Double Weave Hanging

 

Soumak Doodles

 These pictures various stages of a little bit of fun that I been having with soumak. I referred to various You Tube videos and the magnificent "P. Collingwood- The Techniques of Rug Weaving". There was a bit of warp pulling with the curved piece.

Tapestry with supplementary warps

 Supplementary Warp Tapestry

I wove this between October 2019 and March of the following year. It started as a straight forward sampler loosely following the first one in Nancy Harvey's book "Tapestry Weaving - A Comprehensive guide. As I went I put in some supplementary warps and wove them in various fashions to have areas of doubleweave.

The supplementary warps were woven on the surface of the ground cloth and tucked behind when no longer needed. In the picture above the bottom three have been woven as loops, two at an angle and the middle one straight. The top row has two stuffed pockets and one wavy long loop.

The picture above shows the start of the supplementary warps.  I started weaving normally. I looped the supplementary warps around the existing warps. They are visible below the white header. When not being used the sup. warps stay at the back (nicely bundled to to keep them under control. When needed they are pulled through to the front. In this picture they are all at the front; only the middle group is tensioned.

Tension is applied by running the supplementary warps up and over the raddle. In this picture on the left is a sup. warp set under tension at an angle. The weaving of the middle set is finished and they have been passed to the back. The set on the right has been pulled through to the front and are just hanging around waiting for something to happen to them.

#4. This picture shows the sup. warp passing over the raddle.

#5 And here they are hanging down the back and tensioned with fishing weights. When a set of  warps are finished on the front the weights are removed and they are passed back through the main warps to the back of the loom. After weaving a few more picks of the main layer snug up the bit of supplementary weaving and secure at the back with with knots. When the work came off the loom I secured the long warp floats at the back with some tacking stitches.

The two pictures above show the weaving of the stuffed pockets. 

And these three pictures show the stages in weaving the wavy loop.

A crochet hook was invaluable and ready access to the back of the loom was essential.