One of the things I really enjoy about weaving is that cloth doesn't always look the same on both sides of the cloth.
Last night I got started hemming the latest tea towels. This one still needs the final pressing, but yes, I do hand hem all my towels. I just happen to prefer doing it this way, for a number of reasons. If someone prefers to do it by machine, that is perfectly valid as well. (It depends.)
This is one of the drafts from The Fanciest Twills, a little booklet of the twill drafts done on a point progression, developed by Fred Pennington and put together by Irene Wood (I think - I'm going by memory here.)
It's a simple draft, using 16 shafts but only 8 treadles, woven in a point progression over those 8 treadles. This creates a stripe in the woven structure. I arranged the colours so that they were also in a stripe that - more or less - matched the woven structure.
The threads were not kept in strict colour sequence, however, as that can tend to look a bit repetitive, so I allowed the edge of the stripe to be 'blurred' by taking the threads slightly out of sequence for some of the stripes. If you magnify the image, you might be able to see that.
The weave structure is such that one side is slightly more warp emphasis, the other slightly more weft emphasis. The weft was black and the dark value of the weft tends to emphasize the colours in the warp, so that side became the 'right' side, even though I wove it with the weft emphasis side 'up'.
We are experiencing some of the smoke from the wildfires in Washington State, and combined with our rapidly shifting sun making sunset come earlier every day, I'm having trouble seeing these towels because of the black weft making the cloth hard to see. I'm going to have to step up getting these woven and hemmed before our daylight hours become even less.
Which means I need to get the rest of the warp woven. Because the next warp will also have black as the weft! I'm determined to use up as much of the black as I can, as quickly as I can.
Goals. They keep me focused and going back to the loom.
3 comments:
These are so beautiful - no matter WHICH side you use as the 'right' side.
StephanieW
I’m trying to do a better job at commenting on the few blogs that I still follow and just realized that you no longer have the Currently Reading feature.
I do, I just haven't been reading much these days.
I think I mentioned a while back I'd started American Demon by Kim Harrison. I'm about half way through it but need to ramp up my reading because the next Louise Penny will soon be available and somehow I managed to snag the #1 spot in the request list at the library!!!! Usually I'm way down the line. :)
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