Winding the thorn path

[merrileemakes]

So earlier in the year I was playing around with a weaving draft and came up with something truly awful. I briefly considered weaving it just to see it, but it's a big time investment to weave something on a floor loom just to prove that a pattern is, in fact, awful.

So I played around at making the pattern less awful. My idea was to have diamonds that change in size across and down the length of the fabric in a gradient, kinda like a mexican wave. My first design had only one diamond in each size and the changes were too rapid, making a fabric that was hard on the eyes.

This version here has 3 diamonds of the same size next to each other before changing.



It's still a bit awful, but it's tipped more towards intriguing. So I'm going to weave this. The threading pattern to make these diamonds is often called 'rosepath' so I'm naming this pattern thornpath.

First up, winding the warp. For the... third weaving project in a row I ran out of yarn. This is getting really tedious. At least I'm catching my error earlier and earlier - this time I hadn't even finished winding the warp. And for this particular oversight I'm blaming the Americans. There's a lot of converting between imperial and metric units in weaving, which I can do, but don't feel fluent in imperial. I have no mental concept of what a pound looks like, or a yard.

I had cones of Maurice Brassard 8/2 cotton, which is pretty much the internationally standard cotton for weaving tea towels. I knew the yards per pound of this yarn and there were enough yards to weave a bunch of tea towels. But it had never really clicked with me that the cones comes in 1/2 a pound, so I needed to halve the yards available. I have a fair mental picture of a kilo of fibre, or a kilo of yarn. But pounds and half pounds are just words to me.

Anyway, random stripe to the rescue.



I designed the stripes by using the 312 ends of khaki yarn I could get from one cone, then did an off centre series of stripes to make up the other 110ish ends.

I really love my Saori warping board. It has a bar above the winding section with little cup hooks, which makes it super easy to wind multiple ends at a time without them tangling. I wound some of the khaki cotton onto weaving bobbins and then used shuttles to hold them, letting me wind with 4 ends at once and cut down the time needed to wind the warp by 75%.





Here's how the warp looks on the loom.



Haaaahaha japes. The warp is on the loom but it's not on the loom. Get it? Hilarious.

Anyway, here's how it actually looks on the loom.



And through the power of procrastination, here's how the 4 tea towel look all woven, hemmed and washed.



I really like how they turned out. I hadn't planned on weaving the dark green one, but I was using that leftover cotton to test my warp and loved the colour combination.

The three towels on the left I kept the warp in the same pattern as in the first image in this post, for an all over consistent pattern. For the towel on the right I randomly switched between weaving the pattern and weaving undulating lines. I think I like this one the best, but honestly I like all of them.



People new to weaving, or who don't weave, often as why weavers are so into tea towels. You know you can just buy them, right? But tea towels are the perfect canvas size to try something new. They're usually woven in 8/2 cotton, which is readily available and comes in a wide range of colours. And tea towels are good for gifting.

I was having this exact conversation with a new member at Canberra Spinners and Weavers last week. I said if you gifted someone a woven tea towel and they said they didn't need it you could could look disparagingly at them. He went one step further, and suggested you could ask to view the gift recipient's existing tea towel collection and then select one of them to set on fire, thus precipitating the need for a new tea towel.

Welcome Tim, I think you'll fit right in.

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

So cool to see the loom process!