Better Late than Never?

So waaaaaay back, over a year ago, I got home from Beginning Weaving Week at The Mannings and threw a scarf warp on the loom. Just so I could lock what I had learned into my brain.

Then I needed something else to put on the loom. And I froze.

Eventually, I decided to pull a column’s worth of threading off of the twill sampler that we had done in class. I did math and warped up the loom with eight yards of dishtowels.


Holy cow. These are a novice weaver’s first attempt at dishtowels. For reals.

Their flaws are many, but the learning curve is at least as great. The first three were cut off, intended for gifts. Then I got cold feet and decided they were not of gift quality. I was less than one towel into the warp and breaking selvedge threads constantly before I decided that I couldn’t live without a temple. So I ordered one. Yay, internets!

That’s a tool that keeps the thing you’re weaving from drawing in too much. It’s really terribly helpful. Especially for a beginner.

Anyhow...


The last few towels are far better. That’s the green one on the bottom, the purple one just above that and the light green towel at the very far left on the rail (and atop the stack in the final picture).

Oh, after I re-tied the warp and started weaving again, I forgot to leave a large hem. So the hems on the remaining towels are tiny in comparison. Oops.


Seven of these towels have gone to new homes. I went on a finishing spree and got all of the hems sewn. Pressed the towels and realized I did not need this many towels. So the red ones went to Sairy. The blue ones to Zarzuela and the orange ones to her husband, HWJF. And since CelticQueen was nice enough to deliver them to Sairy and Zarzuela at Rhinebeck, she claimed the green one.


So yeah. They’re done. Several have gone to new homes. I’ll get better. It’s a process.

DPUTiger’s First Dishtowels

Started: 7 September 2010
Finished Weaving: 24 November 2010
Finished, for real: 9 October 2011
Thread: 10/2 unmercerized natural cotton for warp.
8/2 unmercerized cotton in various colors for weft
Quantity: 9 towels. Woulda been 10 (I think) if I hadn’t cut off three and re-tied the warp.

Things in Progress

Yeah, titles for these WiP Wednesday posts are a struggle.

Oh, and keep in mind that the entirety of my weekend knitting time went into a now-finished project that you haven’t seen yet.

Daybreak is almost finished


It would be finished by now. But I ran out of the outer border color (the lavender) with about three rows to go, which meant I had to purchase another skein. It’s not the pattern’s fault. I changed yarn and had a feeling this was going to happen. But since I had to buy the extra yarn, hell if I’m gonna just do three rows and bind off. Stand by for a bigger-than-normal outer border.

Last night, I measured out warp for the next project on the loom.


Enough for probably 10 dishtowels, so this will keep me busy for quite a while. It’s 10/2 unmercerized cotton, 14” wide on the loom and eight yards long at 24 epi (ends per inch). I’m going to thread the loom for a twill pattern and I’ll have three treadling options for the towels. Kinda like these:


It’s actually one of the columns from the twill sampler we did in class. Not particularly creative, but it’ll work and holy warping practice, I’ll be an expert by the time this thing is done!

Dishtowels

After a bit of general information and theory at the start of Monday’s class, Tom got all of us sitting in front of a counterbalance floor loom, and we started weaving. Here’s what I made:

Four dishtowels!

I started at the bottom of that strip, with the green towel. You can see where I started out beating the ever-living crap out of the towel following each shot, and where I was when Tom came by and told me to chill out and not beat so hard.


The pattern was to knit a hem, then not quite 3” of tabby (plain weave), five repeats of our twill pattern (my loom was threaded for the “Star of Bethlehem” pattern), then 1.5” of tabby, four rows of twill, lather, rinse repeat to make it symmetrical.

My second color was chosen because I liked my classmate Misty’s first towel.


Each towel is about 24” long. They’re woven with unmercerized cotton. 10/2 in the warp, 8/2 in the weft.


My final towel was done with a dark purple. So dark it looks navy blue.


I decided that I was bored with the basic pattern, so I started messing with my twill set-up.


At this point, we’d been working on the twill samplers enough (the purple thing I showed you yesterday) that I understood that the pattern wouldn’t really emerge unless I reversed direction every so often. So instead of treadling 1, 2, 3, 4 over and over, I tried various combinations of 1, 2, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1.


I’m just about certain that twill dishtowels are going to be the next project on the loom. I just need to decide how long of a warp I want to measure out (i.e. how many towels I want to weave at a time) and what twill pattern to thread for. I’m still pondering my options, but I’ll bet I have it figured out by the time I get home from my Labor Day Weekend trip to The Lake.