost couldn’t advance the warp, but I really would have liked i higher. (At least it is my experience that very tight cloth requires very high tension.)
It turned out I had made a couple of silly mistakes when converting the draft to dobby, but after some corrections I had it right.

The red portion is the “simple cloth” (ie the extra warp floats at the back).
Then I switched to blue weft and the double-sided (one-weft) version.

As I was very curious about how the back looked, I just pointed the camera to the underside...:

Of course, with wet finishing it may yet come out ok!

Having a backing warp also took care of the selvages – at least at the left side. Had I used two shuttles for the outlining weft I would have had two nice selvages (I think).

(Yes it is blurry)

This is the weaving draft for the double-sided – rotated to “fool” the image-viewer:

(Laura, shall I bring them unfinished? Then we both can share the excitement... or the disappointment, of course)