Saturday, December 2, 2017

Weaving up a storm

I have been weaving and weaving and weaving. I had this pile of Harris Tweed Textiles Shetland jumperweight that I had bought on Elann.com years ago. They were getting out of the yarn business and it was cheap. Lovely yarn. I have no regrets about buying it. I used it to make the color gamp scarf in the summer and fell in love with the handle of the fabric that it created.

This was the color gamp scarf, in case you missed it then.


So I decided to use the rest of the yarn to make scarves for the men in my family. Unfortunately, I only see my son at Thanksgiving and I knew I was going to see my brother then. Christmas can be iffy due to the weather. I wove two more scarves with the yarn. One using clasped weft and the other was just stripes.


That yarn is just beautiful. It blooms and creates a gorgeous fabric. So all those three have gone to their new homes.

I love weaving on the floor loom. I warped up some towels following a pattern blindly. My only deviations from the instructions in the book had to do with color and fiber content. I used my own color combination and a cotton-linen yarn instead of a cotton yarn.

The process was a learning experience. First, I had never woven with such thin yarn. I had lots of warp threads to wind. That process went very smoothly. Then I had to warp the loom. Part way through winding the warp threads on the back beam, the right hand side jumped out of the spacers (raddle) than they were threaded through and ended up in a big bunch on the back beam. Oy veh! I thought about it overnight and decided to try and fix it because that bunching would mean the threads would go through the metal heddles at a sharp angle, causing a lot of abrasion and maybe breaking threads. So my husband and I slowly wound the warp off the loom, I redistributed the threads on the back beam as best as I could and we wound it back on. It wasn't ideal because there were a lot of crossed threads, but it was the best I could do. Fortunately, while there was a bit of abrasion (I have rust dust bunnies under the loom), the threads held together and I didn't see any wear on them.  I have to be a lot more careful next time.

They are off the loom but not finished. I need to hem them before finishing. But I have more weaving to do so I am holding off finishing them now.


The mystery in this project is that I ended up with 3 towels in stead of two. I ran out of the rust colored yarn after the first two towels (the project called for 8 oz of that color and I had exactly 8 oz). I wove the third towel with the mauve contrast yarn. This project was from Anne Field's Learn to Weave book.

I heard about a selvedge treatment described in Anne Dixon's Handweaver's Pattern Directory. It was on a Ravelry forum and I thought I'd try it. I really love the way this selvedge looks. It is really solid and like a commercially woven selvedge.

Anyway, while I was weaving these towels. I decided to weave silk scarves for family in India. We are going there in Jan. That is why I am not hemming and finishing the towels yet. They probably won't be going to India and I want to get those gifts completed first.

First I wove another Shetland scarf. I finished that today. I need to wet finish it tomorrow. I put stripes into the warp and used a solid for the weft.


Better photos after it is finished.

I spent some time today planning the silk scarves. These are the colors of silk that I bought from Colourmart over the summer.

The idea behind buying them was to use them to learn various weave structures. I've decided that my first structure is twill. The scarf I made was in a 2/2 twill and the towels also were in a twill called M&O. For these scarves, I've picked a twill called M&W because the threading on the loom is like an M and a W.

My plan is to warp for two scarves in stripes and weave with a third color. The two scarves will have the same warp threading but I will treadle the weaving in a different pattern and that will create a completely different design in the fabric. This way I save on warping time and still end up with unique though fraternal scarves.

I start winding the warp for the first 2 scarves tomorrow.

In between all this, I did get some knitting done. I knitted a wrap when I was traveling in New Mexico at the beginning of Sept.


The pattern is I want that Wrap from Ravelry. I found the perfect buttons at the LYS. The yarn is handspun from a door prize I won at a fiber retreat in 2012. It has a bit of sparkle in it so I wanted dressy buttons.

I also made progress on the two at a time socks. No photos of the progress but I am half way up the leg now.

More on weaving next time. After these scarves are done, I hope to get back to spinning. I haven't spun since the Tour de Fleece in July!

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