Unfurling the Wandering Vine Cloth
Unreeling 12 yards of warp in a wandering vine overshot pattern on the 8-shaft loom, though I only used 4 shafts for this particular pattern. I am still getting used to using this bigger loom.
It's always so satisfying to see fabric that I wove line-by-line come off the cloth beam:
I made this cloth!
This is my sturdy 8-shaft Kessenich Floor Loom, built sometime in the 1960s.
The weaving width of this cloth was 37 inches wide.
End of the warp. End of the line.
12 yards of cloth wound onto the cloth beam.
I use the tape measures to help me keep track of how far I've come. This helps to keep panels that need to be the same size roughly matchable when it comes time to piece them together.
The last bit of weaving as seen through the steel heddles from the back of the loom.
This is as far as I could go on the sectional warp before I couldn't get a good shed anymore. I wove as far as I could on the 12-yard wandering vine warp and the rest woven in cotton for towels, plus 2 samples to try out some wool yarn.
The sectional warp worked very well, and mitigated a lot of tension problems I might have had otherwise. It worked so well, that we will be outfitting the smaller 4-shaft Kessenich loom with a sectional warp. I think that is going to become the coverlet-making loom. I don't mind weaving extra panels if I can make the joy of weaving last a little longer. ;-)
2 panels of red wool and cotton for a Wandering vine coverlet.
How much loom waste? about 27 inches total
4 inches on the front (cloth beam)
22 inches on the back end
American Maid Cotton is nice to work with -- very strong with few broken threads in the warp.
That said, it is dusty, even though I think it has some beeswax on it to help it behave during the weaving process. I vacuumed this haze of fiber dust off the old cloth beam which sits above the new sectional beam, so all the warp flowed over this bundled beam and dropped bits of cotton fiber with every treadling. That's just how it works!
More to come: Stay tuned for the finished coverlet and towels ...
1 comment:
Wow - how satisfying this part of the process must be. That's a lot of weaving!!! And it is beautiful.
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