Tag Archives: carol strickler’s 8-shaft patterns

in progress weaving; the bottom has woven weft in varying blue colors, the top has unwoven warp that is white. a fluff of white is shown on the left.

Kite Fest!

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This quilt was for a local art project in my town! It’s the first time I’ve ever made something to be shown publicly. The project gave us fabric printed with original prints from our local historic flour mill to make a quilt with 🙂 The prompt was “a day in our town”, and this year I went to our Kite Festival for the first time so I wanted to depict that. I loved seeing community members having a great time in the sun, and there were so many colorful and beautiful kites in the sky. I even had a go at flying a kite for the first time in a long time, and it went okay! 🙂

This year I wanted to make a project that incorporated my handspun, handwoven, and quilting, and this seemed like a great opportunity. I wove my handspun silk as the background and incorporated the flour mill fabrics as appliqued kites on top. Then I added borders and used free motion quilting to introduce just a few more wavy lines in there.

I had bought some silk fiber this summer to try spinning, and I had originally intended to make a sort of abstract sky or ocean project, but this quilt was the perfect place for it! The silk was a joy to spin, so smooth and gentle and easy. I understand why it’s not recommended for beginners, but aspects of it were easier than spinning wool, I was never worried about staple length and my single rarely snapped or flew out of my hand. I used a silk roving/top and hankies; I love the fluffy and irregular texture from the hankies but that shine from the roving is just unbeatable. I ended up buying more silk and I’m spinning it up to do a comparative dye project next year. As I wove the background, I got a bit nervous about running out so I spun up some more blue from a tencel/merino blend I had, incorporating some white mint and gray yak/silk to boost my supplies. I spun these blends as a single to be used as a single, which was my first time doing that. It was strange to not ply the singles after I’d spun them, but I really like the fluffy look this yarn brings to the finished piece.

a hank of blue handspun silk yarn
Original blue silk 2-ply yarn
close up of blue fiber being spun onto a spinning wheel bobbin
additional blue on the wheel

Then it was time to weave! I used a thin cotton warp I already had in my stock (I only used supplies I already had for this project; my only cost was registering for the project :)). I looked in Carol Strickler’s book for some wavy, flowy patterns that reminded me of faraway clouds and air movements, and really like the undulation of #8. I played around with the repeated rows and the length of the floats, but all the sky is based on #8. I used a satin-ish pattern for the green hill at the bottom to make it very weft faced and kind of bury the white warp underneath. I used some unspun mint fiber to create the fluffy clouds at the top, along with some long floats in the body of the piece.

in progress weaving; the bottom has woven weft in varying blue colors, the top has unwoven warp that is white. a fluff of white is shown on the left.
bottom: woven sky; top: unwoven cotton warp; left: fluff of mint fiber; bottom left: Carol Strickler’s book

Once I finished the weaving, I moved on to playing with kite shapes and cutting them out of the flour mill fabric. I wanted to capture the different sizes and shapes that I saw at Kite Fest, and I cut a whole variety to place onto the quilt. I appliqued them with my machine, and then attached the double border. I was originally intending to just have the blue border, but it needed something additional and I really like the second border.

a long panel, mainly blue with vague stripes, and a dark green bottom
blue background with applique kites on a sewing machine bed

Pictures of the back of the panel after applique below. I do not always tuck in my ends! I also figured there was no need since I’d be quilting it and securing everything afterwards. On the right you can see the warp faced back of the hill.

handwoven fabric with some stitches in green and fluffy bits of fiber sticking out
handwoven fabric, bottom is white with spots of green and the top is stripes of blue and white. some yarn is sticking out

I pieced together the backing with my scraps from the flour mill fabric and supplemented with some floral fabric from my stash. I used cotton backing and basted with safety pins.

on the left, a bunch of floral fabrics with a measuring tape. a cat on the right looks towards the camera
my friendly helper assisting in measuring the backing; original flour mill fabric in the center under the measuring tape

I doodled a lot of ideas for the quilting, but in the end I wanted to keep the attention on the waves in the weaving and keep the quilting simple. I went with flowy undulating lines and used the same gray-ish thread I used throughout the entire construction and applique processes.

blue quilt with small applique shapes. bordered with light blue and gray
finished kites 🙂

Project completed October 2026.

More Twill Towels :)

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Now that I’ve given all my end-of-year gifts, I can post my work over the past many months! This year I got into weaving and doing dish towels felt approachable and they’re a classic weaver’s project. I’ve posted some that I already worked on here, and then started getting ideas…

First was to pull colors from nature, pictures I take while out and about. Picking a four or five color palette to work with is NOT a strength of mine, I love chaos too much. I started with a picture I took on vacation in Redwoods National Park last year and one of the sunrise in Rocky Mountain National Park. Conveniently, these two had some shared colors so I went with dark green and brown for the warp, and others for the weft.

I started with the mountain colors, working in 2/2 twill, changing weft colors on a whim, sometimes using clasped weft to do half-rows of color. It became clear pretty quickly that the colors I chose were not really that representative of my picture inspiration, and more just red, yellow, and blue. But those three colors are still fun to work with. The dark warp just got lost, I’m not sure why it isn’t as present in the final towels, but maybe it just serves to make the weft pop. I renamed these as the “primaries” series, but I still want to make a sunrise series.

Then I started in on the tree towels – but this was the longest warp I’d wound on, and the tension was pretty wonky, to say the least. In retrospect, I think a couple things happened: the tension wasn’t even as the warp was wound on and I wasn’t putting in dividers often enough, which meant there were more overlapping threads in the middle of the bar, which meant the circumference that the warp was winding onto was not equal across the warp. In other words, the sides of my warp didn’t have enough thread and the center had too much, and it was a whole hassle. I ended up unwinding it and trying again, because my weaving was so uneven and it was frustrating to work with.

It meant I lost some warp, or length, of my project (yielded 3 towels instead of 6 like the other), but it was worth it for how nicely the towels actually turned out, and the ease of the experience afterward.

Then I had nice leftovers from lots of projects, so I had to do a scrappy, chaotic set of towels. I wanted to do some sort of “color and weave” pattern, where both the way the colors in the weft and warp are laid out AND the weave structure create a specific look. Most color and weave patterns are using dark and light colors, so I divided up my leftovers into darks and lights and started looking for ideas. I wanted to do a houndstooth pattern, and stuck to a 2/2 twill on four shafts to keep it simple 🙂 these were so fun. I did stripes of four light threads and four dark threads on the warp and the weft, with a few stripes of two just for experimentation’s sake. I used the same light/dark pairs in the weft as I did in the warp, so there are little islands of perfect houndstooth among a sea of kinda-houndstooth.

Then, I thought I was done with towels for a moment, but a friend revealed to me she didn’t have any towels and I could not let that stand. I immediately chose colors that went with her apartment decor and a really pretty weave structure I’d been eyeing with no real plan to use. This braided twill (Strickler’s #181) has things in common with a twill, kind of like a point twill, but it creates diamonds that share sides instead of freestanding diamonds. I wanted to do a plaid, because I think stripes are cool and wanted to understand some of the color blending between the three colors I chose. A plaid just uses the same color pattern for the weft as it does for the warp, turned 90 degrees. I figured I’d make the weft stripes whatever width I wanted (or however much yarn I put on my bobbin), but keep the same color order. So I made my warp stripes, wound bobbins of differing lengths for fun, and started weaving. It’s a 10 treadle pattern, so it actually got into my brain and body pretty quickly and I was able to weave this fast. I did do some “2/2 twill” treading just to go even faster, since I was on a time crunch. I yielded 7 towels, so I consider it a win. I really liked the high contrast with the dark purple, but the interaction between the two lighter colors was not as interesting.

seven towels! some are finished so the “right side” is right, some so that the “wrong side” is right.

These towels were so fun to make and learn with – I got lots of experience winding on long warps, saw how different colors interact with each other, and tried a new weave structure. I think towels are so low stakes for learning and mistakes. No one cares if they’re a little wonky, or the tension isn’t quite right. I kept the weirdest offcuts for myself, either as napkins or towels, and gifted the rest. I sewed in little tags on all the corners, and I even made little labels to feel extra fancy.

Projects completed December 2025.

First Overshot Weaving

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So my desk is under a window, and throughout the day, the sun blinds me. I have a bunch of plants in the window, so I don’t like lowering the entire window shade. I’ve been balancing an umbrella on my windowsill plants and computer monitor… But I needed something better.

I decided to weave a panel that could move up and down so I could block the sun as it moves across the window. I have been wanting to understand more about overshot weaving, which has two different wefts and makes really interesting blocky patterns. Since this was going to be a small piece, I figured it was a great time to learn an overshot pattern from Strickler’s book.

Overshot is a type of weave structure where you raise adjacent threads to create weft floats (long horizontal lines). And you do the same weft floats multiple times in a row, which creates “blocks” of color. Since you can’t do the same floats back to back, a plain “over under” (tabby) weft pick is put between them to secure the threads.

I chose #418 by Ardis Dobrovolny, and “eight-block point repeat twill”, because it’s clearly an overshot version of twill diamonds, which I already love and know about. I had a theoretical understanding of overshot, but didn’t quite understand how the threading diagrams created the pattern I could see – so using a familiar diamond twill helped me compare and contrast overshot with what I already knew.

Despite having the pattern, I did some improvising on the order of the sheds and the number of picks on the same shed. I even did a few rows of the inverse sheds, where the threads meant to be raised are lowered.

Front
Back

This was also my first time weaving with my own handspun!! I originally tried a different handspun but it didn’t have enough color contrast with the background warp and weft, so I pivoted to this fun blue and orange wool yarn 🙂 I spun this on my bottom whorl drop spindle. Then I ran out of that yarn and added some wool “Autumn”, which I spun on my supported spindle. I used commercial cotton yarn for the warp and tabby weft.

Blue and orange
Autumn

Then I had to do some yardstick-and-hot-glue engineering, and installed it in my window 🙂

blocking the sun 🙂

Project completed March 2025.

Second Adventures in Table Loom Weaving

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Twill towels

  • 3/2 cotton “Beam” thread from Gist Yarn warp and weft in three colors
  • Threading was by color, so I could experiment with different patterns and see the effect of the weave and the color 🙂 I planned to have all patterns be based in 2/2 twill, just different combinations and repeats
    • Pink – straight 12345678
    • Orange – point 12345678765432
    • Blue – broken
  • Warped between two chairs flipped upside down on a counter and table – did not work very well because they slid together over the warp, so the beginning threads were longer than the ending ones.
    • Also learned that I need to put more organizational ties on the warp so the threads don’t get tangled when transferring to the loom
    • I had to use a homemade pin loom as a makeshift raddle to separate the warp threads, and since I didn’t really keep the warp untangled… this was really annoying and I had to keep stopping to untangle the threads so they’d go through the raddle, and also the tension was really uneven throughout the winding of the warp.
  • One floating selvedge on each side to attempt to keep the edges straight and allow patterns that don’t always go over and under the outside threads
Note the tangled threads along the top as they enter the raddle… 😦
Sleying the reed
Blue and orange weft stripes at the bottom are point twill, pink weft at the top is the corresponding treadling to the blue warp threading (called “as drawn in”)
I called this blue weft pattern “ten jellyfish”, it is a 10 pick repeat and I think it looks like a bunch of jellyfish swimming up and down 🙂
I noticed that I was pulling the weft in more on the left passes than on the right passes – my right selvedge gradually comes in more and more, but my left selvedge is pretty consistent. I think this was also due to a lot of threads on my right side becoming looser as I wove, which I tried to weigh down but it wasn’t great.
I tried out some clasped weft – in the middle pink stripe I followed the twill line which was fun
Front
Back
  • Finished in the washer, dryer, and ironed, then used my sewing machine to make two kitchen towels and two napkins. It was a little intimidating to cut into my handwoven fabric, so I did a basting stitch on my machine on both sides of where I needed to cut.
😃

Pillow

  • Cotton warp, acrylic weft that I frogged from a sweater that I didn’t wear
  • Wanted to try my hand at using one pattern for an entire project instead of having fun improvising. I used Carol Strickler’s #178 for threading and “treadling” – which on a table loom is levering, I guess?
  • Direct warped with a clamp on the *opposite* side of my kitchen island, which ensured the clamp couldn’t move or fall off. I warped a couple sets of threads instead of doing all ~360 threads at one time. This was better for me logistically and it reduced the effect of the warp building up on the clamp, making some threads longer because they’re more diagonal than straight to the clamp.
    • I mainly chose to direct warp because using the homemade raddle went so poorly on the towels, but I want to try “normal warping” again.
    • Two floating selvedges on each side just to see if it would help with straighter selvedges.
Two bundles of warp hanging, the right is finished, ready to be wound on using the reed to separate the warp
Since this weft is very fuzzy, the pattern is more muted, but I like the diagonal pattern with the vertical gray warp with the horizontal colored weft stripes. So many types of lines 🙂
Finished pillow next to the pattern and book sample
Finished woven pillow and I transformed my crocheted triceratops sweater into a pillow too!

It was very rhythmic, weaving the same pattern over and over again. I started using an eight-sided die to keep track of which line I was on, and just wove and wove and wove. And I used all the yarn I frogged!

Projects completed early 2025.