Snartemo Part I

Cassandra asked me to make some trim for a tunic.  She gave me three swatches of fabric to match.  The four colors turned out to be burgundy, teal, purple, and orange.  As soon as I saw the colors involved, I immediately thought of Snartemo.  I have been itching to try this technique for a while, so this commission became my excuse.

The requested width is 1".  I am using 20/2 wool from Epic.  I usually use their stuff for embroidery, but this will be my first try weaving with it.  I purchased their sample pack a while back, and I was pleased to find good matches for the fabric swatches.



The base pattern for Snartemo is diagonals using four colors.  There is a warping diagram on the Snartemo link above.  I speed warped forty cards, ten cards at a time because I was not sure how this wool would behave.  I tend to be lazy with large fibers and warp my cards all at once, but with thinner fibersI have found smaller batches of cards work better.  This wool is pretty sticky, so I was happy I did it this way.  Apart from stickiness, which only bugs me when I need to back out weaving, the wool has worked very well.

All of the cards are S warped (pass from right to left through the card), so rolling forward (away from your body results in a diagonal stripe inclining from left to right.  When the direction is changed to roll backwards, the stripes slant from right to left.  Because I'm on a deadline, I decided to do the neckline as just the basic diagonals, changing direction every three inches.

Neckline

Cassandra's request had been that the pattern be orange dominant.  For the sleeves, I used the Snartemo technique to make the orange stripes wider.  When the orange reached the D position on the leftmost card while rolling forwards, I reversed it for the next turn (moving it to A), then went back to rolling forwards (D) on the turn after that.  All of the rest of the cards continued in their original turning sequence.  Each time another orange thread reached the D position, I treated it the same way.  Because I wanted all of the orange stripes to be wider, this meant that I had multiple cards that I needed to keep track of.  Each time I started a new stripe, I offset it a bit from the rest of the cards.  Eventually I had seven or eight offset packs.

  When the pattern is rolled forward the sequence goes from left to right:  roll the first pack forward, roll the first card of the next pack backwards into the previous pack, then the rest of the pack forward, repeat with each pack. When the pattern is rolled backwards the sequence goes from right to left:  roll the first pack backwards, roll the first card of the next pack forwards into the previous pack, repeat this with each pack.  Each of the center packs should wind up as six cards.  The two end packs will have between one to six cards.  When an end pack reaches six, the outermost card will need to become a new pack, by rolling in the opposite direction from the rest of the pack.  The cards in essence cascade from right to left or left to right.  Between rotations the wide stripe color should be in position D on the leftmost card, and in A on the rightmost card in each pack.

Sleeves

If you watch the pattern it will tell you if you messed up.  My biggest problem so far is while rolling backwards.  For some reason I want to roll the first pack forwards instead of backwards.  I'm getting it right now, but I have to concentrate on it, or I roll the first pack the wrong way.  I haven't had any problems while rolling forwards.

The hem will be based on the following pattern.

The diamonds will be red/purple, and orange/teal, though I may just do the orange/teal ones to increase the orange content.  Unfortunately the placement of the colors in the cards is wrong for me to be able to do orange/purple diamonds.  I will post the details of the hem as Snartemo part II.