Friday, February 28, 2014

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

My pinwheel towels

Eight shaft pinwheel weave on a rigid heddle loom seems to be a very popular Pin among Pinterest weaving fellow enthusiasts, so, after some waiting period I also decided to give it a try, using 12" read and 3/2 cotton.

I am following instructions from this post, although I added a two-thread border at the beginning and the end. It seemed like a good idea, but in practice turned out to be useless and time consuming. I am thinking about getting rid of those extra threads after I am done with the first towel.

I was very excited about this design and right after warping decided to weave two first segments (8+8 picks) in order to see my beautiful pinwheels. However, I was bewildered when my result did not looked like the samples from the post. Although i was following the instructions step-by-step my pinwheels were not pinwheelly enough (no photo of the desaster). Soon I realized what the problem was. I forgot about a rigid heddle loom main feature - holes and slots!

The instructions were written for the project where the first right thread is threaded into a hole, mine was in the slot. So, instead of heddle DOWN in the 4th row and heddle UP in the 5th, I need to do reverse, first UP than DOWN.

After unhappy unpicking of 16 rows I repeated the correct order and voila... pinwheels were perfect! Almost perfect, I would say, I still trying to balance my beat. Seems a hard thing to do but the result is very satisfying.

I like picking up, I like weaving, I like every moment and try not to be in harry to enjoy the process. The result may not be posted soon.







And as of now...


Thursday, February 13, 2014

Another blue rug and more

I've done with the younger brother to my Blue rug.
This time I used black thick sewing thread for warp instead of twine.
I like the result better as the fabric is softer than in the first one.
I used two threads in both holes and slots which allowed me to skip threading-the-holes-in-the-heddle stage. Less time and less back pain.






It turned out that I ran out of the weft yarn too early and was left with a lot of warp, which could not be wasted but should have been put to a good use.
A ball of Lily's Sugar'n Cream Stripe came in very handy.
As I warped my 25" loom from the very beginning to the end, I decided to weave two towels simultaneously dividing the warp threads somewhere in the middle.
Note to myself: Need to buy another boat shuttle, may make weaving two things at a time easier.
The result of the experiment is below.