September 05, 2012

Soumac Meeting Line on Interlaced Språng


Up till now I've been closing up the meeting line on my interlinking språng cloth samples with chained links.  The way I've been chaining the threads has distorted the cloth and created a bulge.  By re-reading Collingwood's book, I've found a method of chaining that should solve that.

This meeting line is not chained at all.  The cloth is interlaced språng with a structure like tabby weaving so I used a weaving method, soumac, to close up.

If you're a weaver and even if you're not you might look at my three lines of soumac and think the middle one looks odd.  Yes, this was me.  I was fine working soumac left to right but not right to left.  I was alone with no weaver looking over my shoulder and I was impatient.  I turned the språng frame's front to the back and did soumac on the back of the cloth, then turned the cloth to the front for another row after that.

Soumac makes a small bulge in the cloth on the frame.

When the cloth comes off the frame it widens, stretching almost double its size and the soumac lines move as well.  There's another way of creating a meeting line, to weave tabby across.  But a few shots of tabby across would not give.  They would fight the structure of the sprang, so I think that soumac has an advantage when you want a stretchy fabric.  Tabby was historically used, according to the books, to create a firm stable bottom of a bag.

I got the idea to use soumac from Glenda Stoller's article, "Sprang: Twisting Threads" in The Family Creative Workshop: Silversmithing to Sprang, Vol 17, (New York: Plenary Publications, 1976), p. 2171.  That book is the cheapest one I know of for learning språng, I paid about five dollars for a used copy on the Advanced Book Exchange.  The content is clear and practical.


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