What I Learned from Eenie Greenie

My eenie greenie warp (You’re a hoot, Jane!) was intented to help me make some decisions about a project I planned back in late spring: cottolin-warp baby blankets in a Summer and Winter adaptation of the draft “Four Locked Hearts of America” from A Handweaver’s Source Book.  The Source Book is a fantastic volume of old coverlet patterns edited by Marguerite Porter Davison, presented as profile drafts.

Then I developed a back problem which seemed to be related to treadling.  The blanket project stayed on hold while I wove scarves on my rigid heddle loom.  Finally, I coaxed myself back to the Bergman with the argument that the real purpose of the eenie greenie sample warp was to see if my back problem was definitely related to treadling.  If I moved the tabby treadles to the other leg (treadles 7 and 8, the easiest), set myself up carefully, took lots of stretching breaks, and limited how much I wove in a day, would my back flare up again?

The answer was yes.  Two weeks and a chiropractic appointment after cutting Eenie Greenie of the loom, My SI joint is still giving me threatening jabs.  So that was informative.  Also sort of freeing.  I know what to expect, and I know it’s not because I’m doing anything wrong.  (Which makes sense since I’ve used the same set-up since I started weaving and had no problems until now.)   It turns out I’m just the middle-man in a rocky love affair.  “No hard feelings, I hope, Back.”  “That’s okay, Loom.  Stay beautiful!”  

This was my first time working from a profile draft, and my first time weaving summer and winter.  Leigh’s and Cally’s posts on summer and winter are wonderfully clear and to-the-point.  I reread them several times: I don’t have weaving software, and with overshot drafts the pattern repeats are so long I wasn’t about to attempt full draw downs on paper; I wanted to make sure I knew what I was doing.  In the same spirit I revisited the summer and winter sections in Mary Meigs Atwater’s Shuttlecraft Book of American Handweaving.

There are other advantages in the summer and winter weave.  It is possible to change the character of the pattern completely and without re-threading by changing a few knots of the tie-up and altering the treadling to correspond.  It is possible, too, to weave all the charming patterns of the old double-woven coverlets on a loom that is not too elaborate for amateur craftsmen.  All in all, this is one of the most delightful things known to American weaving.

Clearly a fan!  Mary Atwater’s notes on threading and tie-up were easier to follow when I combined them with the information and pictures in Leigh’s and Cally’s posts.  She makes a number of sensible remarks:

The weave is beautifully logical and is far easier to thread and weave than ordinary overshot work.

This was very true.  No threading mistakes.  Although…

A different texture results from throwing the A tabby between pairs, and it is necessary to watch carefully in order not to make a shift in the middle of a piece of work.  This has a very bad effect.

Once I had woven off the sample warp, I kept hearing the words, “This has a very bad effect,” echoing in a dry tone of voice.  The fiendish part is just how easy it is to make this mistake!  As you may guess from the difference between my first picture (face) and second picture (back), when you are weaving, it’s really hard to see that you’ve thrown the wrong tabby.  A pick of the incorrect tabby looked pretty much the same to me as a pick of the correct tabby on the face of the web.  Each of those glaring skips you see in the second picture came from throwing just one wrong tabby.

As to weft, Atwater advises,

As usually woven, four pattern-shots and four tabby-shots are thrown for each unit of the pattern.  It is therefore necessary to select warp and weft carefully so that the figures will be of good proportion–neither squatty nor too long drawn out.  The warp and pattern-weft should be of about the same grist and the tabby thread should be a great deal finer.

The one thing I don’t like about summer and winter is the muddied look it can get when the tabby weft is too visible.   For the baby bankets I knew I would want a pretty thick weft, which meant I would use the “brick” treadling as opposed to pairs (x’s or o’s) and thus avoid “long drawn out” figures.  The brick treadling tends to hide the tabby pretty well.  I wasn’t worried there.  But since I was also using the samples as a way to look ahead to some summer and winter towels treadled in pairs, I was eager to see if Atwater’s ratios would be the key to sharpening contrast.

I found that the weft weights and their light/dark values made such a big difference to the overall strength and crispness of the pattern, I ended up trying all kinds of combinations.  A medium-value tabby seems to do really interesting things (medium between the warp and the pattern weft).  My favorite combination for towels was a tabby of very old light bottle green Lily perle cotton (1930’s or 40’s–they call it #20, but it is finer than a 20/2) which had about 2/3 the “grist” of the 22/2 cottolin; with a 16/2 blue Bockens line linen for pattern weft.  It’s the fourth from the top.

Most of the other samples were a little loose at 15 epi, but this one was good–light and flexible.  My favorite baby blanket pairing was also good at 15 epi: cottolin tabby with a 8-ply Finnish 50% cotton, 50% linen knitting yarn for the pattern weft.  Before washing it has somewhat the texture of a soft string.  After a hot water machine wash it makes marvelous cloth!  I’m not likely to find any more of that particular yarn on ebay, but I’ve seen similar stuff in a knitting shop, and I do have enough for one blanket.  In the picture, it’s the pale strip in the middle of the green samples at the bottom.

The darker green pattern weft there is cottolin, doubled and single, combined with various tabbies.  Using a brick treadling (o’s deflect the doubled threads and make the pattern too spotty), the doubled cottolin could also make nice towels with a cotton or linen tabby weft somewhat finer than the warp–this is what you’re seeing directly above the pale baby-blanket strip.  I’d set them at 16-18 epi.

Some other things I learned:

The border I planned needs one more unit and a couple of extra repeats to look right.

5/2 mercerized cotton (the aqua, from Goodwill), ick!  Pebbly and coarse and distracting in this context.  Not a useful cloth.

With a fine cotton tabby, plain old Lily Sugar and Cream knitting yarn makes a surprisingly nice fabric, though I’m not sure how it would hold up to the repeated hot-water washings a baby blanket wants.  This combination would also be a nice weight for place mats if it wears well enough.  (Top in photo.)

Fluffy Borgs 2/2 cotton (intense violet second from top) is not a good choice for a summer and winter, at least not with the cottolin.  It is very soft, but the linty halo worsens summer and winter’s tendency to look muddy.

The dark green sample (third from the top) is Poppana, a bias-cut cotton tape that fuzzes up like chenille when you wash it.  This stuff fascinates me.  I had visions of little summer and winter Poppana bath mats when I bought it last spring, but as I feared, I can’t really use a poppana shuttle with the Bergman.  A) I could barely squeeze it between the top and bottom of the shed and B) I had to weave with my fell WAY further from the beater than works well on my loom.  I could feel the beater bearing down on it from from the top, instead of hitting it squarely.  This might not have mattered with a different weft, but I really needed to be able to hammer at that Poppana to pack it in, and I couldn’t!  Poppana comes in disks, making it easy to handle; it would be a waste to wind it from the disks onto a rag shuttle or quills.  I’m not sure what I’m going to do about that.  Any thoughts?

I suppose the Poppana question is moot if weaving on my Bergman is going to keep hurting my back.  I found a forum where someone who had owned many looms remarked that her Bergman loom was much heavier to treadle than other countermarches.  This doesn’t surprise me: the stubby lamms, short castle, front-hinged treadles, and all that nice, dense Douglas fir are the culprits; it’s designed for sturdiness and precision rather than mechanical efficiency.

The eenie greenie warp confirms my treadling fears, and what do I do?  I immediately wind an 8-yard rayon warp for pillow tops and a couple of stoles in “Four Locked Hearts.”  It’s pre-sleyed and ready to beam on now.  Apparently I am in denial.

There’s a Cat In My House!

 

Earlier this week I quickly warped up my rigid heddle loom for one last scarf.  The days have been dark, so I wasn’t able to get good pictures before I put it in the mail; it is a Christmas present for my father’s mother, the grandma who compulsively throws valuable things away.

It gave me a little lurch to send it to her because I don’t like to think of it in the trash.

However, the real gift is the experience of opening it up, stroking it, and most importantly wearing it to lunch a few times and getting to brag on it.

Scarf: Gelassenheit

Plainweave on rigid heddle loom

Warp: partial (3/4?) skein of Manos del Uruguay handspun 70% merino wool/ 30% silk singles

Weft: quite old Oregon Worsted wool yarn, Maypole “Nehalem” a fine 3 ply in olive–nice stuff, I wish it were still being made!

Heddle: 9-and-a-bit epi

Picks per inch: 5 3/4

Ends: 52

Woven length (excluding fringe): 49 3/4″

Woven width: 5 1/4″

Finished length (excluding fringe): 41″

Finished width: 4 1/4″

Finishing: Warm hand wash, plenty of agitation, 7 minute soak, dry flat, light iron with press cloths.

Fringe: Hemstitched then plied.

Conclusions:  Manos del Uruguay wool/silk is an ideal warp yarn for this heddle size.  The strong silk keeps it from overstretching during weaving.  At this ppi it has room to get soft, a little curly, and to bury scratchier warp yarn when fulled, without making the cloth inflexible.

For kicks, I was able to calculate my rigid heddle scarf-making hourly wage.  If this scarf sold for the maximum (too much really) it could command in the crafts marketplace? $2.91 an hour.  Then I realized I had forgotten to include the cost of materials.  Or self-employment tax.  Let’s just call it good at 50 cents.

Did I say something about a cat?  Oh, yes…

Yesterday my half-sister stopped by our house after 13 hours en route to my parents’.  She and her grad student husband had been in the car with their 2-month-old baby, their two-year-old daughter, and their adolescent cat since 3 o’ clock in the morning!

“You’ll get to meet Robert!” (the cat), my sister said on the phone, and I had pictured meeting a miserable creature through the bars of a pet carrier.  If they let him out he would only make a bee-line for some inaccessible cranny or streak out the front door and never be seen again.  This is exactly how the cats we grew up with would have behaved.

There was no pet carrier!  Robert rides loose in the car.  “Is it all right if the he comes inside?”  Everyone piled out of the mini-van and into the house without bothering about the open doors.  I asked my brother-in-law whether the cat wouldn’t run away and he said, “Oh, he’s easy to catch.”  Robert and little E started roaming the house.  Robert’s litter box and food and water dishes came in with the diaper bag.

Distracted by the miniature human, at first I didn’t pay much attention to the toddler and the cat.  I guessed they would calm down when they had seen everything.  The toddler did, but not the cat.  Imagine a cross between a grey Maine coon cat and a ferret, with ENORMOUS green headlamp eyes.  Robert dusted the whole house for me, which is to say he covered every patch of floor under every piece of furniture in the first 10 minutes.

Der Mann’s cat allergy is only the hay-fever-like kind, so I wasn’t too worried.  I didn’t think a cat could leave much of himself around our apartment on such a short visit.  Cats just look around and lie down, right?  When I realized my mistake and decided to shut the bedroom door, Robert decided that he needed to explore the bedroom for the twelfth time.  I blocked him with my foot and a big, scary “no.”

He jumped over my foot.  At least our neighbor’s cat Dobo had the grace to look guilty when she was caught, and to argue about her sentence; Robert has the temperament of a commando rather than a petty criminal.  “Verbal commands, feet–pfft!  Shoot first, ask questions later.”  My sister had to haul him out by the scruff of his neck.  The naughtiness only escalated after that.  Robert tried to get back into the bedroom the moment his scolding was over and his neck was released.  Failing that, he stretched himself out in front of the bedroom door like a guardian lion, tail flicking, waiting for it to open again.  He was similarly attracted to the cupboard under the kitchen sink, which does not latch.

Robert scratched the chair, jumped up on the side table, paced and eyed the countertops with feverish intensity; each time it looked like he was finally going to settle down, he switched mischiefs.  It was almost as if he were “acting out,” because he has been trained never to do these things at home.  Can cats act out?  His constant snaky, sneaky monitoring of his surroundings made him look like he was always on the verge of doing something bad. “Scratch?  No, no, not here.  Keep it cool.  Keep them guessing.  Eat a little.  Sit down for a minute.  Play with the string.  Yeah that looks good.”

I jumped up when I spotted him in a pre-scratching crouch inside my loom.  By then my sister and her husband wanted to put him back in the car.  I told them it was okay because really, our place is so small that there was nothing he could do without us catching him at it immediately, and he was mesmerizing, in a way.  I love watching cats.  Even naughty ones.

While we were discussing the question whether Robert could stay inside he started clawing the curtains, so out he went.  My toddler niece cried a little in sympathy.

She was good as gold.  The toy box with the My Little Pony Pretty Parlor is always a hit.  The baby, while much less entertaining than the cat, was much easier to hold and much sweeter-tempered.  The baby has headlamp eyes too, but no fur–you can’t have everything.

We fed them all Mexican take-out.  When they were back on the road der Mann laughed and said, “They’re such a unit!  And they’re all so cool!  E is even a cool toddler!”  He was trying to express something we both found really funny, which is they just sort of function together.  After 13 hours in the car!  Nobody was crabby, nobody was tyrannical or placatory.  Things got done without a fuss.  Diapers got changed, E got to tie a jump rope around her dad’s neck and pretend he was a sheep, the baby got fed, cat litter got swept up . . . and then back into the gypsy wagon; cat, kids, and all.

Three Sisters

Here are the rigid heddle scarves I have been working on over the past few months while I give my treadles a rest.  They are made (mostly) from the odds and ends of  knitting wool in my departed Great Granny’s stash.  It was interesting to work with so many strictures: limited quantities of yarn (well, that’s normal; I’m an eeker-outer), two shafts, only one possible sett, peculiar colors.

You may remember my mission.  These scarves are for my mom and my aunts, so the fact that the yarn was my Great Granny’s is pretty much the whole point.  Posthumous granny-gifts.

 

Auntie Perfectionist, the Master Gardener

My granny thought this yarn had some wool in it.  I’m not so sure after a burn test.  However, Auntie Perfectionist isn’t particularly attached to natural fibers and I know she likes the colors.  I think the yarn was probably left over from something Great Granny knitted for her.  Taking into consideration the fact that Auntie P doesn’t like to wear anything around her neck, a skinny wear-loose-under-the-lapel-of-her-coat scarf seemed like a plan.  The weft is a non-shrinking green sock wool.

To prepare the warp I pulled each individual warp yarn out of the skein and cut it off after one complete color cycle.  This makes the ikat-like striping effect.

 

Auntie Aesthete, the graphic designer

You know how you can pick out a Frenchwoman or a stylish Japanese just from the not-from-around-here aura of their clothes?  Auntie Aesthete looks like that, and she dresses from yard sales and consignment stores.  She has An Eye.  All kinds of interesting mustards and rusts look fabulous on her.  She wears colors I would enjoy wearing if they didn’t make me look like a radish.

So, it was fun working with the rust and blue, but the check pattern was extremely fiddly to weave without a floating selvedge.  I twined the shuttles and carried the cream and rust threads along the edge, but I didn’t think it would look right to have the blue traveling too, so I cut it off after each blue stripe.  Not an ideal project for a rigid heddle loom without blocks.  The colors are clearer in person.

 

Mom, the ingenue

My photo does not convey the violent color scheme of this 1950’s self-striping wool.  There was a lot of it, so I think it was even too loud for Great Granny!

I don’t have a handle on my mom’s taste except that it is inclusive.  I remember trying to explain to her as a kid “what was wrong” with things like: a giant impressionistic foral print in khaki, banana yellow, black, kelly green and lipstick red; electric op-art Madras plaids; chinz slipcover lookalikes–in fact most any of the splotchy fabrics she brought home from the 99 cent table at Hancocks.  There was a conversation that went something like, “But don’t you like flowers?”  “I like flowers, just not if they’re too big.”  “This is too big?” “Yes, the blossoms have to be smaller than a quarter.”  Mom recently said that she is glad we are finally on the verge of getting back to the pretty colors and “nice comfy” oversized styles of the eighties.

I wasn’t worried about the Granny yarn being too bright for her, but I did wonder how I was going to put those disparate colors side by side without turning them to mud.

This threading works well for 9-and-a-bit dpi of my heddle:  The multicolored fat knitting yarn goes in the slots, pink baby yarn goes in holes–except when it goes in a slot to replace an end of fat yarn.  Breaking the fat yarn up with the baby yarn makes the fat yarn stripes stand out more crisply, since the ends of fat yarn always rise to the surface of the cloth at the same time.  The extra-fine springy wool weft is beaten at roughly 8 picks per inch.  This picture will probably make more sense than the explanation:

The pale pink stripes in the warp and the interaction with the hot pink weft really transformed the gaudy old knitting wool.  The finished scarf has all the same colors as Great Granny’s favorite pantsuits: mint, fushia, reddish purple, lavender.  I can almost smell the Coty face powder.

Fences Fall Down

This is the second scarf from the navy merino warp.  I was going to name it something like “Subtle” or “Manly” and give it to my cousin–until I started weaving it.  Then I realized the purple cloth I was making would look really bad on my cousin, who is a tawny redhead.  There is no man so manly that he must wear an unbecoming scarf, says I.

Adding stripes in the ground started out as a yarn-saving scheme, but I love planning stripes.  I really got into it.  And I was fascinated by the way the burgundy ground-weft made a misch masch with the navy warp up close, and yet when I backed away, they interacted to make exactly the same purple as the pattern weft.  I kept getting up and standing back from my loom in different lights just to re-amaze myself with this trick.

Scarf: Fences Fall Down

Warp: 28/2 Silk City merino, doubled, in navy blue

Ground weft: same in navy blue and burgundy, not doubled

Pattern Weft: one complete skein Cascade Yarns “Cascade 220″ worsted-weight knitting yarn in a heathery purple, courtesy yardsaling relative

Sett: 11 doubled epi in 8 dent reed

ppi: 23

Width in reed: 14 1/8″

Woven width: 12 3/4″

Woven length excluding fringe: 62 5/8

Finished width: 11 1/2″

Finished length excluding fringe: 59 1/2″

Fringes: 2 1/4 on loom, tied when off loom with guided half hitches.

 

I took the photo nearly a month ago, before the monsoons arrived.  There are no more skies like this.  My hollyhocks have finally bowed their heads in defeat.  (Actually I love grey skies so I can’t complain.  Except, um, about the torrents.)  I got the hollyhock starts from my mom’s place last fall because I wanted to plant something hardy along the collapsing backyard fence.  Hollyhocks will survive fence demolition and being trampled on by fence builders.  Also, if the fence is torn out and never replaced, the flowers will make their own little hedge for the enjoyment and privacy of future tenants.

Which brings me to the name of my scarf.  Our landlord is a self-conscious eccentric, and frankly (in ways unrelated to his eccentricity) rather frightening.  Duplex-neighbor Thistledown told me this story:  None of the other fences on the property are in much better shape than the one in the back, which is only standing because a metal T-post has been driven into the ground to hold it up.  One day, when Thistledown was working outside, the man who owns the apartment complex next door called her over.  He wanted to know when our landlord was going to fix the fence on the property line.  Thistledown passed this on to our raw-vegan-musician-nudist landlord the next time she spoke to him on the phone.  He paused a beat, and pronounced:

“Fences fall down.”

Oh, the blissfully inescapable logic!

Thistledown just moved.  Our landlord kicked her out of the duplex.  The way he did this was messy, somewhat shifty, and horrible timing for Thistledown–a single working mom who has just gone back to college.  He wanted to live in her unit.  And now there he is, with his new girlfriend.  And now here am I, wondering how the fence will fall.

I only play at naming, but this time I find I am a little more serious.  At first I felt the name had tainted my scarf with landlord-ick.  Then, gradually, I began to feel it had turned into a charm.  I could do worse than borrow some of my landlord’s blissful logic, in the face of his inescapable self.

If I were a sorceress I would give it to him and see what kind of magic it worked.  I am afraid it would not be the nice kind.

Road Rage in the Barbie SUV

 

My great granny, born in “ought-three,” was a skilled knitter who kept the whole (large) family in Granny Gloves, mittens, and hats–she liked to use the same few patterns over and over; the gloves were particularly nice.  Everyone loved getting them for birthdays.  The familiar squishy bundle always came tied up in beautiful (not re-used!) wrapping paper by yards of curly ribbon, with a greeting card and a roll of lifesavers taped on top.  She didn’t have the patience for sweaters and things when I knew her, though she did once; I remember being sent out to play in the red wool snow suit she’d made for my mom as a tot, circa 1957.  It takes a lot of knitting to make wool soakers (quiz: does anyone else know what these were?) and snow suits for all your grandchildren.

Unfortunately Great Granny thought acrylic yarn was the greatest invention since whipped topping, whipped topping was the greatest invention since instant coffee, and instant coffee was the greatest invention since sliced bread.  (Actually, she often baked her own bread.  She had a miniature loaf pan, and an early memory is the wonder of visiting her house when she had just been baking and being given my OWN loaf of bread to take home, wrapped up in a bread bag.  Her bread tasted like nothing else.  It’s purpose in life was buttered toast, to be eaten by visitors with ancient green tea in her cozy aqua kitchen.  Great Gran made dense white loaves with a “good crumb” that slightly resembled what they used to sell at grocery store bakeries as English Muffin Bread, before they started adding more dough conditioners and sugar to it.  Sigh.)

You get the picture: all that skill went into mittens that pilled horribly, were cold when wet, and could not survive washing without returning to the piles of matted plastic filament from whence they sprang.  My great granny died while I was in my last year of college, so I was spared seeing her decline.  Also, since I’m six years older than my half-siblings, I have more memories of her when she was energetic enough to bake bread.  She knitted to the end.  She started a new pair of Granny Gloves just before she died.

Her stash had a lot of acrylic yarn but only a few odds and ends of wool, mostly from the first half of the 20th century.  Granny separated out the wool when she cleared Great Granny’s house: there was a little tapestry yarn, a couple of full skeins of sport weight, and maybe a dozen partial skeins of other stuff.  She gave it to me when I got my loom.  Most of it is not very pretty, and not enough to dress my countermarche, but I’d really like to use it.  It’s one of the things I had in mind when I bought the Spear’s.

So, here is my first finished rigid heddle project.  I’m not a fan of pink.  On the loom, I kept noticing that it looked like tire tracks with skid marks:

That is why I call this scarf. . .

 

Road Rage in the Barbie SUV

 

Warp:  98 ends combined of a) anonymous eraser pink wool baby yarn and b) subtly variegated periwinkle synthetic-and-mohair blend I picked out and asked Great Granny to knit into an a ice-cream-cone hat (it’s the cowlick hat seen in the first section of Stitchy McYarnpants’ book; a Gr. Granny standard) when I was about 11.  This is a slippery, INCREDIBLY hairy yarn that I now realize must have tortured her.  The hat was too big because she wasn’t used to knitting anything but acrylic, and wasn’t able adjust the pattern properly for the yarn.  I don’t have the hat anymore.  It itched my ears.  I didn’t realize how much sacrificial love went into it.

Weft: eraser pink baby yarn.

Heddle: 9-10 epi

Weaving Width: 9 3/4″

Finished Width: 8 1/2″

Weaving Length (excluding fringes): 45″

Finished Length (excuding fringes): 43″

Finishing: Hot hand wash with lots of agitation and 10 minute soak.  Air dry.  Brushed the mohair stripes a little.

Fringe:  3″  Four strand round braids secured with guided half-hitches.

Mistakes:  Many, but weave is too open to bother with repairs.  They’d show more than the mistakes do.

Conclusions:  I should put tiered blocks on this loom.  Holding the heddle in the up position at arm’s length puts too much stress on my neck.  When, as here, a heddle has wires with eyelets instead of slats you can use thicker yarns for the heddle size, which is nice; but the wires easily become bent which causes visible tracking(?) in the cloth.  The weaving goes quickly (well it would; I went from weaving 23 ppi to weaving 6 ppi!), but it’s hard to notice your mistakes because you weave at pretty low tension and the widely spaced warp threads confuse your eyes.  Weaving on a floor loom is a lot easier and produces more consistent cloth.  Even so, the ease of slapping a warp on the Spear’s and being able to use up all those nasty little bits of yarn make rigid heddle weaving quite compelling to an impressionable child-of-a-child-of-a-Depression-era-child like me.  I even considered saving the 4 inch thrums of 70-year-old yarn for a minute.  Shame!  Shame!

Wisconsin Cousin

 

Okay, the navy merino scarf warp!   I’m going to show you a scarf per post, in the reverse of the order I wove them.  

This one was for my cousin who just moved to Wisconsin for school.  I know he likes scarves because he wrote a song with a scarf in it, and a scarf was part of his costume when he had a band.  It was such a pleasure making something I knew would be used, for someone whose taste I admire.

Scarf: Wisconsin Cousin

Warp: 28/2 Silk City merino, doubled

Ground weft: same, not doubled

Pattern Weft: Manos del Uruguay 70% merino 30% silk handspun single

Sett: 11 doubled epi in 8 dent reed

ppi: 23

Width in reed: 14 1/8″

Weaving width: 13″

Finished width: I can’t find my note!

Finished length not counting fringe: 55

Fringes: 2 1/4 on loom, tied when off loom with guided half hitches, or “gathering knots”

I call this pattern “Reinventing The Wheel.”  I wanted to weave the biggest overshot zig-zags possible on 8 shafts, with skips of no more than 6 threads (turned out to be 7), but I couldn’t find anything in a book.  So, I graphed out possible pattern picks for different point twill threadings, cut the graph paper in strips, and started rearranging the strips until I came up with something that satisfied me.  It was very slow.

Overshot was the structure that dealt best with a bunch of mutually exclusive aims I had for this project.  I’d bought some expensive Noro Kureyon at a knitting store because I loved the colorway.  (Now I know better than to walk into a knitting store thinking “I’ll just have a look around.”!) I wanted use this reproachful yarn as soon as I could, and I wanted Silk City 28/2 merino for the warp.  I also wanted the lightest, drapiest fabric possible, yet not gauzy.  And I wanted to have as much uninterrupted Noro as possible showing on both faces of the cloth, but I didn’t want a weft-dominant fabric.

Part of my solution was to double the warp in the heddles, which I’ve heard adds a bit of warp-dominant-like flexibility to a scarf or shawl.  I also sampled the tabby weft to get a balance between not too much bulky Noro, and not too much tabby breaking it up.  I tried single and doubled tabby; 1, 2, and 3 picks between each pattern pick.  I ended up using two piks of a single strand tabby between each pattern pick, for a total of about 23 ppi on this particular scarf.  The Manos del Uruguay is thinner than the Noro.

Unfinished cloth:

After cold hand wash:

The Manos del Uruguay still makes me cringe, considering the whole project was designed to expiate a yarn store sin.  When I came to start the last scarf I didn’t have anything left in my stash that would work for pattern weft, so back to the store I went!  Two skeins of Manos cost me $27.50 with tax.  Knitting stores make you crazy.  There’s 2/3 of a skein left, and it’s very nice yarn . . . but I wasn’t totally pleased with colors.  The navy really cooled all those warm blues and browns and golds I’d admired in the skein.

My cousin likes it, though.  He said–surprised–that it was just the sort of thing he would actually seek out to wear.  High praise!

Huge and Obscenely Simple

 

Before this, my last project was the “mock Welsh tapestry” I designed in doubleweave for a class.  When I cut it off the loom I swore the next thing I wove would be huge and obscenely simple.  I didn’t quite achieve huge, but I think I’ve got obscenely simple in the bag.

I got bored!  I didn’t think I could get bored weaving!

You’re looking at an 80” x 14 1/2” runner in 4/4 twill.  It isn’t intended for the table shown here, but for a much bigger rectangular table that has been living in the car port since we moved.

The threading switches directions in the center with a herringbone skip.  I also reversed the treadling at the half-way mark, so you get this sort of thing going on with the twill lines in the middle: ><

I planned the project around the weft yarn.  When I first discovered eBay yarn I trawled for bargains by fiber.  This is a cotton/rayon knitting yarn.  My reasoning at the time:  It’s probably got That Blue I Like That You Never See (somewhere between cyan and cadet blue), it’s cheap, there’s a lot of it, and cool!, it’s Italian.

Unfortunately the seller’s pictures didn’t show me that this is a chained (more like knitted?) yarn–the kind that wants to unchain really badly.  I decided I to go ahead and use it because I liked the colors.  Every three quills, I cut my loose ends down to the web and applied a tiny drip of fray check to keep them from unraveling.  Dried fray check has a nasty texture, but is fairly easy to control.  Which is to say, I can feel where the ends are if I run my hands over the thing, but it’s not as if there are stiff places in the cloth.

(I’ve since gotten over eBay yarn.  Yarn hunting that way is really time consuming–and cut-throat!–but it taught me a lot about what exists.  Old yarns they don’t make any more.  Scandinavian yarn.  Japanese yarn.  Fine threads.  Mill ends!  It was also a course in brands.  Sellers would proudly advertise their “Silk City” this or that–or some other distributor–I’d be puzzled, and then I would set out on the internet to discover why it was worth mentioning.)

As for the fringe . . . I don’t care for fringe on household linens, but the sett here was too wide (15 epi) for a nicely hemable header, so I tried some 4-strand flat braids instead.  Yeah, not too attractive with those wavy ends.

At least it shows off my good china.  I bought this mid-century German porcelain for myself when I was 17 and anticipating a life of refined-yet-Bohemian spinsterhood.  (My husband and I had a secret wedding, so no wedding china.)  I’m still not tired of it, possibly because it has been in a box in the closet since then, waiting patiently for the day when we are grown up, and have elegant friends, and throw formal dinner parties for them in the car port.

Um.  Still waiting.