About two years ago I blogged about taking an overshot pattern called Jitterbug and converting it to an 8 harness Turned Taquete weaving draft. You can read all about that here. I don’t know why my mind wandered back to that, but I started wondering about how it would work on 4 harnesses. In her article “Turned Taquete: an Introduction” (*see below), Bonnie Inouye describes how it can be done by interleaving a four harness overshot threading with a second threading on opposites. I did not try this method, but I did decide to explore another method.

In her book Weaving with Echo and Iris Marian Stubenitsky suggests some ways to substitute blocks of four harnesses, each arranged in a different order, for the threading blocks in a design line. This means that each block will be switched for a four-thread sequence. Here is the substitution formula from page 71:

For Harness 1 we will substitute 1324

For Harness 2 we will substitute 3124

For Harness 3 we will substitute 3142

For Harness 4 we will substitute 1342

Other sequences of substitution in her book had issues. One could only be used on a rising design line, not descending. Another ended up with many double threads that needed to be deleted. This method had no problems and only the caveat that this threading rubric does not work with iridescent effects (four colors per block), but only with two alternating colors per block.

Off I went. First I re-wrote the design line to the minimum (keeping in mind that it would be expanded by 4x):

FYI– this is what it looks like with two repeats of the threading and treadling:

This is one repeat of the threading draft after four-thread substitutions are made:

And this is one repeat of the threading draft with the tie-up and one repeat of the treadling draft, which includes tabby on alternating picks:

The longest floats are 4 threads according to Fiberworks, which should be fine for most close sets. So, lest you four harness weavers should feel left out of the Turned Taquete craze, this is a perfectly serviceable technique to join in the fun. Enjoy!

*The complete article can be found here: Complex Weavers Journal, June 2014, pp 36-40.