I spent most of the flight to Chicago playing with seven-shaft drafts. I wanted to try some advancing twills, and I had seen a lovely draft of Bonnie Inouye’s on page 116 of Doramay Keasbey’s Pattern Techniques for Handweavers that I thought would adapt nicely to a seven-shaft variation. So I cooked up some variations, and here they are (click to zoom in):
The rightmost draft is the one based on Bonnie’s draft, and I believe the process for creating it is more-or-less explained in her book Exploring Multishaft Design. (Which, by the way, I cannot recommend highly enough for anyone wanting to learn how to draft their own designs.)
While I absolutely love the right-most draft, I think the one on the far left is most suitable for the shawl I have in mind. It has more visual complexity/interest than the center piece. And since it is a more contained pattern, I think it will cope better with being “framed” in the black and white rectangles than the one at far right. The rightmost pattern just begs to run right up to the edge of a piece, to allow the trompe d’oeil to play freely.
Off to bed! Tomorrow’s another (no doubt very interesting!) day.