Seersucker mk II

or, the quill buster.

By mistake I warped one turn of the mill less than I thought, for the Halloweave project, so there wasn’t enough warp to make a second shawl.

I decided to use the thrums to see if there was a difference in the “seersucker-ing” if I used twill for the flat parts (here the brown stripes), and to use up as many left-over quills of cotton 16/2 as I had patience to. This would then also become a colour gamp of sorts.

To begin with, I meant to use a broken twill, but when I sat under the loom I completely forgot – and did not bother changing from the straight twill I had tied up for...

(Yes, I could have treadled it, but then I would have had to concentrate – I’m all for doing things the easy way)

I ended up with 11 weft stripes of different colours, all different lengths. Here it is, true-ish colours but out of focus:

Some of the weft colours used:

So, did the seersuckering differ any? Hard to tell:

The difference, if there is any, isn’t big enough to bother with, in my opinion.

And here is the “original”, draped on a dress form:

My ”Halloweave”

Over at Weavolution there has been a fun event going for the month of October.

I “signed up” for a dare: to try the seersucker method that Cathie posted some time ago.

I had lots of other things to do, but, at the last moment, I managed to get it done!

On the Friday I dressed the loom.

On the Saturday I wove it (and fringed it)

(which, considering what I also did yesterday, was a bit of a feat)

and today, after wet finishing, tumbling and some press it looks like this:

As the method called for the main warp to be tight, the “seering” (or is that the “sucking” ;-) ?) warp(s) to have a lighter tension, I decided to do 3 stripes, and to tension them differently. As I got confused with the math, I ended up with approx the same tension (weight/end) for the green and the taupe stripes, less for the gold stripe.
I cranked up the tension on the brown warp as high as I could.
(All warps are cotton – the brown is 16/2 unmerc, the coloured is 20/2 merc. All are set at 12 ends per centimeter. The weft is an unmerc cotton 16/2, and the whole thing is slightly warp-emphasis - I think I had approx 8 picks/cm)

Just for the threading, I had wound the stripes on the second beam, meaning to take them all off later, to hang freely. Then it dawned on me: I could let them form loops at the back, hang the weights in the loops – it would make advancing the warp easier, too!

To begin with, I had too little weight on the stripes – after several skips I added to all three!

When weaving, the different tension did show up only when I advanced the warp. When cut off, there was just a hint of “something” in the stripes (see picture above).
So: my hope was the wet finishing would take care of the sucking... and it did. Some.

I had hoped the difference would be greater – or, I should say the visual difference. The real difference is there alright:

Try as I might, I can't get a good photo of the shawl (or "not-quite-rebozo") draped, the colours don't want to cooperate. But there are tendencies towards iridescence in both stripes and main part - maybe another day.

But there is some warp left over, maybe I should try with twill in the brown parts...