Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Color and Weave on the Loom!

Well, it has been a very strange summer for us so far. We worked our fanny's off getting the house ready for sale and it sold faster than we were prepared for it to! That is a good thing. There is a contingency but it looks like it will work out just fine.
I had decided to leave the loom up so I could work while the house was on the market thinking I would have time. Well, now it looks like the loom will be coming down in two weeks!
I have pulled some yarn out of my now meager stash. I found some cotton to play with a bit of Color and Weave. I didn't have enough of both colors to make the entire set of tea towels in Color and Weave so I just put a stripe in one side that will have one square of the Color and Weave patterning where the vertical and horizontal stripes meet.
As I took this picture of the first one being woven, I realized I forgot to border the horizontal stripe with two picks of yellow on either side for a "zinger". I will have to remember to do that on the next one. I should have enough warp to weave three tea towels.
So here are the specs on the loom. Warp and weft yarns are dark blue 8/2 cotton and light blue 8/2 cotton. Roughly that is. Neither cone is labeled and they are not from the same line. The light blue cotton is coarser spun but about the same grist as the dark blue. The yellow zinger, or accent yarn, is a linen yarn about the same size as the blue ones. Again an unlabeled cone.
The warp is sett 15 epi. I determined that sett using Jane Stafford's method of wrapping the yarn on a ruler. I will do a post on that later.
The warp is 20" wide in the reed and 4 yards long. I am weaving the towels in 30" lengths including the hems. As I weave, I am paying careful attention to my beat so that I get a nice balanced fabric.
I usually sample on the loom. That is, I go ahead and warp the loom for the project and put on extra to sample with. I weave a bit and cut it off the loom. I wash one half and leave the other half unwashed. I study the results and make any changes to the sett or beat if needed and have a record of what I did. Due to the nature of time and limitations on the available yarn from my stash, I am not sampling. This is just to get something on the loom and satisfy the itch to weave. I have missed it during the time I had to let it sit while getting the house ready to sell.
If all goes well we will be moving to Eugene, Oregon in a month. The loom will be in storage until I have a studio. In the meantime, I will be working on tapestry weaving and doing some spinning.
Stay tuned for my take on Jane Stafford's yarn wrapping method of determining sett. It is slightly different than most of the instructions I have seen out there.
Soaking up the sunshine, -Renee