Sunday, February 24, 2013

Wrapping Tutorial To Finish a Table Runner

Now that I’m back on track after my head cold and feeling like myself again, I decided to finish the Drall runners. The taupe gold and white runner came out exactly as I’d hoped and here it is….perfect! This photo is of the front and back together before final pressing.
The problem showed up immediately when I had a good look at the amethyst runner…..I made the mistake of treadling the end sequence exactly the same as the beginning sequence but in reverse and consequently I ended up with one extra block! I love this runner and wanted to salvage it, so I decided to pull out the hems to get to the problem. I had to pull out  the 3 inch hems on each end to get to the mistake and then pull out the extra 4 picks that made the mistake. I then hemstitched the ends and thought I’d twist the fringe to finish the runner. Well, it turns out the fringe is too far short to be twisted and I didn’t want to leave the fringe as it was so I decided to do some wrapping. Here’s a short tutorial on what I did to find the solution!
I cut a piece of the linen yarn about 10 inches long and folded it over about a third of the way down.
Holding the group of fringe that I wanted to bind together I put the looped yarn along side the fringe bout and held it in my left hand. I held the long tail of the linen yarn in my right hand.
Holding the loop to the fringe bout I tightly wrapped the yarn around my fringe group four times.
I made sure that the loop of yarn remained above my wrapping.
Holding the wrapped bout firmly in place, I threaded the long tail of the linen yarn through a large eye needle.
I put the needle under the wrapped yarn and came out behind the loop.
Then I picked up the short yarn tail and the long yarn tail and I pulled them tightly until the loop disappeared.
This makes a knot under the wrapped yarn and tightens the wrapping securely in place.
Using the needle again I pulled the long tail from the top of the wrapping back underneath the wraps to secure it and left it to hang in the fringe.
I wanted the wraps to sit about one third of the way down; my goal was to add both a decorative element and a stabilizing element.
Here it is ~ job done!
I feel I came up with a really interesting solution to my miss-weaving and too short fringe and I’m really happy with the finished product. This view is the front and back together ~ again before final pressing....gotta get onto that!

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Lemon Tea and Honey

I had the second installment of my dental implant surgery and frankly it put me on the couch and on my keester for days! I still don’t have the replacement tooth but I’m sporting a nice yellow bruise on my puffy cheek and what I’m told is a rather lovely screw in my jaw! It's been 6 days since my surgery I still have no feeling at the implant site or the teeth nearby...frankly I see this as a blessing! All of this has been followed by a post surgery cold that kept me looking at the warp on my loom and living on lemon tea and honey!

My newest linen runner warp has been a brain teaser from the start. I had 64 ends leftover from my first runner warp and I wanted to use them, but no amount of counting threads made the numbers work into this project. I had also pre-pulled two other linen warps, one with 138 ends and the other with 164 but that was too many ends, so now I’m left with the original 64 ends from the first warp and another 68 ends from this one….ahhh yet another puzzle warp to figure out!

I wanted to add colour stripes to this warp but because the linen in the colour stripes is different from the white Normandy linen, I used the coloured threads doubled and placed them alternately with the white linen to make sure that the runner doesn’t end up with waves. I did thread each of the doubled coloured ends in its own heddle to try and minimize the bridging I expect with linen. I put the white linen on the loom first and then put the coloured linen over top vaguely in the positions I needed it and lashed it to the back beam bar. I put each warp though a different set of lease sticks and tied it all together to pull onto the loom. It really looks like jury rigged job, but it worked very well.
I was able to then thread alternately from the two different lease sticks to get the stripes in place on the loom. I love the blond, bronze and brown stripes which are going to fall into one of the three blocks (hopefully)!
My plan is to weave runner number 1 with the same 5/2 soft gold mercerized cotton that I used last time and runner number 2 in blocks of the blond, bronze and brown linen.