Years ago I took a Craftsy class on knitting with hand-dyed yarns, specifically how to control the placement of color changes in order to create stacked blocks, Ikat, etc... My attempts were not particularly successful. My blocks dodged and leaned and looked anything but planned. Nonetheless, this experiment piqued my curiosity about how such yarns would weave, so I bought a bunch of variegated 8/2 cotton from Webs.
I fell in love with the patterning that showed up on the loom, in plain weave, no less!
Off the loom was even more spectacular.
Like knitting with self-striping sock yarn, there was no need to control the pattern, so I could let the fiber do the heaving lifting.
But the remaining cones sat buried in a bin until my recent studio re-org, which happened just when these little beauties popped up in my yard. When we had spring. A month ago. The clocks might have ‘sprung forward’ but the New England weather has staggered backwards into the season known as 3rd winter.
Messages don’t come much clearer than this. The long-abandoned bright yellow, deep purple and vibrant green yarns became the First Sign of Spring towels.
Knowing I was going to get some sort of a “cheater check”, I elected to frame the variegated warp and weft with a solid, coordinating yarn.
A friend of mine dubbed this Turned Twill version the “Shortcut Tartan.” The patterning is fabulous on both front and back, so I hemmed two of the towels woven-side up and the other two woven-side down.
The 4-shaft version combined Basketweave borders with straight twill blocks and is quite forgiving. As it doesn’t really matter at what point in the treadling sequence you start and stop your frames, you don’t have to worry about ‘blowing your graphic’ if your PPI is a little bit off — just weave to square! (Thank you, Jane Stafford!)
The rigid heddle version was a bit trickier because I didn’t feel plain weave borders would do the variegated yarn justice (plus, I didn’t have the right purple) and I didn’t want to mess with pick up sticks for lace framing, so I turned to texture and pulled a cone of Mallo Cotton Slub out of my stash to contrast with the smoothness of the 8/2 cotton (which is doubled in the warp but woven singly in the weft). I can’t say the border did exactly what I had envisioned, but the towels are gorgeous nonetheless, and remind me of stained glass.
This series gave me an opportunity to play with the newest-to-me discovery, the Dixon Selvedge. In her Handweaver’s Pattern Directory, Anne Dixon describes a selvedge threading technique particularly recommended for twill. My reading of her technique is that she adds 12 more ends to each side of the warp, all threaded in straight draw, with the outer 4 ends threaded 1 per shaft and the other 8 ends threaded 2 per shaft. Then all 12 ends are sleyed through the reed at double the sett (in my case it was 4 ends per dent, for 12 ends in 3 dents).
I’ve always been pretty happy with my selvedges (they’re generally straight), but have often thought they can look a little squished. Perhaps it is simply draw-in, but to my eye, the outer 4-or-so threads always look more compressed than the other warp threads. When I used the Dixon Selvedge, that seemed to even out.
An added benefit was my fell-line remained straight and even -- no weird compression at the edges influenced my beat.
I attempted to do something similar for rigid heddle by doubling up a few of the edge slot threads. It worked, but didn’t create quite the density I wanted since the threads were doubled only in the slots. Next time I’d go further, perhaps by adding some thinner threads to the holes as well.
Did the Dixon Selvedge factor in to the towel patterns? Absolutely. I included instructions for it in the shaft loom patterns, and how to ignore it if you don’t want to use it.
There’s something incredible satisfying about using ALL the yarn for a project. I did have some of each variegated color left over -- not enough for a project with any particular one color, but warped together and woven with a solid weft, I got 4 more towels. And they look like a water color painting!
And that’s all she wove.
Happy spring everyone! Patterns are up in the Etsy shop. Paid subscribers have been emailed their discount code -- let me know if you didn’t get it.
Thanks for reading and see you next month!
xx,
Christine
lovely!