Sue Palterman's description of her lampas woven sample

I put the warp onto my table loom (sorry to stray from TW) (sorry to talk technical, Nancy, if you want a longer explanation let me know) to do a 5shaft straight twill. I set it up with an 4 extra sets of string heddles in front of the others with a different colour warp thread in each set (so that when I get to the pattern part it will make the job a little easier!). Then it all went pear-shaped!

Having started weaving I realised that what I had set up is the same as the diagram for lampas weave which Nancy sent me. I also realised that with the tablet weaving the colour sequence repeats after 4 tablets - if you spiral the colour to get diagonals then the 5th tablet will be in the same position as the first, so one repeat has 16threads ( 4threads x 4 tablets). After 4 picks the same colour has returned to the top, so if the warp thread is down for one pick then it is available on the top for 3 picks.

With the 5shaft/lampas weave the colour repeats on the same shaft after 20 threads. The 4 colour diagonal pattern is achievable on the reverse (probably slightly different, difficult to see well), but in between the warp thread is available at the top for 4 picks. This was probably immediately apparent to others, but sometimes it takes a brick to make me notice things.

Does this help with the analysis of the pictures? The selvedges are really tricky (I'm on Plan D!!). Has anyone seen lampas weave with a selvedge? I thought that I would get a similar sample with the loom, but because of the extra long repeat, there aren't so many across the piece. I've had to pull the sample in by 1/5 to get the same level of cover.

Jenny Kosarew, who scanned and forwarded the images, writes:

Here are the scans of the loom woven sample. Although the back looks superficially the same, there are some differences. The picks/inch (at the end of the sample I used for the detailed scans) are the same as the TW sample, but this one is narrower (1.5" instead of 1.8").

This page was created on 28 September 1998 and last updated on 28 September 1998 by Carolyn Priest-Dorman on behalf of Sue Palterman and the CARDS-L group.

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