Wedding Shawl Commission

Last month I posted the following photo that shows the array of yarns that were chosen by a friend for her daughter's wedding shawl.

My friend originally planned to weave the shawl herself but then commissioned me to weave it.

This is the warp on the loom. I was concerned that the white weft was going make the shawl too white. No need to worry. It came out just right.

In this close-up you can see the variety of yarns used in the warp. The weft is relatively fine with a regular slub that helps keep the yarns in place even though the shawl is loosely woven.

My favorite model just happened to be here before my friend was to pick up the shawl. (That's my daughter visiting from VT.)

I got the report back from my friend: "My daughter loves her wedding shawl!! She says it's the most beautiful shawl she has ever seen!!  That's a compliment from my very fussy and stylish daughter!"

Still weaving

I haven't written about weaving lately, but I'm still working at the loom. I have orders from 3 regular customers for 9 baby blankets. I just finished a warp with 10 blankets.

Last week I finished an order for wool throws. This customer had her yarn spun at Yolo Wool Mill and wanted 5 different blankets. Sometimes it is necessary to add a lot of spinning oil to the wool during processing. The yarn isn't very appealing in that state, but woven blankets aren't truly finished until they are 'wet finished'. In wet finishing  the  oil is removed and the blanket is fulled. Take a look at the before and after photos of these blankets.

I calculated a sett of 5.5 epi. I used a 6-dent reed and left every 12th dent open. After I started weaving I worried that you would see that empty space in all 5 blankets and that would distract from the woven pattern. I didn't need to worry.  In the photo below you can sort of see that line, but when you see the blanket you focus on the diagonal twill and don't even notice the vertical line.

Above is the before and after of another twill blanket.

Plain weave. Before fulling is above and after fulling is below.

This is one of my favorite weave structures. I was concerned about the finishing of this blanket. The yarn that I got from the mill was on cones and in skeins. The skeined yarn was so much oilier than the coned yarn  it almost seemed to be a different batch. You can see the difference in the photo. In fact, there was so much tacky grease that I had to pull a length of yarn out of the shuttle with every pass or my end-feed shuttle would go flying off the loom (guess that's because I have a fly-shuttle loom!) because the yarn wouldn't feed out properly. I was relieved after I washed the blanket that there was no difference in the fulling of the two yarns.