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.

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.

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

Project completed March 2025.