Finnish Doubleweave Placemats and TempoTreadle - Rerun

This post is a rerun of a post from our former blog and was originally posted in October 2017.    We've changed our website and blog site...

My new Louet Spring is ready for a new warp.  I have been wanting to do some doubleweave and had admired the Finnish Doubleweave Placements by Marty Benson in the Handwoven March/April 2017 issue.  I also had several cones of leftover Venne Organic 22/2 Cottolin  from another project that I thought would be good to use on this short 4-yard warp.

This project called for an 8-dent reed, and I realized I didn’t yet have one free at the correct width for this loom.  I used a longer reed that protrudes a few inches on each end.   It looks silly, but it works!

The warp went on easily. I threaded using TempoTreadle and didn’t make any threading mistakes.   However, I somehow managed to wind two few threads on one end.  I guess I had trouble counting to 16!  I weighted replacement warp ends from the back of the loom.

I am still getting used to the tie-up on the Spring countermarch.   It’s not hard,  but takes twice as long as the Louet David,  for example,  since I have to tie each of the 12 shafts to each treadle. I figure it counts as a workout with all the crawling and stretching for the Lams.

If you have looked at the pattern in Handwoven, you might notice it’s an 8-shaft pattern.  When entering my WIF in weaving design software,  I decided to substitute shafts 9, 10, 11 and 12 for 5,6,7 and 8 for a number of the sequences “5,6,7,8” throughout the draft to spread my warp ends across the 12 shafts.   It’s easy to copy the tie-up for 5,6,7 and 8 and paste it onto the extra 4 shafts in weaving design software.

When threading, I noticed that a couple of the colors were too close for comfort on the screen.   Since TempoTreadle is all about helping you avoid mistakes, I decided I better change the color in the weaving software to have a little more contrast before I started to weave.  When making a change to a draft you’ve already loaded, just change the Quick Load option to “N” when loading the new version into TempoTreadle.

When I started to weave, I realized I hadn’t turned off the color change alerts.  Since picks alternate between brown and another color,  I was getting a color change beep on each pick.  I looked at the draft and realized that each “real” color change occurred on treadle 4.   So I turned off color alerts on each treadle except #4.  That worked great! 

The thing I find most different about weaving on the Spring as opposed to the other Jack looms is that the treadles sometimes stay down once I lift my foot and don’t come completely up until I press another treadle.  While weaving, that’s not a problem.  In fact, the weaving is so easy and light that I am starting to love the Spring.  That treadle action (or lack thereof) doesn’t bother me until I stop weaving!  Sometimes the last pressed treadle just sits there after I move my foot.   I want that last pick to register in TempoTreadle, so I barely tap another treadle to cause that last pressed treadle to rise and the shed to close; now TempoTreadle registers that last pick.

Now the weaving is easy!  I think these will be nice as everyday placemats.  I can either use the bold colored side or the back that’s dark brown with little spots of color.  Note – after I wove the placemats, I looked back at the original article in Handwoven and realized that Marty Benson intended for what I called the “back side” to be the front.   Either way works!

I may weave these placemats again using 8/2 Cotton or Organic 8/2 Cottolin.  The 22/2 Cottolin mats were sett at 32 epi (so 16 epi per layer).   I plan to sett the 8/2 mats at 36 epi so that I have 18 epi per layer. This will result in a weaving width of 12.8 inches instead of 14.5, so I'll modify the threading to add a couple of inches of warp ends.