Weaving wedding gifts

I’m weaving kitchen towels for wedding gifts. Warp is linen, weft is cotton. I’m including a small amount of handspun, locally grown linen. It’s from flax that was part of the Rustbelt Fibershed’s first flax crop in their Cleveland Linen Project. I was lucky to be able to help plant and harvest that first crop, and process and spin a little bit of it, too.

The first picture below shows some of the commercial warp on the warping board. The last two pictures show some of the warp on the warping board that includes my own handspun from the Cleveland Linen Project. I had just over 200 yards and so with 7 yard warp I was able to wind 31 ends into the warp. So in the last two photos, the first 31 ends are my linen yarn. The rest is the commercial linen yarn. The commercial yarn is a bit smoother.

I’m using the pattern found in Handwoven Magazine’s most recent edition. It’s called Bespoke Wedding Towels. Bespoke because each towel will have the wedding date coded into it with patterned stripes.

 

My yard is wild

 My yard is wild. No, really. Through combination of scattering native wildflower seeds in certain spots and neglect, my yard has gone wild. I’m embarrassed what the neighbors might think. The lawn is mostly weeds with a smattering of grass. I’m pretty sure the weeds are all natives, or at least naturalized like dandelions. Things like ground ivy, self heal and clover run rampant. It really does all look a mess, but this morning when I opened my front door I startled some goldfinches who were snacking on seeds from some of my flowers, and a yellow tiger swallowtail butterfly was supping on a coneflower while the little golden birds flitted here and there. Every time I walk out my door I am surrounded by the hum of bumble bees. Droves and droves of them. There are always hummingbird moths flitting among the bee balm along with the bees, and occasionally a real hummingbird will fly by. There are so many other interesting things to see that I often want to just wander amongst the flowers and loose myself, but I watch my toddler granddaughter during the day so losing myself is never an option.

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.

Weaving with Handspun Singles

I have been wanting to weave with handspun singles yarn, so I spun up a bunch of woolen-spun singles wool yarn for both the warp and the weft. I usually warp my loom from front to back, but since I was using singles I warped from back to front -something new for me. I also sized all my yarn with gelatin.

The wool is from a few different breeds, all natural colors. I also have been wanting to weave this large advancing twill diamond pattern for a long time. 

I’m about 1/3 of the way through my warp and I am on the last of my weft yarn. I will either have to spin up some more or switch to other handspun yarn I have. I’d really like to keep it as singles, though, and all my other yarn is two-ply.

I will add more to this post later.

 

A Handwoven Jacket for my Granddaughter

I am very happy with the way this little jacket turned out. I made it for my granddaughter with a small bit of material I wove with a bit of extra warp still on the loom after having finished weaving throw blanket. I had woven the blanket in double weave so that off the loom it would open out to double the width and continued in double weave for this little bit of fabric. After fulling I had roughly a 12” x 54” piece of fabric.

I had to do some creative piecing to get the fabric to fit into the pattern, but it all worked out really well. I had JUST enough to create the front of the jacket. I am really proud of how it turned out and it’s such a cute little fall jacket on my little granddaughter.

The fiber was all hand dyed by other artisans and then handspun and handwoven by me. The content of the yarns is wool, silk, yak, linen, and I used a bit of cotton weft in the fabric for the jacket, but not in the original blanket.