About Overshot Weave

I’m not mad keen on weaving Overshot, but right now ‘needs must’ as the saying goes. I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned along the way.

I’m using white 2/8 unmercerized cotton as the warp and as the tabby weft and a great magenta coloured 2 ply La-mieux wool as the pattern weft. It is really coming up nicely and after trying out 8 other wefts I’m happy as it is weaving in squarely. I swear I tried every combination of wool I had, what a pain! As you probably know Overshot should be woven square with the same number of pattern and tabby wefts as the warp. I’ve sett my warp at 20 epi, so I have 20 tabby picks and 20 pattern picks in every inch. My Louet Spring loom is not happy with the hard beat I have to use to get my weft packed in. I created this Overshot pattern and am weaving it ‘as drawn in’ star fashion, so that there is a strong 45 degree angle from corner to corner. I used the Name Draft technique to find the pattern and kept plugging along until I got one I liked, then I made borders to compliment the pattern.
One way to weave Overshot is ‘woven as drawn in’. This means that the treadling sequence is exactly the same as the threading sequence…well sort of. To make this happen you have to do a little fudging on the treadling. You write down the threading sequence and when you see 121 you think of this as block A and fill all three of them in on shaft 1; 232 is block B and is filled on shaft 2 etc., before you know it you have a pattern!

When I tied up my loom I tied up tabby (a) to a far left treadle and tabby (b) to a far right treadle, my four pattern treadles are in the middle. I started my tabby throw with tabby (b) from the right, so I always know which tabby I should treadle by which side the shuttle is on.

I will have this piece done today and am ready to weave something fun….Echo Weave, or Turned Taqueté I think.

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