Something about two birds and a stone…

I’ve always been good at looking at my to do list and seeing what I can accomplish and knock off the list with minimal effort.  Like combining errands, cooking for multiple days.  One effort and multiple outcomes.

Back in October I had to do a half day demonstration at the Newark Museum, where I brought a shaft floor loom and just sat and wove and talked to the public.  No sweat.  I had my 25″ four shaft loom empty and it seemed like the logical one to bring.  I had to decide what to demo, experience has taught me not to get too complex, since half the time I need to be talking, explaining things like “how long it takes”, you know the drill.

Knowing at this point that life was going to get dicey towards the holiday’s, with my husband’s illness, and the fact I would be on the road most of November, I thought about my annual run of dishtowels, and looked at my stash of Cotlin, which was pretty pathetic.  I looked at my shelf of perle cotton, especially the 5/2, which I think is a bit coarse for toweling, but I had a lot of it, due to a couple of generous donations, and it seemed to work really well for the beginning weaving project I did when I taught for Peters Valley at the end of the summer.  You may recall this post…

I had the students weave a gamp, an exploration of structure and color within the same piece, a sampler if you will, and then had the students pick two of their favorite treadlings and weave two towels.  I thought actually that this would make a great demo as well, because I could show the sampler/gamp, and then every hour-ish, I could start weaving a new towel, different weft, different treadling and have a completely different look.  And in fact, viewers returned occasionally to see what the next towel would look like.  I wove three towels while I was there, not bad for an afternoon of work.  Unfortunately the last towel I wove was a rather complicated 3/1 – 1/3 twill, with reversing twill stripes, and I didn’t realize until the piece was off the loom that there was a mis-pick in the weft sequence, leaving me with a huge flaw right across the middle of the towel.  I’m smiling because I get to keep that one and it is my favorite.

So I spent the last week weaving off the remaining towels, I ended up with nine on a 9 yard warp.  Each towel was 32″ long.  I made up a draft, which featured a straight draw, straight draw with 2/2 stripes, and a point twill in the middle.

Each weft color change was treadled in a different pattern.  Plain weave of course.

Twills in a couple of different colors.

Bird’s Eye treadling…

Extended Bird’s Eye…

My favorite, the 3/1, 1/3 alternating twill…

Basket weave…

And Color and Weave with alternating weft striping.

I love that I can have a stack of towels, each so different, on the same threading.  They wove quickly, and washed up well.  I sett them dense, 20 ends per inch for the 5/2 perle cotton.

So in between doctor’s visits, and end of year stuff, like my infamous Christmas letter, yes, I write them, I’m trying to get reacquainted with my studio.  It has been such a long time.  If you want to read the family Christmas letter, here it is.  Those of you on the snail mail list, it will get there eventually…

Stay tuned…