Wandering Vine Test Pieces - Wow!

Test piece of Wandering Vine Coverlet panel.  

Left side cut off the loom; Right side wet finished.

When a seasoned weaver recommends that you do some test pieces, listen carefully.  It's often hard to tell what something will look like after wet-finishing when you see it on the loom.

In this case, I was more than a little underwhelmed with how the red wandering vine was weaving up.  Too much white.  I expected there to be more red ...  

"Patience, Grasshopper ..."

Today, I cut off that test piece, hemmed the edges, cut a chunk off and threw it in the washer.

What a pleasant surprise to see how it bloomed so beautifully!  More red -- much more like what I had in mind.  I am on track to really get started with making fabric!  The red wool yarn did not run, but there's a slight halo effect from the fibers -- which is ok.  I wanted more red anyway. 

As expected, there was some shrinkage after wet finishing.  It lost about 3/4 inches on the vertical and about 1 inch on the horizontal.  Of course those numbers will be multiplied on a larger piece of fabric.  The lost length and width is taken up in the 3rd dimension with loft.  The wet-finished piece is definitely thicker. 

Here's a comparison of the selvedge edges.  The fresh-off-the loom section is on the bottom, with the wet-finished sample on top.

The blue wool (at the bottom of both samples) was used to separate the warp, and is not part of the final fabric.   It does shrink with wet-finishing, so you see some puckers there.

The next yarn is a white acrylic (junk) yarn again used to separate the warp and test for threading errors.  This plastic yarn doesn't shrink or change after wet-finishing, so you can really see the difference in the wool and cotton shrinking next to it.  This will be cut off of the final panels.

The next yarn (next to the red)  is the 10/2 cotton tabby, which is indeed part of the final fabric.  It does shrink and bloom a little, but is in nice proportion to the wool.  And since it is the structure and foundation of the overall piece, it's a uniform shrink that works well overall. 

 

I decided to use my 2nd Hockett shuttle for the tabby (natural thread).  Otherwise, I was running through too many of the smaller bobbins.  This heavier bubunga shuttle makes me feel more productive on this coverlet, and works beautifully with the birds eye maple in the same shape.

 

I'll leave you with some lovely sunlight and shadows through the lace curtains this am.

A Few Small Repairs on the Big Loom

I ran into a snag weaving my test pieces on The Wandering Vine Coverlet last week.  I was just 6 or 7 lines from finishing the 3rd pattern repeat of the Wandering Vine pattern motif when I lost all tension.  I couldn't quite figure out what went wrong, so I went to get my husband.  He figured it out right away ...

When my husband set up the sectional warp beam on The Big Loom, he used the same kind of bolt/screw as on the regular warp beam.  Unfortunately, when I was weaving my test pieces, I managed to sheer it off -- broken in 2 places.    There are tremendous forces at work on a floor loom when weaving!

We stopped at the local hardware store this week in search of a screw / bolt made of a stronger grade metal, but they didn't have anything.  

 

So on to Plan B: Piano wire.  It's not really piano wire, but that's what they call it.  It's carbon steel and much harder than the bolt/screw we had before.  He had to use a blow torch to bend the end, and cut it -- That's how hard it is.

This should hold it.  So far so good!

Down a Rabbit Hole: Flax to Linen

I Grew My Own Cloth -- The entire flax to linen process by Engineered Knits

My friend Sheila sent me a link to the Engineering Knitter who was talking about math and weaving ...  in another video, she was growing her own flax from seed in garden boxes on her patio to process it into linen.  OMG!  I have not gone that far, but I might!  It never occurred to me to grow just a handful of flax -- I figured you'd need a couple of acres to have enough to spin for a coverlet.  I never really liked the feel of spinning flax, so I never pursued it.

Still -- I could not look away as this video was just so darn interesting!

Things were going along well with weaving the text piece on the wandering vine coverlet, until I sheared off a bolt, and then I could not get the warp to hold any tension.  So we'll have to get the fixed in the next week or so ...