Going Green

I'm working on another trade this week and if it works out well, I'll show you the results in a future post. It involves a band, and a guitar player who doesn't speak much English. 

He was able to convey that his favorite color is green, though.

My strap inventory had a few with green as a significant color among other colors, but I wanted to give him some really good, really green choices.

I've got a nice variety of green yarns in my stash, so here's what I wove this week.

This one below turned out interesting and looking a bit like an African design. I wasn't sure that the light "mango" yellow and dark red would work well together, but was happy with the result.

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This one is a Baltic-style pickup which I love! Most of it I wove on Saturday, August 27th, while vending at the People's Faire in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

It was great visiting with all of the locals, including this grasshopper who spent some time checking out my design. 

This picture had a few edits so as to bring out the grasshopper better, but the photo below, showing the strap after it was cut off the loom, has more accurate color. 

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The strap shown below also uses a Baltic-style pickup pattern of sorts.

It's what I call a "Simple Pickup", a term for a concept that I came up with. These types of patterns employ a design which is mostly plain weave, with only a few threads used for the pickup design.   To see more examples of Simple Pickups, click here to read this previous blog post.  If you haven't done pickup, this is a nice way to ease into it.

Since there was a lot of interest in this band from members of the Inkle Weaving Group on Facebook, I'm including below the threading chart for this band. There are 75 warps.

The top row represents the heddled threads and the bottom row, the unheddled.

The pickup pattern involves the center cinnamon-colored thread and the two off-white threads on either side of it. It spans three rows and goes like this:
Row 1- Pick up the center thread
Row 2- Pick up the two threads to the right and left of the center
Row 3- Pick up the center thread
Because you are picking the center thread once and then picking it again, it ends up floating over 5 rows of weaving, while the other floats are over 3 rows.
In this band, I have woven 6 rows of plain weave before starting the next pickup motif.