Weaving for me

The baby wrap bubble is apparently going strong elsewhere, but for me it has burst. Like most things in life, that is both the bad news and the good news. The bad news is that it provided a huge income boost to me for a few years, and that’s over. The good news is that now I have time to weave things I’ve not had a chance to get to, try weave structures and other fiber-y things that call to me.

A while ago I wove curtains for my bedroom. The posts about those curtains talked about the difficulty in making the squares be square.

I thought I’d like to weave similar curtains, in all white, for my kitchen. I thought that when I did I’d do double weave – weaving two separate layers of cloth at the same time – so that my squares were identical. But when I sat down to do the planning, I realized that I didn’t have enough heddles to do so, and I didn’t really want to (a) buy more and (b) wait for them to arrive. (Despite what visitors to my booth think, I am not a patient person.) So I simply planned for the all white curtains and figured I’d again just live with some difference in the squares, knowing that those differences would be less noticeable with everything the same color.

Well, I was surprised that it was substantially easier for me to make those squares be square this time. I don’t attribute it to my experience with the bedroom curtains. Here’s what I think the difference is: I wove the bedroom curtains from (mostly) 16/2 cotton (6,720 yards per pound) sett at 24 ends per inch. I wove the kitchen curtains from (mostly 20/2 cotton (8,400 yards per pound) set at 21 ends per inch. So finer threads sett more loosely.

As you can see from the top photo, I again made myself a little jig to use while I was weaving, but it all worked better, easier for me. Maybe because I’ve woven so much lace in the past. Maybe because I felt no pressure. Maybe because the stars were lined up more auspiciously. If you look closely at that photo you’ll notice that there is a place where I had 3 threads in one dent instead of 2. I decided I didn’t really care.

I wove 6 panels, hemmed and wet finished, and hung them on a tension rod in my bay window in the kitchen.

I love the way they look. The only thing that’s not exactly what I planned is that somehow I mis-measured before I started. I wanted the curtain rod to be the same height as the ‘joint’ in my double hung windows. But somehow I thought that was 24″ finished length when it should have been 27″ finished length. Oh well. No big deal.

Now I’m getting a warp on the loom to weave fabric for a pair of pants. I so liked the cotton/linen towels I wove in April that I knew I wanted to make myself some pants. I hope I can get the 7+ yards woven in the next few days and get started on the sewing.