January's towel of the month - wet finishing - and giveaway!

To wet-finish my towels, I just put them through a normal laundry cycle in the washer and dryer.  Then I ironed them.  To end at a good place in the weave pattern, I wove the towels a little short of the 38" recommended in the WJ article, about 37.5" under tension.  Off the loom and before hemming, they measured about 36" x 17.5" - they lost a lot just coming off tension.  After hemming, they were 32.5" long.

Here's a photo before washing.

And here's the "after" photo.  After washing, they measure 32" x 17" - not much shrinkage due to washing.  The photo shows the spots closed up a little, but most of the movement of the yarns happened just by taking it off the loom.

You can see I had trouble keeping the motifs square and the diagonals at 45 degrees.  I kept beating too hard.  I found that I had to just barely squeeze the weft in place to keep it square. 

I'm happy with my towels so far.  Here's the plan for my three towels:  the first I'm going to keep and use in my kitchen.  The second I will send to a test kitchen among the households of my family members.  The third one I will give to one of you, someone who wove January's towel along with me.  Since only one weaver let me know (over on my Facebook page and google+) she was weaving along, the towel goes to her.  Thanks for weaving along, Anna!

If you join in next month for February's towel and would like to win the Towel of the Month, please leave a comment to let us all know you're participating.  You can put a link to photo(s) of your project, either finished or unfinished, in the comment.  At the end of the month I'll draw names from a hat.

January's towel of the month - weaving!

Yay!  all sleyed, ready to weave...

I raised shaft one, and checked that I had every other warp raised.  This was easy to see since I used a 15-dent reed: one yarn should be through each dent in the reed.  I raised all the other shafts (two through four) and all the other warps came up, looking similiar - one per dent.

Then I raised just shaft two, and checked that it was the pattern threaded for that shaft, in little groups of two: first six groups, then three spaced out, then five, then three...looked good.  Similarly with shafts three and four.  I tied up the treadles for weaving, and feeling smug that I didn't have any threading errors, raised the first shed to put in a header...and snapped a warp yarn. Presumably it was a threading error, but we'll never know since it came right out of the heddle it was in.  So I repaired it and started weaving.

I wove a couple inches of plain weave for my hem, then inserted a piece of rug warp that I'll remove after it comes off the loom, to make a line for my

hemstitching.

Then I started watching the pattern appear.  It's an attractive pattern with a square field formed by the five groups of 2s and 3s, and a sort of an oval leaf shape in a star pattern.  I was happily weaving along thinking how nice it was to weave something that went so fast, when I noticed the right selvedge warp starting to wear.  I was getting too much draw-in.  So I sistered in another edge warp, and "bubbled" my weft more to get the draw-in to lessen.

Plain weave in this threading is formed by raising shaft one (foundation threads), versus all the other shafts (pattern threads) alternately.  You can see by studying the tie-up in the draft that the "spot" in spot Bronson is formed by leaving one pattern shaft lowered while the other shafts continue to raise to make plain weave, causing the weft to float over the 2 or 3 threads that are on the lowered shaft.  On the reverse side, those warp threads float correspondingly as warp floats.  And between them are another couple of layers of threads of warp and weft left just passing across each other, not woven.  These layers of non-interlaced yarns tend to smoosh together and form the spot or bump that makes the pattern.

In her book Handwoven Laces, Donna Muller devotes an entire chapter to spot Bronson.  She discusses the difference in structure and threading from huck spots, and how to use this structure to design your own patterns.

Are you enjoying weaving along in spot Bronson?

January's towel - threading

Are any other weavers threading this yet?  This one was kind of tricky to thread.  I don't think I have ever woven Spot Bronson.  There are so many traditional structures I haven't explored - like the Summer & Winter summer weaving I did for the first time last year.

I complicated the threading process a bit because I did not have enough heddles on one shaft to be shaft 1, so I used shafts 1 through 4 as shaft 1, and used 5 through 7 as shafts 2 through 4.  I will do this to avoid having to move heddles, which I do not enjoy (to put it mildly).  I hope I did not introduce errors by being lazy.

Next step, sleying the dragon - uh, I mean the reed.

Who else is weaving Spot Bronson towels this month?

January's towel draft, and about the yarns

"Snowflakes are suggested by an all-white Spot Bronson weave." (Clotilde Barrett, from the original article, Weaver's Journal, Fall 1983.)

Here's the draft I promised, re-drawn since the old one was a bit fuzzy.  I hope this one's clear enough to work from the image.  Notice that Spot Bronson is threaded with every other thread on the same shaft.  This means you will need lots of heddles on the one shaft, and may have to move some from other shafts (unless you have more than four and can use some other shafts to tie up identically and work along with it).  The treadling is "as drawn in".  I've marked the center pick of the pattern, from which point it reverses.  You can use the threading sequence for the entire pattern.  Repeat as many times as needed for the towel length of 38".

Now, about yarns: I don't have any 40/2 or 20/1 linen in my stash.  When I looked to buy it, I found that would mean quite an outlay in dollars to do all the projects (most of them use these two yarns).  So although linen towels sound absolutely scrumptious, I'm going to try using some yarn I have already.  I have some 20/2 cotton that according to weaving books can be sett at 30 epi (the same as the article recommends for the 40/2 linen).

As an aside, in my search I could not find bleached linen in 40/2 or 20/1 anyway; I could only find half-bleached.  If anyone knows a source, please let me know!

So have you decided to try a kitchen towel in Spot Bronson this month?  What kind of yarn will you use?

Towel of the month

Happy New Year!  Here's wishing you and yours health and blessings in the coming year.  If you're a weaver, happy weaving, too!  A few months ago I came across an article by Clotilde Barrett in her Weaver's Journal that gives a project for each month of the year, all kitchen towels, each in a different 4-shaft weave structure, as a way to study each structure and end up with a useful sample at the same time.

I saved the article thinking it would be fun to make the projects starting in January, show my progress and stumbles, and invite other weavers to weave along.  Well, January is here, and because I have a piece going on the loom that is turning out to be very time-intensive, I'm not in a position to commit to weaving anything else this month.  But I'd still like to share the projects.  And who knows, maybe I'll need a break from the scary project.

So, the towel of the month for January is... Spot Bronson.  The vitals are:

Warp: 40/2 bleached linen
Weft: 20/1 bleached linen
Sett: 30 epi double sleyed in a 15-dent reed
Total number of warp ends: 561
Width in reed: 18.7"

I'll work up and post a draft and calculations, and I plan to at least post some thoughts on the project later this month even if I don't actually weave it.

You can find the full article and many other gems at Ralph Griswold's On-Line Digital Archive.