Finnish Lace Shawl Completed

The Finnish Lace Shawl is done and even lovelier than I had hoped. It is very light and drapes beautifully.

When I took it off the loom it was stiff and I really couldn’t see any distinct pattern in the lacy areas. The white markers are my measuring threads; I measure on the loom every 5 inches and keep a running tally. I wove the shawl 83-1/2 inches long, plus allowed 12 inches for fringe on each end.
Here is a close up of the lace area before wet finishing, quite open but no real pattern. You can see that I used two different cones of red cotton in the warp. The cotton was exactly the same, but from different dye lots. I alternated the red warp ends on the warping board and you can see the uniform pin striping effect, which adds interest to the tabby stripes.

After wet finishing the floats in the lace areas aligned and spaced out, creating a wonderful openness. The lace areas didn’t puff up and create a texture as I expected, they lay flat and seem very stable. This weave structure creates a beautiful lacy openness and really shows off the hand painted warp threads. After wet finishing the shawl measured 82 inches long and 19 inches wide. Amazingly I only lost 1-1/2" in length and just over 1/2 inch in width. I had machine washed it a full 4 minute cycle on permanent press so I attribute the minimal shrinkage to measuring with the tension off and using a temple.

This is my draft for the shawl which I modified from an article in Handwoven Magazine Summer 1984 by Miranda Howard. I left out the alternate pattern blocks and wove the shawl using only lace runs. I was concerned that the lace could take up differently than the plain weave, but this didn’t happen.
I thought I’d share with you how I did the fringe on this shawl. I did a simple hem stitch on the loom in bundles of 12 warp threads. I split the bundles in half and twisted each bundle 40 twists to the right and then combined them and twisted 35 to the left. This gave me a nicely beaded looking fringe, securing with an overhand knot. I then folded the shawl in half and placing one side directly on top of the other I aligned the fringe. Using a line on my cutting board I anchored the shawl with heavy cook books. Then one by one alternating from each end of the shawl I ensured the knots were at the same level, again using my cutting board to line them up.

I am very happy with this shawl overall, but have a few slight selvedge issues.

I think I may be doing a rolled edge or some kind of selvedge treatment in the future to make it really pop in the Guild sale!

Weaving Words

The word tabby describes a plain weave fabric. It also describes a striped cat, a spinster, a rich watered silk and a prying or gossiping woman.