Second Undulating Twill

Hi there - time to share my second undulating twill project with you !

I was so pleased with the winter sea scarf that I decided to do another run using the same draft. This time I used 50% merino 50% tencel in 16/2 weight. This yarn was hand dyed for me, in the north of Scotland, by Helen at Ripplescrafts and is in two shades of purple, sort of heather colours. I used the darker version for the warp and the lighter shade as weft.

This was how it looked on the loom, a lovely rich mixture of colours.

As you all know I am particularly fussy about having good selvedges ! When I was in Sweden for the exhibition, I bought Janet Phillips' book Designing Woven Fabrics. Janet uses a special selvedge threading for all of her projects. She uses 12 or 18 threads on either side of a scarf for the selvedge. If, for example, you thread at 24 ends per inch and sley 2 to a dent you would perhaps use 12 selvedge threads and thread them from the right edge, 2 in the first heddle, 1 in the second heddle and repeat for a straight draw until the 12 threads are used up. You would repeat that sequence on the left edge finishing with 2 threads in the last heddle.

When it comes to sleying the edge threads she recommends one and a half times the density of the main part of the cloth. For our example this would mean sleying 3 per dent for those 12 threads.

I liked the pictures of her finished scarves, they looked very professional so I decided to give the method a try. I was using 8 shafts for this project and so I threaded a straight draw for the first 8 heddles. Using the 2 and 1 threading I needed 12 threads for selvedges. I was sleying at 2 per dent in a 10 dent reed so sleyed the 12 edge threads at 3 per dent.

From the very beginning the selvedges looked great and for the whole project I didn't have a broken edge thread. Nor did I need to use my home made temples ! The next picture shows how neat the selvedge is. Please excuse the colour, not sure what happened to the lighting !!

Anyway, I am delighted with the result and may build that into my next projects to see how it goes.

I tried to take a picture of the finished scarf using a nice vase of silk sweet peas, not sure I have the artistic talent to pull that off !!!

So I reverted to my usual drape over a coat hanger technique ! Hope you like it. The colour is more as it should be. Think of a clump of heather on a Scottish hillside !

This has to be one of the nicest scarves I have woven, the edges are so good I don't need to hide any of it. Once it was washed the merino tencel is so soft and it drapes beautifully.

I need to concentrate on doing more weaving to this standard !

Next project is a back to basics one but with special selvedges !!