A finish, an in progress and a new start.

This week I have three things to tell you about and I will start with a finished project.
My reversing hearts tea towels are finished, all nine of them and the small tray cloth. My thanks to all of you who offered help on my sticky out bits of hem !  My friend Susan has done the most wonderful blog on how to finish off towels and runners with great pictures of all the stages. I would urge you all to check it out !
Susan recommended using a 'presser' to get weight into the final process and I do have one ! I hadn't thought of using it but tried it out and what a difference in the finished article...........

Here is a picture of one of my best edges !

It took me quite a while to press the towels but the final stack looked like this...................

The towels were easy to weave but the finishing seems to take a long time I suppose because there are so many to do. I am very pleased with the result and they will make good gifts for people. I am not sure how well they would sell in the craft shop as they have to be so much more expensive than the tea towels you can buy in the supermarket or wherever. I know the quality is different and they will last forever but just not sure people would be prepared to pay the price.

The second thing to tell you about is my Danish jacket. You will remember that I bought the kit on my trip to Denmark back in November. I have finished the body of the jacket now so just have the sleeves to do. I found I had to concentrate on the instructions to do the second half of the body as it just says to reverse everything ! I have learnt how to do short rows to get all eight gussets done. There is also a gusset down the middle of the back and one under each armhole so I have done eleven altogether. It is looking good but I can see it will soften up after a wash and probably hang a bit better. I have never knitted anything all in one before nor side to side !

Here we are though ...................

Now to the third thing and a new project ! 

Tony has his computer in front of one of our sitting room windows on a wide wooden shelf. When we have sunshine it tends to fade the wood so I keep it covered with something.  A few months ago he suggested that I could weave a runner for the shelf rather than have the rather tacky paper tablecloth thing you can see in this picture......................

I must admit I hadn't shown much enthusiasm for this idea until recently ! However, when I brought home the runner Ellen and I did on my trip to Denmark and saw how nice it looked on the coffee table I decided it was time I did something about the windowsill ! 

The shelf is quite wide so the runner is going on the loom at 24" and will be at least 72" long to stretch each side of the window. In the sitting room we have terracotta walls and dark green leather furniture so decided on a terracotta 16/2 cotton warp with a 2/16 pale green linen weft. the draft is the same as the one Ellen and I used. Next time I will try and post a picture of it from Fibreworks PCW.

The warp of 1200 ends was ready and now wound on to the loom....................

It is a classic Drall design and I am using ten shafts and ten treadles. Threading is underway but I am short of heddles so need to order some more. I have 1,000 but need 1200 ! It is such a pain adding heddles, I will order plenty so that I don't have to do it again !

It is maybe not quite so orangy as the picture makes it look ! A much softer colour.

I think that is all for this week. Might be a couple of weeks before the next update !

Many thanks for visiting.

Happy New Year

Hi there everybody - a very Happy New Year to you all and good wishes for a healthy, peaceful and productive  2011 !  Time to get back to normal after the festive season and certainly time I updated this blog !

When I left you last year I was having a dilemma about spotty selvedges on my reversing hearts tea towels. Would I change the floating selvedges everytime I changed weft colours or would I add pink or purple threads and floaters to the warp ? Well, neither was the answer, I did something much simpler !
I had three natural coloured threads at each end of the warp and I just took them out leaving the darker shade of pink and the floating selvedges in the purple shade. I made this change in my sampling phase and I was much happier with the result.

I found the treadling very straightforward and soon got used to having ten treadles to work with.

It took me about two and a half hours to weave a 32" length of tea towel and I did 1" hems at each end in a finer yarn. In total I was able to make nine full sized tea towels and one half sized one !!

I used up the 250gms of  8/2 purple cotton quite quickly and had to hunt for more cotton weft in my not very large stash ! Anyway here is a picture of the tea towels just as they came off the loom.

The piece at the front of the picture with the different colours in is my sample ! Next job was to zig zag stitch in between each towel so that I could cut them apart without a lot of unravelling. Sewing is not my favourite occupation but it had to be done !

Once I had cut the towels apart I had to press the hems in place.

So far so good, but now as usual I have a question ! When I do this bit of folding over the thinner hem and then folding over again to make the hem I always get a bit that sticks out like this.........

This drives me mad ! If I poke it inside when I stitch the hem it makes a lump and spoils the whole thing.  Even using a finer thread I still get this problem.  So, please give me suggestions when you post your comments. Is it a common thing or just peculiar to me ?

However, now I have a pile of tea towels ready to be hand hemmed. That will be a job for next week, hope there is something good on the television to take my mind of it !!

Rest assured though, there is another warp already wound and ready to go onto the loom. All I will say is, it has 1200 ends and is 16/2 cotton and will use ten shafts and ten treadles again !

Please help me out with my problem ends ! 

Bye for now