What I made with the fabric woven from handspun singles

 Here is what I made with the wool fabric I wove from handspun singles (both warp and weft). It’s more of a poncho than a serape. It is closed on the sides at the bottom 5 inches. It was almost a ruana, but I eventually went with what you see instead. I cut up the smaller bit of cloth that I wove on the extra bit of warp I had and added it to the bottom of the garment to get a little more length.

The only raw edge on the whole thing is the bottom front edge, all other edges are selvedges on the weaving and not hemmed. Instead of hemming the bottom of the garment, I hopefully will be tablet-weaving a band with which to decorate it. I probably won’t get to that until the summer.

It’s kind-of all higgledy piggledy and thrown together. I don’t really have the time or the energy for really precise things right now. Hopefully in the not too-distant future I will. It really was woven as an experiment and I made what I could that seemed easy enough with the fabric. 

Fabric woven with handspun singles after fulling

 In the last post I showed fabric woven with handspun singles (warp and weft) as it looked straight off the loom. Here it is after fulling. Take up and shrinkage was quite startling in the width. Un-fulled the fabric measured 120” x 25.5”. Fulled it measured 100” x 16”.

The smaller piece, which was woven in plain weave and with two-ply weft, had much less take up and shrinkage. Pre-fulling it measured 27” x 25.5”. Fulled it measured 21.5” x 21.75”. 

I don’t know if the dramatic difference in the longer piece is due to the twill pattern or the singles in both warp and weft, or a combination of the two, but it is dramatic, especially in the width.

I have so many questions running around my mind about long-ago weaving, the processing and the results. I read that in medieval times, singles were preferred for weaving. I wonder why. I thought weaving this cloth with singles would result in a light fabric, but I ended up with a thick, cushy fabric. In fact, the smaller piece woven with two-ply weft is much thinner and less cushy. I have more experimenting to do.

Cloth woven with handspun singles is off the loom

 The cloth I wove with handspun singles as the warp and the weft is off the loom! These picture show it fresh off the loom before any washing or fulling. I used gelatin sizing on the singles. I ran out of sized singles at one point (about halfway through the weaving) and scoured my handspun stash for any singles I had. I finished the weaving with un-sized singles. You can see where that happened in the weaving as there is a sudden draw-in of the fabric. Next in the process will be fulling, which will also wash the yarn. I expect some of the whites to brighten up a bit. It measures about 120 x 24 inches pre-fulling.

The smaller plain weave piece is what I wove after finishing the length that I wanted in the twill pattern. I still had a bit of weft so I wove the plain weave with some two-ply yarns I grabbed from my handspun stash. This piece measures about 27x 24 inches pre-fulling.