Project: Rigid Heddle Two Tone Waffle Weave Towels

When I started weaving last fall I ordered a bunch of tea towel kits from various suppliers including a 6-month subscription to the "tea towel of the month" club offered by Cotton Clouds, an Arizona-based seller of fibres (especially natural fibres like cotton). 

The first kit that arrived from my Cotton Clouds subscription was a fun kit for waffle weave towels that was perfect for a novice like me.  It was a little daunting because it required me to sley my reed with 2 ends in each hole and slot (rather than the usual single end per hole or slot), and it required weaving with doubled threads on each pick rather than single threads, which was a first for me. 

The waffle pattern itself was quite easy, however, and perfect for someone like me who was just starting out.  The pattern used a single pick-up stick over a series of 5 rows, repeated along the entire 34" woven length of the each towel.

I ordered a kit with enough material for 4 towels and by setting up a 5-yard warp I had just enough warp to complete the towels with only minimal loom waste.  The kit calls for Aurora Earth 8/2 unmercerized cotton in three different shades - - in this case, natural, navy blue and copen, with the navy blue used as stripes of the warp and as the weft. 

It was my first time working with 8/2 unmercerized cotton, or with a yarn so fine in general (31 wraps/inch), and I found it was easier to work with than I expected - - I had initially thought it would be tangle-city, but it actually tangled less than anticipated. 

However because each towel required 3" of hem in tabby weave (1.5" on each end) and 34" of waffle weave, the fine yarn took me longer than usual to weave the entire project - - just over two weeks.  With my more robust Peruvian cotton towels it takes no more than a weekend to weave 4 towels, so the fine yarn does have its challenges.  Namely, that it challenged my patience.

As with all projects, I learned a lot as I went along, and the last couple of towels were much faster to weave up than the first towel by a long shot.   This was in part because I no longer had to look up the pattern with every pick, I simply kept track of which pattern row I was working with a handy counter.

Overall my tension was fine for the project even with the 5-yard warp, and I didn't have any issues with broken warp threads.  I saw after finishing that I had incorporated a few of my trademark* errors into a couple of the towels, in this case a couple of unintentional weft floats, but I think this just adds to the character of the finished pieces. 

The unmercerized cotton is quite stiff coming off the loom, and it really helps the pattern to pop.  After washing the fabric softened right up and developed a wonderful soft texture, much more so than I expected. 

I have to confess that finishing these towels pushed me all the way out of my comfort zone because not only were these not hemstitched on the loom, I was going to have to machine stitch a hem on each end, something I had never done before.  I had last worked at a sewing machine in my senior public school home economics class, and I can assure you that I remembered almost nothing from those days.  Except that I had sewed my teacher's skirt to my sewing bag, a memory I wish I could forget. 

Up to last month I did not even have a sewing machine (because I did not sew, natch), but I could see that sewing hems was going to come up sooner rather than later the more I wove.  As it happens a dear family friend was no longer using one of her sewing machines and she was kind enough to lend the machine to me, while the Nerd's mother (a ridiculously accomplished sewer and ninja-level quilter) gave me a crash-course on sewing hems.  Thus armed I was only "completely terrified" to tackle hemming these towels rather than "incoherently gibbering" which is what I suspect would have happened otherwise.

All in all, though, the finished hems didn't look too terribly bad - - not perfect by any means, but nice looking and functional in that they were, in fact, hems (rather than loose and uneven with dangly bits hanging out all over).

As for the finished products, the kit claimed that the finished towels would measure 17" x 28" after washing and hemming.  My towels each ended up being around 17.5" x 27.5", which is close enough for my purposes - - all the (minor) variation in length came from variation in my hems between the individual towels.  I was frankly happy to see how much the towels shrunk up in length after washing and drying because the 37" total length was a little huge looking when I initially separated the finished work into the individual towels. 

The photos below show the detail of the two sides of the waffle weave, front and back.  Both sides are interesting and nice to look at, which is a plus. 

The Nerd and I have already claimed one of the towels for our own kitchen.  It seems to be fitting in well. 

* Not an actual trademark, just a figure of speech, pace, all you trademark lawyers out there. 

Project: Tasselled Shawl

The Nerd's mother is, alas, completely allergic to wool (a fact I discovered after knitting an entrelac shawl in silk, lamb wool and merino).  This is actually not that inconvenient because acrylics and cottons are generally: i) cheaper than the fancier wools I typically use; and ii) available in colours that the Nerd's mom likes.

Case in point with the current yarn.  Whilst shopping with the Nerd's mom last fall she cooed over some chunky variegated yarn in colours shifting from seafoam green to teal blue to purple - - basically all of her favourite colours.  I opportunistically picked up a few balls of this chunky wool, and fortunately remembered to look for some appropriate yarn to use as a complementary warp (although in hindsight, not enough, sadly).

The result: Red Heart "Soft" 100% acrylic yarn in a seafoam green (the colour doesn't show up well in the photo due to the poor lighting) as my warp yarn, combined with the Lion Brand Homespun Thick & Quick yarn (88% acrylic and 12% polyester) for the weft.  No living animals were harmed or even made the tiniest bit chilly in the making of this shawl (!).

Given the heft of this yarn I opted to work with my 8-dent heddle.  I only had 2 balls of the Red Heart warp yarn, which was enough to warp across 156 ends at 100+ inches.  I was hoping to do something shawl-like, or at the very least, a really generous scarf. 

One thing I discovered very quickly was that the Lion Brand, while a great weft yarn, is terrible at holding up under pressure.  I initially tried working my hemstitch in the Lion Brand yarn but it literally shredded under the pressure of being pulled through the fabric within a few stitches.  Thankfully I had some remnant Red Heart yarn left over from my warp, which turned out to be just enough to do the hemstitching on both ends of the piece - - with centimeters to spare.  Whew!  The seafoam colour of the Red Heart actually worked perfectly with the colours of the Lion Brand weft yarn, and I am very happy with how the colours played out.

I have to tell you that this wool weaves up lickety split.  From start to finish this entire project took less than a single day.  God bless chunky yarns!

Because the Lion Heart weft yarn was so damn chunky, I had to forgo my usual boat shuttle in favour of the stick shuttle.  This actually worked pretty well, all things considered, but given the nature of the yarn and the fact that the colour changed along the length, I actually had to load my shuttle twice each time - - once to get the right amount of yarn on the shuttle, and then a second time to unwind the yarn from the first shuttle onto a second shuttle so that the beginning of the new shuttle was the same colour as the end of the working shuttle.

Otherwise, I quickly discovered that what may start out as purple when winding the shuttle shifted to teal and seafoam by the end of the shuttle - - without reversing the shuttle I would be going from my last pick of purple to a new pick of seafoam in the middle of a row, which would look terrible.  Since I didn't want any dramatic colour changes in the finished piece, I had to make sure that I was following the colours as they came off the ball. This is not to say that there are not still sharp colour changes, but I can honestly say that these all come from the yarn itself and how the colours are combined, not from my shuttle changes.  This posed additional problems when I was changing from one ball to another, but as it happens I finished on a purple area and after starting my next shuttle with seafoam at the beginning of the next ball, the yarn colour had shifted to purple by the end of the shuttle, so I was able to simply start from that point (without having to reverse the shuttles).

Because I only had 2 balls of my warp yarn, the piece was not as wide as I usually prefer, but it was much longer than I expected coming off the loom - - the thing was huge!  Fresh off the loom the thing could wrap around me multiple times.  This was very different from my pure wool shawls, which have much less stretch to them. 

Fortunately, washing and drying the piece on high heat shrunk it up, but it is still easily the longest piece I have done to date.  The finished work measures 17.25" x 79.5".  I am actually not too unhappy with the finished dimensions.

In the photo below you can really see the colour changes that happen with this yarn:

I used my tassel twister to clean up the fringe at the ends, which adds an interesting look to the finished shawl.

After washing the shawl is very soft to the touch, and it is certainly warm and cozy.  I hope the Nerd's mom likes it when I give it to her, likely for her birthday.  Or as a hostess gift the next time we go down to visit them.

Although I am still not a huge fan of unnatural fibers (I am such a snob!), I have to admit that the I like the colour, texture and feel of the finished work.  Perhaps I am being converted.