'Right' Angle

 

The photo is a little deceiving - the twill angle in the towel is 45 degrees, but between the paper being a little bit curved and the textile having a bit of a bump in it...

Anyway, when one is weaving, the warp is under tension which means the warp is being stretched.  Therefore, during weaving, the objective is NOT to have a perfect 45 degree angle while the web is in the loom, but to hit 45 degrees once it has been cut from the loom AND wet finished.

I have to admit I didn't work very hard to hit 45 degrees.  Instead I tried to be really consistent in my weaving, especially in beating the weft into place.  Truth be told, I rarely check the angle of the cloth while I weave it any more.

Frankly there are too many distractions right now and I'm too weary to fuss much about being 'perfect' for a tea towel.

But as I have been wet finishing this series of towels, I'm feeling enough better that I began to wonder if I'd managed to maintain any kind of consistency while I'd been feeling so poorly, so I grabbed one of my angles and put it onto the cloth as I was folding them up after taking the towels off the drying rack. 

 I checked a couple different towels, and so far as I could tell, both were pretty close to 'perfect', hitting that 45 degree angle.  OTOH, the square motif wasn't entirely 'perfect' with 4" in length and about 3 7/8" in width.  But I only measured the square next to the selvedge, and sometimes dimensional loss will be greater close to the selvedge.  Just eye-balling it, the square motif looks 'square'.  I'm not going to break out in a sweat because they are off by 1/8th of an inch over 4".

I'm actually more pleased with these two colours than I expected (the other is a pale yellow/beige) because while on the loom the colours looked quite insipid.  After wet finishing, they look much better (imho).  And I managed to clear the yarn off of more tubes, so win-win!

I have also just crunched the draft for the next warp and will go down and strip the warp off the Megado and set up to start beaming the warp.  There is still time today to get the warp beamed, if I don't dilly-dally.