Weaving on the Macomber

The time came to move all the wool and boxes from around the Macomber so I could start a project on it.  What you can't see in the photo below is the bags of wool are now in/around/over the upright loom - so for the moment I can weave on one or the other until I can sort and store the spare wool/yarn.

It should be noted that I did manage to uncover the Leclerc Dorothy, but more on that later.

Dressing the Macomber

The project is one we have had 'on the books' for a while.  We bought a nice oak table and chairs soon after arriving here and use them in the kitchen (four of the chairs, and other rooms; the other two).  While they are fairly comfortable they do really need a small cushion on the seat.  Simple to weave I said, and here we are 6 months later and I'm just now starting!!

I decided to do three cushions as a test using some of the blue cotton I had in my stash.  The final cushions will match the colour scheme we have planned for the kitchen.  It is 8/4 cotton which I would normally use for rug warp yarn, but I hope will give us a nice firm and hard wearing cushion material.  The hand woven will only be on one side with some plain cloth on the other - where the zip will be.  We will stuff them with a small sheet of foam and some of our 'reject but washed' Clun Forest short locks.

It was a pretty straight forward task to dress the loom with the 440 ends, in a point twill design, taking just on a day

Heddles threaded and reed sleyed.

 I had planned to put a twined border at either end, but I soon discovered that fiddling with twining at 21 epi is not fun, so that will have to wait for another project. The weaving is racing along with over half the weaving done in two sessions yesterday interrupted by a trip to the recycle centre in Cleveland.

Progress on the cushion covers.

The other weaving was on the Dorothy.  I had heard that the reflective properties of 'Z' and 'S' twist wool yarns would be visible in weaving, so set out to see what that would actually produce.  Previous blogs have noted the spinning of skeins of both yarn types (from Clun Forest of course).  I set up the Dorothy with a small test run using stripes of both yarns in the warp and then wove with the same sized stripes in the weft.  The best result would have been obvious 'squares' where the 'Z' or 'S' overlapped or opposed. 

As it turned out my home spun yarn turned out a little finer than my initial calculations and I didn't end up with a perfectly balanced cloth.  I will need to do a second test but with the set just a little smaller so that the weft and warp are perfectly balanced.  As it is there is definite 'striping' across the weft as seen in the picture below.  More to follow on this one.

Z/S twist sample.