Generally, by the time I’m sitting at the loom shuttle in hand, I’ve thought through all the possibilities and have made up my mind what I’m going to do. Sometimes minor changes are made, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking before I start weaving.
This warp, however, seems particularly fluid. After thinking about how I would set the warp up for two weeks, when it came time to start beaming I radically changed what I was going to do in order to use up some 2/40’s cotton along with the 2/20’s. This meant a change in density, and doubling the very fine linen weft for the samples.
As I wove the samples, I was quite pleased with the results, but the fabric was not really suitable for towels. In order to make good towel fabric, I figured that I’d need to re-sley to 27 or maybe even 30 epi. That would make the fabric a bit skimpy on width for towels, so I really didn’t want to do that.
However, I felt that if I used 2/8 Tencel for weft, I wouldn’t have to change anything, and I’d get a pretty nice shawl out of it. So I wove one using some 2/8 lavender Tencel for weft, which turned out quite nice, I thought.
Unfortunately, most of my 2/8 Tencel is in rather intense jewel tones, not pastels. My only other option was bleached white.
About the time I thought about using bleached white weft, my fibre choice radar pinged, and I suddenly remembered that I had some 3000 yard/pound white rayon chenille. Quite a lot of it, in fact.
So here I am in mid-stream, radically changing my weft choice, and being rather pleased with the results.
Sometimes you just have to be open to alternate possibilities.