"Poor Man's Damask"

 

May be a little hard to see, but I've switched to white weft on white warp and while I'm sitting at the loom I can't really *see* what I'm doing.  It is only when I get up from the loom and look it from an angle that the pattern becomes visible.

Yes, I'm still weaving twill blocks (or turned twill) and this is sometimes called Poor Man's Damask, especially when woven white on white.

Damask is woven with satin weave and as such is very shaft hungry.  Usually it is woven on a drawloom or Jacquard in order to get those really fancy designs.  If you 'only' have a shaft loom, it's a lot harder to get very fancy with satin weave structures.  Satin also takes a *much* higher epi/ppi than twill blocks, so using turned twill to create motifs is a lot cheaper and quicker than satin.

Selvedges can be an issue with it (as mentioned in my previous post) but I don't fret too much so long as they are 'reasonable'.  

(Each weaver has to decide for themselves what level of 'not perfect' they are willing to live with.)

The next warp in this series will also be twill blocks but after than I think I will go back to 'fancy' twills.  Selvedges on a 16 shaft fancy twill can also be a problem, but again, usually not anything I'm too worried about.

My goal is to use up the 2/16 cotton this year.  (I *thought* it would be done by now, silly me!)  Once that's done, I have several boxes of 2/20 mercerized cotton.  More tea towels.

Am I bored with tea towels yet?  Nope.  Each warp is a different threading and I'm limiting how many of each motif I weave in each colour.  That is about to end as my dyed yarns are actually disappearing.  However, I have about 3 kilos of that turquoise I showed in my previous post, and a whole bunch of natural white.  Given all the other things I need to work on, weaving on the Megado will slow down for the next few months.  But I haven't forgotten my goal of reducing my stash.  It's just going to take a bit longer than I thought it would.