More braided twill

Since I had the Macomber treadles tied up for braided twill and my feet knew the treadling pattern after the baby blanket, I decided to prepare a warp for some braided twill scarves.

I chose an 8/2 black rayon for the warp, intending on weaving three different colors of weft.

First was a red purple 8/2 tencel from WEBS. (The color in the photo below is correct, not the one above on the loom.) Lovely sheen, great drape, nice color purple. But the purple and black don’t have enough contrast to show that braided twill pattern off clearly.

So for the second scarf I chose an 8/2 tencel azure, again from WEBS. I particularly like this one.

I’ve done some studies in black & white before, and thought it was time again, so I picked a 6/2 off-white bamboo.

I didn’t think the difference between 8/2 and 6/2 would be noticeable. Ditto the difference between rayon and bamboo.

In this particular case, I was wrong. You can’t really tell from the photos, but the black & white scarf is substantially thicker and has both less drape and sheen than the rayon ones. If you only feel the bamboo, it’s fine; it’s only in comparison to the rayon ones that the difference is obvious.

I’ve successfully interchanged rayon and bamboo before, and different sizes of yarn, so it must be this particular bamboo and this particular rayon. The WEBS yarn is really lovely, and I don’t remember where I got the bamboo, but I remember it was on sale–maybe there was a good reason for that?

Regardless, these three scarves were successful, but I’m tired of braided twill, and the Macomber, for now. Moving on....

June 14th, 2012 | 

Braided baby blanket

 My niece is having a baby. Her first. It’s a girl. Sure I could have gone to Babies R Us and bought something off her registry, but didn’t want to do that.

I’m a weaver. I wanted to weave her something. No not something, I wanted to weave her a baby blanket.

I do have a small supply of baby blankets in my inventory, but none of them were what I wanted to send her. I wanted to make a new one.

And I wanted to make a cotton one. Now, I’ve made other handwoven baby blankets from cotton, and I’ve not been overly happ with the results. I like the way they look, but I haven’t liked their softness and drape. Actually, their lack of both.

It was time to try again. I figured what the heck? Since it wasn’t expected, if I wove it and hated it, I could throw it away — the materials wouldn’t be too costly — and go to Babies R Us as a default. Safe enough.

So I warped the Macomber loom for an 8 harness braided twill in 5/2 cotton. White warp, pink weft, what could be simpler?

I liked the way it looked on the loom. But then again, I almost always do, so that wasn’t really meaningful.

While I was weaving, I decided on a different course of action than my usual. Usually I weave, sew on the binding, and wet finis with a hand wash. This time I’d try another way. After all, that old saying that is if you do what you’ve always done you’ll get wha you’ve always gotten. Plus, I still had that throw-it-away-Babies-R-Us default option.

So I took it off the loom, went upstairs to the sewing machine, sewed not one, not two, but three rows of machine stitching on each end, went down to the basement and tossed it in the washing machine. Then without looking at it I tossed it in the dryer.

My thinking is that the cotton would shrink however much it was going to, and if the blanket was still alive when I took it out of th dryer, that was the time to sew on the polyester satin binding.

Well, I took it out of the dryer and LOVED it! It was soft and sweet, not a bit of stiffness left in it!

Went back upstairs to the sewing machine, sewed on the binding, shot a few pix, and sent it off to baby.

I will definitely do this again. And will probably use the washer to wet finish all my cottons from now on. I’ll still hand wash all my rayons and bamboos, though.

I have so much to learn. That’s one of the things I love about weaving. As soon as I have one thing mastered, there are a dozen others waiting for me.

Back to the loom!

June 10th, 2012 |