12 Shaft Drall Scarf

Like so many of us I am forever looking at the news and social media and frankly, both of them can make you a tad sad.  I often feel that events beyond my control are flying off willy-nilly and it all seems a bit much at times.  

That's when I really enjoy weaving; there is something so very comforting about the simple process of warp, weft and colour.  

Usually I am drawn to weaving curves and spots, but the chaotic feel of life right now is leading me down a different path.

I am looking for structure and there is nothing more structured than a square!   

Now that I have decided to weave a simple design I started hunting through some of my previous drafts and I was immediately taken with some 12 shaft drall scarves I wove back in 2012.  I had named the post My Comfort Weave and I guess it still is.

I have been watching a lot of gardening shows on BBC of late and they have been showing a lot of Escheveria, and although I don’t have any of these lovlies in my garden I have embraced the colour scheme.  This photo is not mine, I give all credit to the photographer.

I began by pulling the warp in silver, sea coral, rose, mineral green and lavender.

The colours are in varying widths to try and replicate the overall colours of the Escheveria flower.  

I had previously woven my drall scarves in a random treadling pattern, creating the blocks as I went along, but this time I want structure, so I planned my colours very carefully and I decided to treadle the pattern ‘Exactly As Drawn In’. 

This gave me a nice mix of boxes with plenty of interest to the weave.  As I treadled it each different colour was woven once as a true square as the pattern progressed, the rest of the time they were rectangles.  I think this gives a little more interest to the weave.

Off the loom and before washing it looks a little flat and wavy, but after washing and steam pressing I am pleased.

Each side is different and lovely in their own right, but the squares are it for me!

I really loved creating this scarf and have already put on another warp in a different colourway with a different threading.  This scarf will appear on Etsy for sale and as a PDF pattern in a few days.

The garden this year has been amazing and the Brugmansia is a real show stopper.  Today I have 12 buds ready to open and to fill the garden with the sweet smell of baby powder. This is a bog standard Brugmansia and didn't come with a name so it is called a NOID.

Navy and Blue Drall Tea Towels

The beginning of the year is always tea towel time for us.  The newest tea towel warp is a lovely shade of blue with six stripes of turquoise that have a pin stripe of peach.

The pattern is an eight shaft drall and the weft is navy blue.  Drall is a Swedish term for turned twill.  And turned twill means that areas of the draft are 1/3 twill and other areas are 3/1.  In this case the stripes are 3/1 twill and the rest is 1/3 twill.  The stripes almost have a braided appearance and the large areas are lovely blue dots speckled on a navy background. 

I like to have a border of stripes on each towel and in with this draft when I turned the twill in the treadling, like magic, the blue warp appears as the stripes.  It is a really nice way of making a border for the tea towels without changing the weft.

I like to make a unique border pattern for each tea towel so I write down the pattern but I also take a picture to make sure that I have a backup just in case.  This is towel two.

After two towels I decided to try different weft colours, white and a light grey.  But I didn’t like either of them so back to the navy I went.

This is towel three and I seemed to have not taken a picture of towel four.

I like to machine wash and dry the tea towels and then steam press before turning up the hem.  I use a metal ruler to measure the turned up hem, the one drawback to this is that the metal ruler does get really,really hot!

Then the tea towels are hand hemmed before getting a second and final steam press.  Here are the final pictures of the tea towels.  For Sale.

For Sale.

Final Garden Shot is Puschkinia or Russian Snowdrops....after the slug attack only a few survived!

Eight Shaft Tea Towels

January is synonymous with tea towel weaving month for me, so very satisfying after the holiday season.  I take the time while weaving a straightforward pattern to make sure my posture at the loom is correct.  Weaving tea towels is  comfortable enough for me that I can concentrate on my throw and really think about technique, balance and comfort.

To that end I wanted to put on tea towels that used only one weft, so I found a pattern that would give me lots of interest without any colour changes.  I found this lovely 8 shaft Scandinavian pattern called Korndräll.  FYI  dräll in Swedish means twill.

I put on a 535 end warp in white 2/8 cotton and put enough warp on the loom to weave 6 tea towels.  Working towards my ‘always years’ resolution (because I make this one every year) to use up odds and sods of weft, I wove each in a different colour.  I know I have enough weft to finish a 36 inch long tea towel if I have more than 2 ounces on the tube of cotton.

The pattern really shows off the warp colours and is the same on the reverse side.

Here they are just off the loom.

Ready to stabilize the hems and wet finish.

All done.....you’ll notice that there are only 5 in this photo; and that is because the wine red towel ran like crazy.  The white warp still has a slight pink tinge to it even after soaking in warm water with dye catchers.  Lesson learned, no red and white; and yet another tea towel for me!  Another lesson learned is that this pattern has quite substantial width take up; I put 22 inches of warp on the loom and after tumble drying I ended up with 16 1/4 inches of width.  The upside of this is that these are beautifully lofty absorbent towels.

I have already pulled the warp for my second batch of 4 tea towels using what was the same colours that were left over from the wefts on these towels, minus the wine red.  I did however, take the pattern and made each square larger and made the warp 601 threads,  I am still debating about weft.

The final garden shot is not a living plant at all.  This is all that is left of my lovely Himalayan Birch tree that we had to remove last autumn.  What a lovely reminder of a lovely tree.

Purple Striped Tea Towels

In the beginning of the year we are always drawn to tea towels.  This year I wanted to do lively coloured and thick stripes.  I was really drawn to the purples and a lovely lime green to highlight the colours.

I found a charming pattern on Handweaving.net that forms little boxes.  The pattern is a 3/1 turned twill also known as a drall.

The stripes are an inch wide and there are three boxes per stripe which makes them look even wider.  The weft for the tea towels is a lovely shade of blue from Brassards called Denim.

I put on 7 yards of warp for 6 tea towels 36 inches long.  At the end of the warp I had 26 inches left, so minus 12 inches for loom waste, I had 14 inches left over.

I came up with a great idea, bookmarks!  I tried out a couple of colours of 2/8 cotton but they were matte and boring.

So I tried some 2/8 Tencel in black and two navies, they had shine and were exciting.  So I had found my weft for the bookmarks.

I decided to only use some of the stripes.  And here is where I made the mistake; I decided to cut out the warp stripes that I wasn’t going to use.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  The tension on the warp went wild and I had to finish cutting the entire warp off.  Here is the chained off warp looking sad, maybe I will do some temari balls with it.

Here are the finished tea towels.  They look fresh and cheerful.  They remind me of the first spring flowers, crocuses.  For Sale.

One thing about the tea towels is that the lime green stripe doesn’t look green anymore.  The purple stripes and navy weft has pulled the green colour from the stripe and now it looks yellow.  I still think that they look great, but not quite what I had intended.

Final Garden Shot is Bleeding Heart.  I wish I had a crocus picture but a bunny dug the bulbs up and ate them!