Since Kelbourne was founded right in the middle of my masters work, I never had the opportunity to pursue weaving as the focus of my career. After moving into a home with room for a dedicated studio 2 years ago, I finally had the space to set up my floor loom (and the freedom to weave something not related to my grad work), and was delighted – and a bit overwhelmed – at the possibility.A large focus of my graduate work was on designing patterns for the jacquard loom and coming up with new structures on the 24 harness compu-dobby. Both required heavy sampling and development (think swatching over…and over…and over).

When returning to weaving for fun, I looked to one of my favorite structures, Overshot, to create this scarf. Overshot is deceptively simple, and the end result is quite beautiful. The structure looks incredibly complicated, but the effort is in the threading. Unlike a straight draw, where the ends of a warp are threaded 1-2-3-4, etc, an overshot threading is unique to the pattern and directly related to the treadling of the warp ends. The large blocks of color created by floats of the patterning weft are stabilized by a tabby weft, a much thinner warp end that is woven in a plain weave after every patterning weft pick. To throw in a knitting analogy, while applied differently, the tabby weft can be thought of similarly as tacking long floats in colorwork.

NEIGE SCARF:

STRUCTURE:
“Fish in the Pond” Overshot from The Shuttle-Craft Book of American Hand-Weaving by Mary Meigs Atwater, as published in A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns edited by Carol Strickler.

EQUIPMENT:
• 8-shaft loom, at least 24” weaving width
• 12 dent reed
• 2 shuttles

YARNS:
WARP: wool or wool blend, appx. 545 yds/100 gm skein: 2 skeins.
PATTERNING WEFT: wool or wool blend, appx. 656 yds/100 gram skein): 1 skein.
TABBY WEFT: wool or wool blend, appx. 1120yds/100 gm skein): 1 skein.

WARP LENGTH:
214 warp ends, 3 yds long. (allows for 6” take-up, 28” loom waste, 10” swatching/sampling).

SETTS:
WARP: 18 epi (1 – 2 / dent in a 12-dent reed)
WEFT: 18 ppi patterning, 18 ppi tabby

DIMENSIONS:
WIDTH IN REED: 11.66”
AFTER FINISHING: 10.625” width, 64.25” length, not including fringe.

For the weave draft and weaving instructions, download the free PDF here.