Weaverly

Taking Out The Garbage

Remember this warp? I called it a garbage warp, a term I learned in the 1970's to denote a mixture of odds & ends used hit & miss, in the service of stash reduction. I threaded it straight draw on a 16-shaft dobby loom and used a plain weave ground with a sprinkling of warp- and weft-floats in satin order. 

It repeats on 16 picks. If you click to enlarge, you can make out the draft in the lower left of the laptop screen.

I finally wove off all 6 yards a few days ago and cut it off and washed it. Surprisingly it lost about 20% in take-up & shrinkage. 

But what used to be a pretty boring project on the loom is now ~5 yards of delightfully squishy cloth which will some day (I hope) be something to wear.

Mostly cotton.

Thankful

It doesn't take much. Just that little bit of red.

Sometimes I overdo it. A bit less red would be better. But then the other colors would change, too. Everything is connected to everything else.

The threading & treadling are interleaved & non-parallel. I'm enjoying the combination of left & right diagonals and a bit of birdseye effect. Now how on earth did that happen? I'm sure I don't know. Click for enlargement.

In the Department of Books, I have just finished reading Foster by Claire Keegan and Signal Fires by Dani Shapiro.

Naturally

On a whim I ordered a kit of naturally dyed yarns from Cotton Clouds. I was blown away by the colors. I was also attracted by the community service aspect of the yarns. The final product is to be a simple vest of four rectangular panels. Instructions are for a rigid heddle loom, but I thought it would be an easy thing to adapt for a table loom with shafts. As it happens, it was not so easy. The warps are double (two strands acting as one), which is easy to accomplish on a RH, but a bit fiddly for a shaft loom. But I persevered. 

Once the loom is warped, the weaving is straightforward. Plain weave. There is a pattern suggestion of bands of pickup and other texture weaves, but I decided to stick with plain weave, and perhaps add fancy button loops as an embellishment post-weaving.

The colors are indeed wonderful. More about the dyers of San Rafael, Guatemala, here.

In the Department of Books, I have just finished reading the new English translation of Alessandro Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi, or The Betrothed. I don't intentionally go seeking out novels about the Plague, but they seem to find me. This one was wonderful and I'm glad I stuck with it. Lot's of interesting Italian history here. And it apparently inspired Verdi to write his famous Requiem Mass.