So my plan, about two months ago, was to weave circles in Summer and Winter. I was looking to broaden my circles repertoire. (Turned Taqueté fatigue anyone?) I am a big fan of unit weaves, and I wove a lot of Summer and Winter in the late 80’s and into the 90’s. Therefore I did a deep dive into my profile drafts of circles to see what looked good. From there it would be a quick process to get from profile draft to a full fledged Summer and Winter threading draft.

I found this:

This is a 10 block profile draft. It was previously unusable for me when I only had 8 harnesses to work with. But, now, with 16 harnesses at my disposal, I can use up to 14 blocks. I started doing block substitution in Fiberworks and came up with this:

This is a draft for 12-harness Summer and Winter. Looks good, right? Look carefully, and you will see that there are tabby treadles provided, but no tabby inserted into the treadling. I find it odd that the block substitution function in Fiberworks doesn’t automatically insert the tabby, because, the structure is useless without it. But there you are.

So, if you tell the program to insert the tabby please, this is what you get:

Suddenly, the lovely circles were transformed into ovals. I struggled with this result for a while. You can try to adjust for thread thickness in both threading and treadling, which I did, but this is time consuming, and really not very productive. You really have to weave the design to get a sense of how the proportions will play out.

I planned on using 12/2 tencel at 5040 yards per pound for warp that I had dyed a nice Pewter Gray. It’s been so long since I wove S&W that I had to check what the correct sett would be. My sources recommended a tabby sett for Summer and Winter. Tabby for 12/2 tencel is 24 epi. Which I went with. I recently bought some 2/10 Merino/Tencel Colrain lace weight, which at 2800 yards per pound is roughly the right weight for a pattern weft.

Once I got weaving, I soon realized (like, immediately) that the circles I had planned were definitely working out to be ovals. Yet, if you’ve ever woven on a table loom, you know that unweaving is to be avoided at all costs.

So, notice the bottom of this photo. Ovals. I quickly decided to incorporate the ovals into the overall design, and weave a less elongated oval next.

And then an even less elongated oval next, which now looks like ovals just turned sideways:

Now I was finally getting the circles I envisioned. See the middle part of the scarf photos.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the process, and I think I will be tying to on the this warp and weaving at least one more scarf like it. But after that? Turned Summer and Winter!