Post Olympic Marathon

As I may have mentioned - the placemats I am weaving are for 3 weddings that are only a week away now!!  The back order linen arrived and so the first job was to dye enough yarn for all the stripes.  A fairly straight forward task, but very time consuming.  Over two days we prepared and painted the yarn needed for the remaining stripes.

Wound bobbin of 'stripe' yarn

In parallel I began weaving - with one more completed last night and then this morning the marathon began.  It will take me two days to weave all the placemats - I had estimated about an hour a placemat (16+ inches), but of course that doesn't take into account broken threads, coffe breaks and getting up to stretch regularly (I had to).  So averaged out over the day it took about an hour and a half for each placemat, although I suspect the earlier ones took longer as once I had backed off the tension a little bit the warp threads stopped breaking - which isn't rocket science.  Higher tension made keeping the selvedge neater easier, so the sacrifice is that the selvedge is now a little less 'straight', but still within a reasonable tolerance :-)

6 placemats done today, with the already woven 3, leaves 5 to do tomorrow, unless I get motivated and do one more tonight.  We'll see.

9 placemats done.

The plan for tomorrow is: weave, remove from loom, sew ends (either side of the blue cut mark in the above photo), cut, 'finish' (wet), hem, relax (!).