Moscavaja balka band with pix.

[herveus]

 Some years back, I ran across a post from Tina Bean on FaceBook with this picture:

She was wondering if anyone could help her with working up a pattern. I don't think I ever shared my pattern with her (but I can fix that), but I cooked one up using 13 cards. 

Note the stuff going on on the left side. I read that as the beginning of the band. Like the weaver did a length, and this got cut off and somehow survived. I was really excited by that recognition. When I chart out a band for twill or Snartemo, I do something like this to start it out. 

I finally hit the right combination of empty loom and motivation to try this out.

Some years ago, I had picked up some cones of a 10.8nm shetland single from Webs. It was a mill end, but they still have the description on their web site. It's 5000 yards per pound. When I examined it, it seemed to be nice and tightly spun. 

This seemed to be a suitable yarn to try. I went with the beige and brown. 

1 cm wide. 

The warp is behaving just fine. A bit of the wool sticking together, but nothing very bad. It's not very fuzzy yarn. Unweaving has not been an ordeal.

As weft, it's a bit more fragile. I've broken the weft half a dozen times or more. It's no big deal to cope with.

If you note the loop of warp hanging down, you'll see that it's twisted back on itself. I read that as the yarn being a bit overspun, which I take as a Good Thing™ in this context.

I am reckoning it will be six to eight hours per yard of weaving time. I'm guessing I have two feet or so done now. There's a nice little roll on the cloth beam.

The pattern is 52 picks long and it is twist neutral. 

I have the cards all threaded S (as I use the term). Note the slashes that show how the cards lean. Backslash is a backward turn; slash is a forward turn. The vertical line is an idling card. Row 18 is the transition from rep to twill; the odd numbered cards turn; the even numbered cards idle. That's all it takes.

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