Autumn/Winter 2022 Recap - Weaving - Longish

In the last year, I learned the verb, "to bloviate". I like it, it makes me giggle; there are so many situations I could use it. And it sounds like it's related to "blog". This post is going to be one such. I'm going to sum up weaving-related stuff since my March post as best I can. (Or, since May when I resumed weaving.)

In the four months, I wove six pre-made warps/ten pieces, all on four shafts; finished most; and washed six or seven cashmere pieces I wove way back, though some are not in the photo. In some instances my beating changed so much within a piece on Ashford 8-shaft, there are a few pieces I don't know what to do. I took some of these and half a dozen too-long-on-my-couch pieces to Salvation Army in early winter. I'm now weaving another pre-made warp on the four-shaft; have a problematic warp on the 16-shaft, (see below;) and Sunflower II remains on the table loom, (too dark in the stash room to weave in the winter even with lights.)

 

At first there I wove black and/or slate pieces because they were of good quality yarns, some in my best merino, (you can't see them in the pic, sitting on a dark green chair, but I wrote my name under the bottom piece,) one white and one brown, during a rainy dark winter, in my basement. Boy, I do like to make things difficult for myself. 

Most early pieces were Dornick Twill, but the brown warp, I mixed basket weave for the bouclé warp and 2/2 twill in the regular warp. This might have been the first time I mixed structures other than plain or twill at the selvedges. The different warp yarns have very different shrinkage, so I didn't make fringes, just trimmed the tassels, but I'm worried how they would present after subsequent washing. 

I'm going to write about the red, yellow-green and teal pieces, towards the top, from a navy warp in a separate post. And then about a failed two-blocks-on-four-shaft experiment I'm weaving now, after that.

 

Few of the reasons I've been weaving exclusively on the four-shaft is a) May was late fall, and weaving standing up on jack loom proved to be good cardio workout with no heating required; b) I wanted to concentrate on some basics like tension, selvedge and beating; c) foot loom weaving is so fast; and d) I didn't want to fuss over designs. I wanted to really enjoy the act of weaving, and it worked for a while, but soon I got bored of somber colors, so I moved on to the navy warp, and incorporate more colors in between somber ones.

On the same day in May when I put on a black warp on the jack, I also put this cottolin towel warp on the 16-shaft. Back in 2014, I made two towel warps hoping to use up all the cottolins, Swedish cottons and linens, and anything else that can go into towels. And because the warps were made of leftovers, I have this lop-sided warp where, the number of ends in the stripes are not symmetrical. I've had to come up with suitable drafts, and, you guess it, I couldn't be bothered. 

Here are weft options. The other towel warp is in browns, and I can only hope stripe widths are symmetrical. At first I was thinking of fussy twills, but I might try lace or waffle or otherwise puffy structures, none of which I've woven that I can remember.