Love my overshot!

This is the very first sample, and there are just a few mistakes I see!  However, so far I really love it!  I can't believe that I made this draft and I get to weave it up!  It's a pretty awesome feeling! 

My whole book idea is going to be on how you can do this yourself.  It's probably half way done, and I can't wait for you to see it and try it!!  Inside the book is also some of my other profile drafts from this year, about 20 of them in fact.  And I teach you how to design your own profile drafts and how to convert them to overshot with lots and lots and lots of pictures and examples!!!  It's written for those who get confused easily. 

Anyway, back to the Lego pattern!

This sample has one mistake in it, but otherwise looks so good!!

I also love these two colors together!   This is just a sample, but for the final project I have a slightly darker shade of aqua to use.  I wish I had enough of this shade because I like it! 

But knowing me, I will like the other one, too!

Leggo my lego

Bertha Gray Hayes is my hero!  She was an amazing weaver!  On Warped Weavers, we have been trying to figure how which weaver she was in the picture in her book.  We have guessed many different ones, and someone wrote to someone else who wrote back and said it was one lady and then others think it's someone else... so I guess it doesn't really matter what she looked like, but her work was phenomenal!  (But please share and correct this picture if you know for sure!!!)
 



I like her work so much that 18 months ago I decided to use it to study overshot drafts and make my own profile drafts that are in her style of weaving overshot.  I have some here.  I kind of forgot about them, but lately I have seen them over and over and over on Pinterest.  Do you know how weird it is to see your own stuff on that site and find it inspiring??  I've been hoping to see my work all woven up by someone else, but all I see are the drafts rotating around and around!!

The other day I decided to revisit my profile drafts and actually weave one up instead of waiting to see it done!  I made these over a year and a half ago, so it's time I did this!  My most favorite was called "like" as in the facebook button, but originally it reminded me of one of my most beloved childhood toys: Legos.  I wanted to name it Lego to begin with, but Brian didn't think that name was all that great, so I changed it to something else. Well, I have since changed my mind about the name, so it's going back to the original name of LEGO!  The original name also reminds me of the commercials for the 1980's frozen waffles: LEGGO MY EGGO, which was also something I loved, and these kind of look like waffles!  I love this draft!!!!  It's so me!!!

Here is the draft I made in Oct 2011, renamed to MY LEGO:

I was having so much fun playing with profile drafts at the time!  I love them so much.  I love how you can see a condensed version of it all, but you can weave all different kinds of weave structures from it.  I think I might go and make some more!  In fact, the main focus of my book will be about profile drafting, how to do it, how to make them, how to convert them, how to draw your own, and about 20 new drafts of my own with conversions to overshot, samples, and variations.  Yes, it's way intense!!

This draft is the actual draft that sparked me to write a book.  Yes, this draft will be in my book and a tutorial on how to convert it to overshot, summer and winter, and even how to make your own profile drafts that look Bertha-like.  It's going to be a really neat book!  Of course, it's not all about overshot and profile drafts, there are some other random weaving things in it as well!

I can't wait to get started weaving this!

My own profile drafts

I have been playing so much with profile drafts that I decided to make some of my own.  After studying Bertha Gray Hayes' patterns so much, I feel like these are her done in her style. 

And now, my profile drafts:

Fancy Dancy

Frolic

Delightful

Tiles

Curvy

Snow Day

Square dance

My Name Draft

Donut star

I love to weave code draft

DNA (I'm such as science teacher!)

My Lego

"Lego" in summer and winter

 

 These are way too much fun to make!  I feel like I have so many in my head and want to get them all out onto paper.

Changing to profile drafts

I changed Lee's Surrender overshot pattern into a profile draft so I could weave it in the summer and winter weave.  However I didn't even take into consideration the fact that for every 2 overshot threads, it turns into 4 threads with summer and winter, so basically I double the width of my project.  Using my baby wolf loom with 10/2, I would need a loom twice as wide.  I don't think this big pattern will work so well.  So I started looking at some smaller overshot patterns, like Bertha Gray Hayes' miniature overshot drafts.

Here are a few of the profile drafts I "translated" from Bertha's patterns:

Balalaika:

Domino:

Estrellita:

The Olive:

 

Tangerine:

Linoleum:

 

Trellis:

After playing with these for a bit, I decided to turn my favorite draft, Trellis, into summer and winter weaves: 

Making this discovery is so cool!  I really like being able to turn these drafts from one into the other, and be able to use them in different ways!  I feel like I have really opened some doors here, and I'm excited to jump right through into the next level.  Now I just need to find the time to weave up a sample!

I just doubled my pattern collection by switching to Profile Drafts!

Yes, that is right folks!  Profile drafts are totally amazing, and you can go both ways with a profile draft.  You don't have to use a profile draft just to change it into something else.  Imagine taking a overshot pattern and turning it back into a profile draft!!  And then using it in something else like summer and winter, or M&O's, or lace weave!  It's totally amazing!  That is what I did for Lee's Surrender, just to see if I could!  This is how I did it:

1,2 =A
2,3 = B
3,4 = C
1,4 = D

Every combination has to be counted as a block, so take the middle part of Lee's surrender as a sample:

See at the bottom right edge?  Count all the 1,4 or 4,1 combinations:

There are 7 combinations, so in your profile draft you would fill in 7 squares for the D block.  Fill in the 7 blocks in both the threading and treadling sections.

Then, count the next section in the pattern.  I color-coordinated this one to make a little easier to see the pairs if you haven't caught on yet.

The 1,2 combination is block A.  So add 4 block A's to your profile draft in both the threading and treadling sections.

Again, go back to your main pattern and find the next combination.  It is 2 blocks of D.

Compare the two blocks at this point.  The left one is the profile draft and the right one is the original draft.  I color coded major sections so you can compare and see that they are the same. The profile draft is just missing the "overshot" parts (aka the half tones), but that is the whole point!

Keeping in mind the original "key" to transform this back, keep on going through the rest of the threading.

1,2 =A
2,3 = B
3,4 = C
1,4 = D


Now you can take this profile draft idea and transform any overshot pattern you want to into something else.  For example, I want to make Lee's Surrender in summer and winter, just because I can!  Maybe someday I will make a rug out of Lee's surrender, and summer and winter make a much better rug pattern than overshot because it doesn't have long floats of threads in the warp.


Here is 1/4 of Lee's surrender in profile form.  This would have to be repeated over several sections to get the entire draft.  But profile drafts are usually written a bit more compact anyway!

Also, now that we have the profile draft, we could change sections of it to be bigger or smaller.  That is the beauty of the profile draft!

Summer and Winter sample

So far, the summer and winter project designed from the profile draft is coming along, however I have come across a few challenges along the way, as usual!  I found just one threading error, and it was easy enough to fix.  The only concern now is that the design looks really stretched out when I weave it.  (I think this is where sampling would have been a good idea!)  Originally I planned for 27 epi, but I wouldn't have been able to squeeze in 3 repeats of this design without 30 epi.  So that is why I went with 30.  Also, I knew right away that I wanted to use the same size pattern thread as warp thread.  But I'm sure now that I miscalculated the epi.  Because it's summer and winter, I needed to use a tabby epi, and when I did 10/2 back in April in the weave-along, I used 20 epi.  12/2 cotton is not much different in size, so maybe the 10 dent reed with 2 threads per dent (20 epi) would have been a better choice here.  Now that I think about this, I wonder what was I thinking with 30 epi?!  In order to address this, I think I might try half the treadling just to see what happens, like 1a2b instead of 1a2b1a2b.  Otherwise, I might just have to improvise along the way.


Here is a sample so far.  It's pretty even though it's stretched out!

So far the weaving width is about 22.5".  I think for a dishtowel, 4 rows will be perfect!  It will be about 32" long, plus the fringe length.  Here is a close-up photo:

I am doing my usual hem-stitch edging.  I love the way it looks in the end!  It's so pretty.

And the back of the fabric is looking good also.  Because it's the summer and winter pattern, the back is a complete opposite of the front. What is dark is light, and what is light is dark on the opposite sides.

Even though it's stretched out, I do like the colors and the design!  I'll keep experimenting!  Good thing I have an 8 yard warp! 

A few treadling mistakes...

 As I was measuring out the yarn for this project on the warp board, I was thinking about the treadling and realized that something was wrong.  After looking at it again, I have realized the mistake.  I had the treadling as 1-a-2-b instead of 1-a-2-b-1-a-2-b!  So no wonder it looked so "normal" when I put it up on the screen!  But with the corrected treadling, it became very stretched out so I had to fix the picks per inch to twice the ends per inch.  This is what I came up with:

This one is just way too small to see all the treadling along the sides.  If you want the pattern all drafted out, let me know.  I have saved it as a WIF file, but can't find a way to post it here.

I'm also thinking of trying some with my favorite treadling, the 1-a-2-b-2-a-1-b treadling.  It looks like this up close:

I know profile drafts are a lot more work and it's easy to make mistakes along the way, but they are so much fun.  The combinations of patterns and colors seem endless!  It's so much more fun than following a pattern or book word for word!

Atypical Profile Draft

I've been thinking a lot lately about profile drafts and came across an atypical situation.  Take a look at this draft, the Gartner Manuscript on page 74:

It was kind of throwing me for a loop because of the tie-up section.  I have only seen and work with tie-ups that are lined up like this: 

But notice how different it makes the draft look!  What is one to do if they want to make it into a pattern?  Well, you definitely have to take the tie-up into consideration.  And it's easier than you think.  After plugging it into the draft program using summer and winter as an example, I have figured out how to use it!

Basically, all you have to do is just mesh the tie-ups together to include all the shaded areas.  The above pattern shows blocks A, B, and C in order across so the tie-up is just normal for summer and winter.  In the below tie-up, the blocks are A, C, and then B&C are combined, so your tie-up for summer and winter would be in that order, meshing (or combining) the last two together.  Compare these examples:


 

Notice the few slight changes in the second tie-up pattern.  In the bottom example, the third tie-up combines the tie-ups for both blocks B&C.

Here are the drafts all filled in with summer and winter.  Notice the changes between the two.  It makes quite the difference to have the tie-up done right, but still makes a neat looking draft to change it a little bit.

Original draft from Gartner Manuscript page 74

Tie-up is more normal than original draft

I have been so focused on summer and winter lately that I haven't plugged in any other threading yet, but I'm sure it would work the same with any chosen pattern structure.  I hope this tutorial helps get your brain thinking about other kinds of patterns that are out there!  I love the profile drafts, they open up so many different doors.  They also open up a lot of designing opportunities.  Have fun!!!!

Profile Drafting

I've been thinking a lot about profile drafts since I did this tutorial at weavingtoday.com.  I figured out how to do the profile draft using a simple draft with 2 blocks, but it only allowed for 4-shaft designs.  I wanted to go beyond the basics and utilize my 8-shaft loom, which means I needed bigger profile drafts.  That's when I discovered the Gartner Manuscript.  While away on vacation in Washington, I took this book with me to work on a profile draft in summer and winter.  It was definitely a challenge to figure out how to do the profile draft with more than 2 blocks.  That is why I wanted to describe it here, so it could save everyone else some time!  For this explanation, I chose Johan Ludwig's Speck's #20 from this book, which is on page 104.  It looks like this:

In order to go through this, I am going to assume that a basic knowledge is known about the profile draft.  If a review is necessary, see my beginning tutorial .  It has a cheat sheet and a power point to explain it all from the very basics.  

This profile draft will make a 6-shaft design in summer and winter.  In order to "translate" this profile draft, I have to consider the different blocks for threading:

Block A= shafts 1-3-2-3
Block B= shafts 1-4-2-4
Block C= shafts 1-5-2-5
Block D= shafts 1-6-2-6
Tabby= shafts 1-2 & 3-4-5-6

And these are the tie-ups for this profile draft:
pedal 1= shafts 1-2
pedal 2= shafts 3-4-5-6
pedal 3= shafts 1-3
pedal 4= shafts 2-3
pedal 5= shafts 1-4
pedal 6= shafts 2-4
pedal 7= shafts 1-5
pedal 8= shafts 2-5
pedal 9 = shafts 1-6
pedal 10 = shafts 2-6

The treadling will follow the profile draft alternating with shots of tabby on pedals 1&2:
Block A= pedals 3&4
Block B= pedals 5&6
Block C= pedals 7&8
Block D= pedals 9&10

So basically, you just follow the profile draft from this point on, plugging in the substitutions where they belong. The warp is one solid color and the weft goes back and forth between two colors.  The tabby is the same as the warp and the pattern thread is something contrasting, sometimes a bigger size.  Here is the corner up close so you can see the detail.  As you can see, it gets way bigger once everything gets plugged into it!

And here is the whole profile draft in summer and winter:

I think I'm going to make this into some dishtowels.  My supply has run very low because of the many special days (like birthdays and Mother's Day for example!) that have come and gone!  I haven't picked out my colors yet, but will start looking today!