Interlinked Sprang Stripes

Using multiple colors in a warp is one of the easiest ways to liven up a sprang project. The interlinking structure invites numerous possibilities for varying the color pattern. Peter Collingwood discusses several means of changing the color sequence of sprang warps (The Techniques of Sprang, 1974, pp. 90-96) and Carol James discusses other pattern possibilities for color patterns (Sprang Unsprung, 2016, pp. 52-55).

I tried to follow Collingwood's sequence in this bag with a wooden handle, but didn't quite match his results. Some day I'll examine it and figure out exactly what I did to get the pattern at the bottom of the bag.

The bag is in interlinked sprang with occasional full twists to change the order of the threads. The diagonal lines at the top of the bag are formed by alternating loops of contrasting color (each loop is two threads). After a row in which every other stitch is a full twist, the pattern becomes horizontal rows of color. Additional patterns of full twists occur at each of the pattern changes.

Inspired by Plain Weave

When I first saw Annie MacHale's book In Celebration of Plain Weave: Color and Design Inspiration for Inkle Weavers I was immediately struck by the similarity between her patterns and sprang. After all, inkle weaving is warp faced and sprang is all warp, so I should be able to get the same patterns in interlinked sprang. So I went through her building blocks of pattern elements and tried to replicate them in sprang.

The uniqueness of sprang showed through in two ways:

• The under-two structure of interlinked sprang creates discontinuous vertical zigzags rather than the straight lines of weaving. Some of the inkle weaving building blocks look significantly different in sprang.The vertical lines become diagonal and speckles become diagonal lines.
• In weaving it's easy to warp individual threads in the order required by the pattern. But in sprang it is much easier to warp two strands of a single color together in loops.* So there's an extra step between warping and the pattern of arranging the threads into the desired order.

* This is true of flat warp sprang if one wants to avoid having knots at both ends of the warp. In circular warp sprang it is possible to place individual threads in the desired order, but the peculiarities of circular warp require special placement of the color threads, adding a different layer of complexity.

Below are some of my first attempts at rendering inkle patterns in sprang. Check out this page for comparison with the inkle loom patterns.

Full Twists

In the above samples I used whatever method I could to move the threads sideways without recording what I did. In the patterns below I moved the threads using full twists. The strategically placed extra twists exchange the places of the two threads and allow for a wider variety of patterns. The details of the full twists at the top of each stripe are on the Full Twist Experiments page.

Interlinked sprang bag. Full twists at the top to create a variety of stripe patterns.

Drawing of the pattern of this bag. The rows with two colors represent full twists.

A drawing of the top of one of the stripes in the bag, showing the full twists moving threads sideways.