Lights All Askew in the Heavens

I like winter for lots of reasons. One of them is that if you plan to weave, it's much pleasanter to wrangle massive bundles of wool through a loom when it's cold! But somehow, this year, I managed to sneak through the season without weaving anything, which is a shame. Even if I don't know someone who needs a nice new handmade scarf (really, with mechanized looms, beautiful scarves are a dime a dozen), I try to do at least one annually, so that I can remind my brain and body of how the process works. It's definitely not a skill I want to lose.

To that end--despite the present sunny days, and their thinly-veiled threats of the oncoming desert summer--I'm going to make myself a new one.

I have a fantastic resource in my bookshelf, Marguerite Porter Davison's A Handweaver's Pattern Book, but sometimes I want something a little more complicated...and that's when I lose hours of my life playing with Weavemaker, a pleasantly anachronistic bit of software that allows you to work out patterns of your own (and then scale them so you can see what the proposed fabric will look like).

So far all I know is that I want it to be red and white wool. So There's lots of playing to be done. Here's my first "sketch"...a little improvisational riff on Finnish Twill.

The black and white blocks on the side and top indicate the threading and treadling patterns--the instructions I'll follow later.