Weaving Project

My current weaving project is a new (for me) experiment with network drafting and chenille. Chenille needs to be woven in a tight weave structure to prevent it from "worming." The most common form of network drafting is based on a four thread twill. (i.e. a mix of 1/3, 2/2, and 3/1 twill resulting in three thread floats -- however I realized that if you use a three thread twill (a mix of 1/2 and 2/1 twill) the longest float is only two threads. Alas, that means you have many fewer basic units to work with (think black and white rather than greyscale), but there are still some interesting possibilities.

For previous network drafting projects I have used different colors in the warp and the weft to make the pattern visible. For this project I'm using different textures. I have a 10-2 pearle cotton warp and a rayon chenille weft that are very close to the same color and weight (as close as I could find.) I'm hoping that the result will show areas of chenille velvet and areas of pearle cotton smoothness and luster. We'll see. At 24 epi x 12 inches I have a lot of threading to do before I get to see any results.

All of this is going to be woven on our 24 shaft Studio Dobby AVL loom with a compudobby 2. I'm only using 18 of the harnesses because there are only 6 "interesting" three thread twill units (001, 010, 100, 110, 101, 110.) I'm using an antique 386 computer with 16M of RAM and about 200M of hard drive to run the loom. Old computers never die...