summer flowers

summer flowers

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

New Projects on the Looms

I got the towels woven and washed, but I do not have a good photo yet.  I need to spend some time getting a good shot.  Here is a close up of the structure.  On the unwashed side you can see the stitchers and on the washed side they are hidden and it looks like regular basket weave.  
When I heard about the structure in a workshop last year, it was new and exciting, we had not seen anything like it.\.  Then, as I started looking around and I found the pattern in the Mary M Atwater Recipe Book, she was using it in the 1930's.  There is very little new in weaving, we just keep "re-discovering" the things over and over.


When I finished the towels, I decided to put on the Lichen Scarf.  That gives me two new projects on my looms.  I am bouncing back from loom to loom doing weaving.

I love the block twill, and now it is the correct pattern so I am very pleased with it.


I also put a new warp on the Big Mac.  I have had this project in the queue for a long time.  I got a Christmas towel from a friend years ago.  It was one of those printed towels, the 12 days of Christmas, but I loved the structure of the weaving.
Here is the towel showing the 12 days
But look at that cool structure
I spent some time figuring the threading...of course there were some threads missing but I got a "basket weave variation."  I also want to develop a waffle weave variation. 

But for this project I want to make picnic napkins to match the dishes in the picnic basket.  It took me some additional time to get the yarns that fit my color requirements.  I found out about a sale on cotton/linen yarn and got the colors to do my piece.
My mismatched dishes are tied together with the napkin!
The hardest part so far was tying up the treadles.  The pattern has sixteen shafts and sixteen treadles and 128 tie ups.  My poor body after 30 minutes under the loom.  I had forgotten how hard and time consuming it is to tie up that many.
Two versions of the tie-up my figuring and the walking version


2 comments:

  1. Which brand of loom are you showing on the last photo (with the treadles and draft). I have a similar system on my 8-shaft Beka loom from the mid 70s. Yours is the only other loom I've seen with the metal wires that go into slots on the treadles!

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  2. This is a Macomber loom. The tie-ups go through the slot and over the lamn. I have never seen a Beka hook-up.

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