Friday 17 October 2014

Finally an Empty Loom.


After having this project on my loom for well over half a year I am genuinely happy to see it off and finished.

As I had the opportunity to work in the weaving workshop at work in the first half of the year, I thought it would be fun to experiment with some 8/2 cotton on the rigid heddle to see how it holds up.

It was an absolute nightmare to warp and I ended up re-warping it no less than 3 times.
I also could not budge some of the horrible twisted mess that started to happen in the second half of the 6m warp and so, once my patience ran out, I promptly cut off the other 3m and they are to be found somewhere in a corner :(

I guess this is why it took me so long to finish.
I couldn't motivate myself to sit and weave, but everytime I walked past my loom I felt bad for seeing it just standing there.

Then I had the bright idea to weave some of this year's Christmas gifts and that finally motivated me to get to the end of the warp.

The original idea for this warp was to make some hand-towels in our bathroom colours.

I did just that and have managed to cut and sew 3 towels for the bathroom.

3/2 Cotton

As we have a towel rod, I sewed a channel in the tops of the towels so that they can be threaded on to this rod and sit quite snuggly.

woven hand towel

So, will I be using this cotton on my rigid heddle again?
Not unless I use the direct warping method. 
I had used the warping mill to work out this warp:

warping mill

I don't think I could manage a 6m project on the rigid heddle either.
The cotton is so fine and I only had half the warp on it, the work took forever to move forward. Once I have my floor loom, then yes, I would definitely make more 8/2 cotton projects but not on the rigid heddle.

Another issue I found was that the warp warped!
I have never had this experience before but try as I might I couldn't get it to correct itself.

I am not sure why this happened, and my only conclusion is that I didn't loosen the tension after working on the project at some point, and this created the problem. (It is maybe not as apparent in the photo as it is when you have the cloth in front of you, but there is a definite difference between the one side of the band of colour and the other side)

Have you experienced this before?



hand towel rigid heddle

Besides that, the 8/2 cotton feels luxuriously soft and silky, I really love the feel of it. It would have made an awesome shawl or cowl, and I do plan something along those lines as future floor loom projects.

Since I was so happy to finally have the loom free and ready for a new project, I merrily warped it for a new scarf for Jas on Wednesday and I am thoroughly enjoying the simplicity of the new WIP. But that is news for next week, so stay tuned :)

Did you complete a WIP this week?
I will be sharing this post with all my lovely Friday Friends

I wish you all a super weekend.
x

2 comments:

  1. I've never done weaving before but it sounds pretty complicated!
    Those are beautiful colors you used. To the untrained eye the towels turned out beautifully.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Wowza! I've never woven that fine on my RH. There are tension issues with the RH that I don't find on my 4Harness. The finished weight I use my my RH is fingering weight. I don't know if that helps.

    I had a bad warping experience on my 4Harness and now I'm shy about working on it again. I understand your frustration and being glad to be done with the project.

    Your towels are great...and you learned something from it. That's always good, right?

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for visiting my site and leaving a comment, I really appreciate each and every one.
I will reply to each of your comments, sometimes it does take a while to get around to all of them, but I will reply within 24 hours of you posting. :)

Blog Archive