How I do transfer and inkle loom pattern

defreitas wrote

on 7 Oct 2012 11:25 PM

I just purchased Anne Dixon's lovely book Inkle Pattern directory.  I will like to weave some bands on my AVL loom with out having to do pick up and using some of the patterns in Anne book - 

Can someone help me figure this out - ? 

Thanks, 

Chrystal 

CarolineA wrote

on 8 Oct 2012 12:13 AM

hi Chrystal, I also have the book, its got some lovely patterns. The biggest thing to remember with transferring an inkle pattern to a regular loom is that the inkle band is a warp faced fabric. So your sett for most of these projects will be very tight and your weft invisible except for the edges. It may be easier to weave without the reed and use a beater to get the tight  weave you need.

It is possible to transfer these patterns to a regular loom so that they are loom controlled rather than weaver controlled, depending on the pattern. Many inkle patterns are simply plain weave, albeit warp-faced, and the pattern appears because of the order of the colours in the warp. They only require 2 shafts and they alternate as in regular plain weave. Your tension may have to be a bit tighter, but sampling will tell you that.

Those patterns that have a supplementary warp thread can be done using an extra shaft or two for the pattern warps; the pattern warps are sometimes thicker than the background warps in the pattern. Often the background is basket weave so where the supplementary warp is on, say, shaft three, the warping will go something  like 1,2,3, 2,1,3, 1,2,3,2,1,3 and so on. You may have to do a bit of manual pickup on the third shed, because of the patterns which are usually diamonds, crosses and flowers etc, but it should be fairly automatic for the rest. If you are interested, you could even convert the drafts to use more shafts to make that loom controlled as well.

I would suggest starting with the simple stripes and comb patterns until you have the warp-faced technique down, before trying the pick-up using supplementary shafts.They are not very wide, and its surprising how close many of them are to regular 4 shaft or more pattern drafts. Often they are simply already familiar drafts turned on their sides so that Krokbragd, for example, becomes a warp faced weave instead of a weft faced weave.

Hope this helps.