This blog records my experiments and successes with fabric and fibers, surface design, stitching, weaving, photography and whatever else strikes my fancy. Enjoy ...
At long last, The Sugar Plum / Plum Pudding quilt is finished!
I love the colors -- It reminds me of the week between Christmas and New Years, leftover plum pudding. The shine and glitter of the holidays has gone, and your left with the darker grays and bruise-y plums after the celebrations are done.
It always reminded me of Harry Potter left at Hogworts over the holidays.
I must have run out of the 4-patch blocks, because there is a gray place holder towards the bottom. Do you see it now? That solution works with this pattern.
Pattern: Fuzzy Logic from Brenda Hennings Strip Therapy book
Fabric: Snow Berry Island Batik jelly roll
Dream Wool Batting
Quilted in a 2-inch grid that takes about 5 hours to complete, and 4-5 bobbins
Detail of the diagonal grid quilting and the Snow Berry batiks.
Here are some previous posts about this quilt in progress:
I gave a quilt to my dear friend, Karla. 2023 was a heck-uv-a year for her, but things are looking up ...
Doesn't she look pleased!
The Autumn Copper Canyon colors suite her. ;-) And she appreciates the wool batting.
This is my go-to pattern these days, made with jelly roll strips. The patches look like stained glass windows of light. The pattern is similar to Phoebe's Flower Box Quilting Tutorial.
Left side AFTER wet finishing / Right side NOT wet finished.
The right side is fuzzy and thicker -- like a blanket.
The right side is crisp and tight -- like a towel. The American Maid warp and tabby cotton has a beeswax finish on it that makes it easier to work with while weaving. I think the blue wool also has some kind of "temperance" treatment on it -- some kind of stabilizer. That yarn may have been designed for knitting machines. Once you do the wet finishing, that stabilizer washes out and the yarn it allowed to be itself.
While I had some of the pieces off the loom, I was curious to see how wet finishing changed the fabric. It always kind of amazing to see how the newly woven fabric comes alive and blooms once the fibers come together as a cohesive team.
What is wet finishing? Basically, you wash your newly woven fabric. Because it's wool, I'll be more gentle than I would with normal cottons, because I don't want it to felt up.
I wanted to get an idea of how the Mountain Cucumber would finish ...
Summer side: Left side AFTER wet finishing / Right side NOT wet finished.
The difference is AMAZING when you can see it in person, though I'm not sure I did such a great job with the photos.
Of course all that uplift has to pull from somewhere, so the width decreases as as the wet finishing creates new textures and loft.
Here are the numbers:
25 inches wide = Width of warp on the loom through the reed
24 inches = Woven on the loom under tension with the stretcher
23 inches = Off the loom, no tension'
21 inches = After wet finishing
Now to finish winding on the warp for the last panel ...
Abbreviated Panel 4 of The Mountain Cucumber Coverlet
I was working on the forth and final panel of the Mountain Cucumber Coverlet ... At the 4th of 7 blocks, I ran out of warp. At the beginning of this project, I'd warped up 14-1/2 yards thinking that would be more than enough for 4 105-inch panels, along with loom waste with extra room for testing, and learning the pattern. Turns out, I was about 1-1/2 yards short of what I needed for the 4 complete panels. [Let that be a lesson: Whatever you calculate the warp to be for a coverlet, add another 2 yards to the final calculation!]
My calculations were a bit off. I calculated a 12-inch block on the worksheet, and what I wove consistently turned out to be a 15-inch block, but I never went back and re-did the numbers, or I would have known sooner that I'd come up short. Sigh! To be fair, I did switch to a smaller tabby yarn that was half the size of the warp threads, and much less than the pattern threads.
I weighed the options:
* Weave as far as I could on panel 4. It will make a nice runner, or something ... And it is! I hung it in the Loom Room where I can see those lovely intertwining vines (aka worms)-- See the photo at the top of this post.
* Be happy with a 3 panel coverlet. This might work, but things will shrink again when I wet-finish it, and then it will still be too narrow for my full-size bed.
* Cut the short panel off, but leave enough warp to act as a "dummy" warp to tie on and pull through a new warp to finish the job properly.
I am opting for the last option. So I'll be running a new 5-yard warp this week to finish the job. Technically, I shouldn't need quite that much, but I don't want to be caught short again ... The photo above shows 204 ends of a 5-yard warp of 10/2 American Maid Cotton. I was able to run it much less time than the longer warp for the whole project. Let me say it again: This warping mill is such a joy to use: It was a complete game changer. I don't think I'd still be weaving if I had to use a traditional warping board -- Too many frustrations, and too many body aches and pains with that old method.
1 panel is about 108 inches, plus 1 yard for loom waste plus some for the take-up (the ups-and-downs of weaving).
I recently saw Kathryn at Blazing Shuttles demonstrate how to tie on a dummy warp. The last time I did it with the official weaver's knot, painstakingly tied one-by-one, most of them pulled part when I pulled them through the heddles. But Kathryn says you can use any knot -- so I'm going to use the easiest and sturdiest one I know: overhand -- and it will still be small enough to pull through the heddles without falling apart.
Tying onto the previous warp.
See: It's not the end of the world. In weaving, you can usually find a solution.
I know it looks like a tangled mess, but it's all in order, and should wind on nice and cleanly.
This option let's me continue the sheer joy of weaving this pattern every week through the holidays, and if the dummy warp works like it should, I won't have to re-thread the reed or heddles again. It'll be just like starting over ... ;-)
