Monday, September 7, 2015

The Evolution of a Weaving Project

How does a weaving project begin?  Today it began with a general need to weave something.  It’s a grey day and my lovely Lily Louet is naked. Tea towels have been selling well for me lately so I opened up my PCW draft folder and started poking around in my tea towel folder pattern folder looking for inspiration. Click on the photo to make it bigger.
I remembered a seeing an interesting pattern in 4 shaft twill from one of the Guild of Canadian Weavers exchanges; naturally I couldn’t find it right off so I thought I’d look through some photos of past projects to see if I could spot it.  Have I mentioned that my attention span is that of a gnat?
Still no luck so I went to the blog to search out past projects and ‘viola!’ found this great runner that Ngaire wove ~ yup I’m stealing from the daughter!

Now that I have the pattern picked, it is time to find the yarn.  I always want to use my stash first, so a foray into Excel is next ~ math is not my strong suit!
I wanted to use Orlec which is Orlon from Brassards in Quebec for this project because it washes and wears extremely well and has outstanding colours (and that is what Ngaire used!). I pulled out my stash bucket and started weighing to find my options; as you can see there really isn’t much left!
I decided on brown and robins egg blue….really fresh and pretty!
Now it’s just loading up the loom and enjoying the process.

We are huge cycling fans and right now the Vuelta a Espana is in progress, so I need to do something to keep my hands busy while I'm watching the boys in spandex climb mountains.
I've had this huge 30 ounce spool of 6 ply Pima Cotton in my stash for a few years.  This is truly beautiful cotton with a lovely sand colour and lustre.  I seriously can not find a use for this beauty!
So to while away the hours over the 21 day tour Ngaire and I take turns un-plying it.  What we will have in the end is 30 ounces of 2/10 Pima cotton and that we can use!