Stars and Roses

It is a source of continual amazement to me how things interconnect in weaving.

One of the things that students study in level two of the Olds program is overshot and one aspect of that weave structure is how the central motif of so many overshot designs are called 'stars'.  More fascinatingly, how 'stars' can be turned into 'roses'.

Now I'm not a big fan of weaving with two shuttles so I never did do much overshot over the years.  But as part of my master certificate from the Guild of Canadian Weavers I had to learn how overshot worked, and do the star to rose conversion.

It can be difficult to tell them apart, but once seen, cannot be unseen.

In the above draft, I was playing around with a traditional draft from Pat Hilts work on the old weaving draft book about Gebrochene twills.

Over the past few years I have been using overshot motifs as the starting place for weaving tea towels, converting the four shaft motifs of several popular overshot threadings into twill blocks.  I have 16 shafts, so I can do that.  It was, in fact, this very book that showed me the link - it has the 'Wandering Vine" or "Snail's Trails and Cat's Paws" motif rendered in a twill block version.

Ah-ha! I said to myself.  If it can be done with that motif, it can be done with any four shaft overshot motif.

Paging through the book late the other night, I spotted the above threading showing both star and rose motif in the same cloth.  I thought it would look great on the 2/16 cotton warp with the singles linen weft I need to use up, so fiddled with it and came up with the above version.

If you can't see the two different motifs, then I direct you to look at the top right hand corner where the border turns into the motif.  The star sits first, then the rose and then they alternate across from right to left, ending with a rose.

The stars all connect along the twill line.  The roses are rounded and look like a flower.  (A pansy to me, but also a wild rose.)

Most of the 'work' that I did with this threading was to determine the number of repeats I wanted, fit the borders in to 'frame' the body of the towel, fiddle with the tie up. I don't claim this as original work, but inspired by or based on, the work of Marx Ziegler as presented by Patricia Hilts in Ars Textrina, volume fourteen, 1990.