Category: wet finishing
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That Old Magic in the Water
The colours in the photo are not quite ‘true’ as the greens look more yellow than they really are, but the good news is that the sleying error filled in quite nicely during wet finishing and these towels will not be relegated to ‘second’ status after all. 🙂 When something as simple as getting the…
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Before or After?
Finished place mats removed from the loom ready for serging. So, are you supposed to cut and serge/zig-zag before or after wet finishing? Well, that depends. When I had my old Maytag washing machine, I would simply take the entire length of weaving and toss it into the tub and dryer and cut the place…
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Progress on Several Fronts
This photo shows the unpressed cloth on the left and the pressed cloth on the right. The unpressed cloth is nice enough but after pressing it gleams. I confess I’m a magpie so anything shiny is always more attractive to me than something that isn’t, but I just feel the colours look so much richer…
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Unwinding
This is a squirrel cage swift. I find that it works much better than the more common umbrella swifts that are available. The skein behaves better in this orientation, so even when I’m using an umbrella swift, I will mount it with the axle horizontal rather than vertical as seen in every ad for them…
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Raw Materials
Most weavers in this day and age wind up weaving rectangles – place mats, scarves, shawls, etc., etc. What we tend to forget is that historically what weavers wove were the raw materials for people who cut and sewed something from the yardage. Here is the damp yardage for my new office curtains. I’ll press…
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Flexibility
One of the advantages of being self-employed is that you set your own schedule – and when Life Happens, you can also change it. I’d intended to go pressing on Monday, making a marathon of it – the curtain fabric, 4 towels and 3 dozen or so scarves. But there is a ‘family’ meeting on…
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Relaxation
Someone asked on one of the lists about whether or not one should allow the woven web to ‘relax’ after being cut off the loom, before wet finishing. I think the answer to that question is another one of those ‘it depends’ sorts of answers. During a workshop with one expert, he stoutly maintained that…
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Knowledge and Soapboxes
A gamp of various wefts for the rest of the warp. Colours are not true – the greyish one is actually a soft greyed lavender which looks very pretty on the warp but not so great in the photo…. There has been a lively discussion on one of the chat groups about recipe weavers vs…