On and Off Again

I have a trio of items that have been "on" and "off" again. Two have been on and off the loom; one has been on and off the spindle.

The spindle project was an ounce of shetland wool from Fall Creek Farm. It was easy to spin and even easier to ply. Now I have to decide how I am going to use~60 yards of shetland wool 2-ply.

The two weaving projects are in preparation for a presentation that I will be doing for the Weaving Indiana Guild in November. Donna H. and I are going to focus on cotton for our "fiber intensive". The top collection (dark blue with light blue stripes) is 10/2 cotton in a balanced plain weave. I wove three pieces and then did different finishing treatments on them. It is easy for me to distinguish between the unwashed sample and the other two, but the difference between the handwashed and the machine washed piece is not so obvious.

The second woven set is a collection of pieces woven with Sugar 'n Cream, a 4-ply worsted weight knitting yarn. The yarn was a "hand-me-over" from my great aunt (great story here...my craft room is full and overflowing. Why does it never get emptied out? Because my friends and relatives all know that I use "stuff". I do occasionally say "no", but more often than not, I encourage the odd & random replenishing of my stash!) . I hadn't used this yarn for weaving before, but it was just the right sort of thing to try! I started by measuring the wraps per inch, then divided by 2 to get an estimate of the "ideal" sett (7 epi) for tabby. Then I ran through a series of calculations to determine the size of the final piece if I sett it wider (4 epi) and closer (9 epi). I warped the loom and rethreaded the reed for each sett. The changes in the fabric are phenomenal!


Here are two of the pieces: 4 epi & 6 epi. Can you guess which is which?










(6 epi)













(4 epi)














And, just because I played around with the twill, here is a two color twill (left edge of photo), a single color twill (middle), and a tabby with a fine weft all at 9 epi. The warp is the same two color warp from above.