All wise... a bit of catching up... one...

Well... November is turning out to be one of the slowest months for me in terms of posts written. Unless I get a lot written in the next few days, it's going to be a rather sorry showing.

This is the first of three posts I'm making in an effort to bring this place up-to-date.

Weaving. I started some placemats using a draft I found online. It's a freebie from the Leclerc company of Canada. I had figured out the instructions from the French version of the pattern before realizing there was an English version. It makes me feel pretty good to have been able to understand the French. I wish I were fluent. Alas. Non.

Here is the warp as I was threading it:

The pattern is warp-faced meaning the warp threads are so close to each other they completely cover the weft. This creates a certain type of fabric. If the weft is thick, one obtains a mat-like material. Good for placemats. I'm using 3 threads at a time to create a thicker weft and the fabric is turning out very nice. Not too thick, not too thin. Won't take forever to dry after washing, but thick enough to protect a table top.

Lot's of learning from experience on this. The warp is the longest I've ever wound at 6.5 yards. That's enough for 8 placemats. I did not tie the warp chains in enough places which caused some trouble when I went to wind the warp onto the beam. Some threads were criss-crossed and loose and folded over on themselves when entering the heddles. I ended up with 5 broken warp threads due to this (there are 514 all together). It was all a bit iffy for about 15 minutes, but I persevered and tied on some replacement threads and it's now proceeding nicely.

I have completed one mat and am just starting another. Half way through the first I noticed a threading error but decided to finish the mat and fix the mistake in between mats--in the area that becomes fringe. The mis-threading caused a glitch in the pattern that is pretty hard to see, one must know there is a mistake and further more, know where to look.

This shows the weaving at the end of the 1st mat, just after I fixed the threading error and proceeded to start the 2nd mat. You can see the knots where I had to re-tie the miscreant thread after fixing the mistake. I had to cut the thread in order to remove it from a heddle on frame #2 and move it to frame #3.

Pretty, aren't they? :)