Four Shaft Place Mats

Finally the cotton and linen place mat warp is off the loom.  I swear it was the slowest weave ever!  I started out with high hopes of doing some serious stash busting and ended up with a weave that I completely lost interest in. 

The idea was to weave some very simple place mats using linen, linen/cotton slub and cottolin warp in neutral beige/browns.  I decided on an eight yard warp to give myself options.  I chose a larger grist of natural cotton for the warp.

I used the spool rack my husband made me  to pull the warp, because the colours and threads were to be random.  I ended up making three separate warps because I wanted less of some colours than others and some of the yarn was minimal. 

Of course each of the warps demanded a different set of lease sticks, so here are the three sets all piled up.  

I used the raddle on the looms castle to do the first basic colour spreading, and it looks a right mess!

Thankfully after all that, the warp pulled on very nicely.

The pattern I used was from A Handweaver’s Pattern Book by Davison called Ribbed Twill.  It is a 4 shaft pattern that has a lovely diagonal with some grouped threads.

It is always so satisfying to see the cloth winding around the cloth beam, knowing you are almost done.

This was one of the messiest warps I’ve done in a long time and there was a lot of vacuuming up to be done.

Here it is off the loom just waiting for me to decide on how to finish it.  Do I wash it in a piece and cut later?  Do I cut it into place mats, then wash?  Do I give a fringed edge with a machined finish?  Do I do a turned edge?  Do I make double across the table place mats or individual ones? Too many questions!

Here is what is keeping me from the loom right now.  We just bought an outdoor pizza oven and we are waiting impatiently for the weather to cooperate so we can try it out.  Apparently it will get up to 500 C and cook a pizza in 1 minute!  There will be wine and cheese when we finally fire her up.