Greenland progress!

For some reason I could not sleep at all this morning, so I got up and finished dressing the floor loom and finally got the first inch or so of weaving done for my Coronation A&S project.  Yay!  Finally!  I'm feeling much MUCH better about that whole thing now.  I talked with one of the other entrants yesterday about the competition, and aside from realizing that I have a very low opinion of the impact my own work makes on people, got a much better idea of what to expect and am less worried about the whole thing.  We are supposed to send the documentation in 2 weeks before the competition so the judges can read it ahead of time, which is great, but as the project won't be done there are some things I won't be able to include.  Little stuff like my conclusions.  We came to the conclusion that this was going to have to be ok, since neither one of us can do anything about that (she's cooking, and you can't really include the recipes until AFTER you have cooked the food) and the missing bits won't be more than a few pages anyway.

Aside from having a rather embarrassing episode of spatial dyslexia last week  when trying to figure out the twist direction of the yarn I'm using (I could not get my head around the idea that the twist direction is the same regardless of which way the thread is running, I'm chalking that up to a low-caffeine moment, though it was useful in the end), I'm now trying to sort out the Truth of Twill.  For some reason, when I start the first inch or so this morning I had a floating warp thread on either end of my cloth that wasn't getting picked up by the weft.  When I revered my treadle direction, everything was fine.  There's some relationship between the direction of threading, treadling, and the direction of the throw that I'm just not connecting in my head.  I understand what needs to be happening, it's just how to make it happen in a pattern that's messing with me.  This is only my second project where any of these things have mattered though, so I suppose it's ok that I don't understand every last thing about weave structure.

Here you can see my progress so far.  It looks ok as far as twill fabric goes, but I'm not 100% happy with how the balance is in comparison to the photographs of the Greenland fabrics.  The weft should be denser, and I just can't get the Shetland to pack any more than you see in these pictures.  I think I'm going to have to dig around a bit and check with the local yarn shops before I weave any further and see if I can't find a somewhat light weight option for the weft, something closer to the pink singles I used on my first twill sample.