Weaving with wool

The wool saddle blanket sample project is on the loom at long last: it took about two hours to wind on the warp, all 37” wide, then another 3 hours to thread the heddles and sley the reed, then another half hour to lash on to the front beam and fiddle with the tie up.

I puttered about for a few rows with a broken twill pattern, but I wasn’t getting the size of shed I wanted, not for a warp that wide: I really needed to be able to give the shuttle a toss and have it slide all the way over, but it kept snagging. So I changed the tie up and went to a plain twill: the heddles are threaded with basketweave at either edge, so it doesn’t end up having big gaps at the selvedges and I don’t need a floating selvedge thread.

So far, so good:

I put a stripe of darker yarn near each edge, just to see how the pattern looked with different colours.

Can you see the strong diagonal stripe in the fabric? That’s the identifying mark of a twill weave. Blue jeans are done in a twill weave, if you look closely, you should be able to see the diagonal lines in the weave on your pants. It makes for a strong fabric with good drape, and that’s what I’m after here, so that’s what we’re trying.

The sample is about the same size as I’ll be using for the coats – same width, within a couple of inches, and I need to see how it comes out of the washer. It’ll shrink, in both length and width, though probably different percentages in each direction, and I need to know how much so that when I set up for a coat, I can weave to the pre-shrinkage measurements and know what size it’ll end up after fulling in the machine.

So, that’s what I did today. Now, to spin and watch Star Trek TNG on Netflix. I had completely forgotten some parts of the episodes I’ve watched so far, but at the same time, I’ve found myself quoting dialogue in places! My brain stores the strangest things.

Yes, I am a geek who loves science fiction and all things fibery.