4 Horse Blanket

Not a blanket big enough for 4 horses, but rather a throw for the artist who painted the picture "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (Anne's younger brother Connell), in appropriate matching colors.

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Connell Byrne

The first challenge was to match the colors which are much brighter in the original which hangs in Connell's living room in Baltimore.  The copy above from http://www.pbase.com/connellart doesn't nearly capture the mix of vivid colors. Luckily we had plenty of photo's to go by.  In the end we managed to find appropriate yarn at www.loveknitting.com.  To get the color range we went with an acrylic in DK weight. 

After some fiddling to sort out appropriate balances for stripe/background and color mixes we ordered the yarn and waited for the 7-10 days for delivery - they just made it.

Half the warp wound

Dressing back to front.

A day of preparation, winding the warp, and attaching it to the loom.  Everything went smoothly although as this is the widest project I have undertaken I had to borrow parts from the upright loom as most other accessories I have are 36" wide and this is 40".  I also found I had missed one green warp end. Far better at this stage than after starting to weave!

Ready to tie on

 No problems while threading heddles or sleying the reed and nothing complicated as it is 8 ends per inch in an 8 dent reed.

Weaving started.

Started weaving and so far it is going smoothly - I have some weighted floating selvedges on this to help avoid too much draw in (I don't hae a temple large enough).  It's a balanced weave so will go slowly at first to ensure my beating is appropriate, but it is the same as the last blanket I wove so I recall it isn't a heavy beat. 

I have a new shuttle for this project. The small plastic shuttles can be thrown across this width but they don't hold all that much yarn so I would be forever changing bobbins.  For this I have a new wooded 15" Leclerch boat shuttle and enough bobbins for the colors.  It seems to work pretty well. Photo's to follow.

Gift Towels Finished

With some extended sessions the towels were finished.

The obligatory finish libation...

Pete (the loom) performed well - and will now get a deserved clean - weaving 30 cotton towels really does get dusty!!  I used a temple to keep the draw in to a minimum and as the next photo shows I managed to keep the overall width pretty consistent across the whole warp.

Edge of the cloth beam.

After using some sticks and packing around where the knots were I didn't bother with any more packing and had no problems.

The towels were cut off, rough finished on each end of the continuous wash - any ends were trimmed and the whole thing was thrown in the washing machine.  After washing and drying I ironed the whole roll and then cut it up at the marker threads.  I then ironed and pinned the hems and machine sewed them.

Towel #1 finished.

We had about 22 towels to complete to post/deliver for Christmas and the rest are stock for sale or next Christmas gifts.  I bought two very large cones of the cotton for this project and based on how much this used, I should be good for 3 to 4 years!!