I had a flash of insight into how my brain works yesterday. I am a creature of pattern. It came to me while I was doing some summer/winter pick-up – a technique that can swiftly drive you batty, but yields beautiful results.
The technique I use is based on a Weaver’s Craft pamphlet by Jean Scorgie (Weaver’s Craft, Plain Tabby Press, www.WeaversCraft.com). Jean writes with a clear voice and is an excellent teacher. In this particular issue, she describes the basis for the summer/winter structure, provides an excellent pictorial for the pick-up process, and supplies pattern examples for your experiments.
Summer/winter is a tabby and pattern weft structure. Each block requires 1 shaft plus the base shafts: 1 and 2. Threading is 1, 3, 2, 3 for one block; a 2nd block can be added by using 1, 4, 2, 4; and 3rd by using 1, 5, 2, 5; and so on. Treadling alternates the pattern and the tabby. The summer/winter pattern I had selected did not feel intuitive at all. I was completely unable to track where I was. (Black Pattern, Red Tabby: 1&2, 1, 3&4, 2, 1&2, 2, 3&4, 1, 1&2, 1, 3&4, 2, 1&2, 2, 3&4, 1, and so on.) It felt like so much gibberish until that Eureka! moment: ignore the tabby mentally and concentrate on the pattern. The tabby was always the same: right hand throw on 1, left hand throw on 2. If the shuttle was in my right hand, I knew where it had to go, so I only had to track the pattern treadling (1, 2, 2, 1). Easy peasy – and I was off and weaving up a storm.
Which led me to my self-revelation. I need a rhythm and a pattern for all of my weaving and knitting. If I have that, it is easy to memorize and easy to read. Once it is in my muscles, my speed and efficiency increase because I don’t make as many mistakes. I have known this for a long time with my knitting. Once a pattern makes some sort of intuitive sense to me, I don’t need to look at the book or even count the stitches as often. My projects grow very rapidly from that point. I can even improvise. And if I can’t see the pattern intuitively, I struggle. Now I have proof how much it helps my weaving as well.
But it doesn’t just help my accuracy. It is actually what appeals to me in both weaving and knitting. I love that rhythm – the real understanding of how the structure is building the fabric – the beat of the process. For me, that is at the very core of weaving – it is the essence of what makes weaving special and joyful for me.
I love this post! I too have come to appreciate the importance of pattern this winter. I’ve made 5 “Kelly” scarves: 2 with crackle weave, 2 with an undulating twill, and the last 1 with just a broken twill. The last one was easy to keep track of, but the other 4 took some effort. But I realized, like you did, that once I internalized the pattern, once it “made sense” to me, it was easy to keep track of the treadling–it was easy to catch myself when I pushed the wrong treadle. The other thing I realized was that part of my way of “making sense” of the pattern involved a kind of spatial representation–almost like a map or like a chess board. I don’t quite understand how this works, but when the pattern “clicks”, it feels spatial.