I love getting comments from my Post readers. And I love learning new things. A comment from Jon gave this threading to catch the outside warp thread. With it you don’t have to think and you don’t need a floating selvedge. I might not use it if I thought I would weave other structures besides twills in a piece, but it beats a floating selvedge if you plan a big twill project. Try to figure out how it works just from the threading.
Here is the regular 4-shaft twill tie-up. Can you see how a thread is always caught on each edge with every weft shot? Notice the circles in the tie-up. That’s because it’s showing shafts lifted. Remember that bubbles rise.
Now add the treadling. Can you figure out what the edges will look like from this information?
Here is the complete draft. The edges make a sort of plain weave. Perhaps you could thread more threads for the edges and make a border. Maybe an idea to ponder and worth trying? This is how my mind works—I’d want to do a sample first to see how the two weaves work. Now I’m thinking again…you could thread the edges: 22, 44 and 11, 33 to get a real basket weave on the edges and I think that should surely work with the twill. When I want bands of both twill and plain weave in a cloth, I often use basket weave instead of real plain weave because they both draw in the same. (If you use plain weave bands, they will turn out to be wider than the twill areas.)
Have you tried it yet? I’ve attempted something like this recently using a worsted wool yarn. I was basically making a trim piece, 2″ wide, to finish a hucklace woven wool piece that ended up looking like a ribbed sweater! Anyway, I thought a twill trim would be easier to shape around the sweater collar and stuff, but also needed a good edge and the worsted wool wouldn’t full very much, so I tried this – creating a tabby at the edges with the last four threads. What didn’t work is that the tabby weave and the twill weave didn’t, um…pack? the same way? What word do I use? haha. The tabby weave was tight but the twill was too loose — so I just used a tabby weave for the whole piece. I was wondering if maybe a basket weave or spacing out the threads – like going from 24 to 12 epi or whatever, might do the trick. I just wove yards of 16/2 linen twill to make bread bags and did nothing special, it turned out great – but that’s linen for you!
I worried about that problem and you proved it worthy of worry. I think that’s why I began to think of the basket weave and doubling the threading for the edges. The worsted wasn’t very forgiving, but neither would cotton or line be. It will be interesting to hear other reports.
Peggy
I weave Tartans, and this is the thread up I use to give me clean, solid edges.