From Play Pen to Weaving Tool

At the beginning of last week I looked at all the part-done projects and tasks hanging about and decided to get stuck into completing them. The list included the rag rugs, some gardening tasks, a few sewing jobs and carpentry projects. I thought I’d get it all done in a day… it took a week. But I did succeed in my aim!

The rag rugs will be in another post, and the gardening and sewing jobs were small and menial, so I’ll stick to the carpentry projects. The first one was another box thing to match the one I put my 4-shaft certificate course notes in, ready for when I do the 8-shaft one. It made sense to make it while I could recall what I did on the first one. However, I do wonder if I’ve now jinxed the course, and it won’t go ahead now!

The other project was to turn a giant warping board which was once two sides of a wooden kid’s pen into two normal sized warping boards. I’d picked up the broken play pen from hard rubbish aaaages ago. It once looked like this:

Only two panels survived. I was going to make a clothes drying rack or hang plants off it, but one day I looked at it and thought, “all I’d have to do is cut the dowels a handspan long and I’d have four sides of a warping board”. Of course, Paul did the cutting as he is master of the power saw, and he found some metal brackets to join the corners with and “Ta-Dah!” we had a warping board.

A really huge warping board. Maybe 120 cm square. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a photo of it. A pic of someone holding it could have been quite comical. I held off oiling it and left it out in the garage because there was nowhere to store it inside and I knew I was going to have to consider whether I really needed a giant warping board or should cut it down.

I decided on the latter and, after some measuring up, confirmed there was enough framework to make two normal sized boards. A bit of sanding, sawing, screwing and oiling later the reconstruction was done. However, what I had then was two warping boards with wobbly pegs. The dowels had shrunk since I’d bought the pen panels.

So I set to carefully painting watered down pva around and into the gaps. This wound up taking a couple of hours, broken up over days as the glue dried and shrank and needed to be topped up, but by the end those pegs weren’t moving anywhere.

Do I need two more warping boards? Nope. But the wood has been repurposed and the boards will eventually find homes.

I Fell Into It, It Seams

In the middle of making patterns for my next sewing project, a friend invited me to a Regency-era costume picnic the next weekend. That sent me off in a bit of a tangent. I have a dress I made some years ago that I’ve only worn twice. While it’s cotton velvet, so should be warm, I was suddenly obsessed with the idea of having the right underthings. Stays were probably not achievable in the time I had, but I could try making a chemise. The garment, from what I recall, goes under the stays to protect the skin and soak up sweat.

And sweat was likely, if we had a hot day. If we had a cold day I’d appreciate the extra layer. So I searched the web for instructions, and after sending my friend lots of questions about fabric and length, cut up a bed sheet and made this in an afternoon:

Some adjustments were needed to match the neckline to my dress the next day. If I hadn’t been in the middle of a sewing jape, I probably wouldn’t have tackled this or got it done so quickly. Though it’s a simple garment to make, all seams are flat fell seams, so it’s rather slow and finicky.

I rather fancy making a full Regency corset now, but I knew I wouldn’t get one done in time for that weekend so it’s low on the to-do list. Probably I’ll get keen again next time I have a Regency-era costume event to attend.

Twill Be Rugs. Lots of Rugs.

For a few months now I’ve been cutting, matching, sewing together and ironing flannelette rag strips ready to weave more floor rugs. The flannelette scraps from the enormous bag of them I’d bought from the pj-maker last year has all been sorted and cut. The pieces of flannelette I’ve picked up since are mostly cut into strips too. I have to say, cutting big rectangles of fabric into strips is much faster and more accurate than cutting lots of scraps, and if I wasn’t doing this partly as an exercise in making something useful from what would otherwise go into the trash I’d stick to using old fabric.

I reckon I have enough batches of strips for seven or eight rugs, with possible eighth either being made up from the leftovers, or the first of a new batch using more fabric added to the leftovers. The first two rugs I’m going to weave are 1 x 2-2.3 metre wide aqua and blue rugs on the same warp, which will be a twill sequence of blue stripes interspersed with orange, yellow and green stripes. The colourway is bright and cheerful and reminds me of beach towels.

Halfway through measuring the warp I ran out of blue and had to order in more. While waiting for it to arrive I moved on to sewing the strips for the next two rugs: a pink rug and a light blue rug using the same grey warp.

My plan was to weave one pink rug of about 1m x 2.5m, and a smaller light blue rug which would require more fabric. But as I laid the pink strips out I considered the likely owner of the final rug. The most probable recipient would be a child, and it would be a pretty big rug for a child’s bedroom. So I decided to weave two pink rugs instead, at 80cm x 140cm. It turned out I had exactly half the weight of light blue rags to pink ones, so I’ll be making three rugs of the same size and don’t really need to find more fabric for the light blue one. It’s nice when things seem to fall into place like that!

The first batch of pink rags is going to be a graduation.

The second will be all mixed together, as will the light blue. The pattern will be rosepath, based on the project in Tom Knisely’s book. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to order an extra cone of the grey warp along with the blue. Not only will I need more than I have left on the original cone to do the longer warp, but winding with two ends together will make the measuring much faster.

Once the blue warp arrived I finished winding that warp. It took two attempts to get it on the loom. On the first attempt I realised I had counted 22 threads for every blue stripe not at the edges, but was actually 24. So I had to add threads and weigh them at the back of the loom. Whether the weights were on or not, this made lashing on the warp at the front a pain in the posterior.

But it got it done and started weaving… and realised that the draft I had created didn’t, as I’d thought, let me weave plain weave for the hems. I tried weaving basketweave, but it just didn’t compact down as it ought to and would not make a good hem. So I went back to Fiberworks and came up with a draft that mostly fixed the problem. And since this meant I’d have to rethread the loom anyway, I wound the whole warp onto the front beam, tied on the extra threads so I wouldn’t have to hang and weigh them, and wound it back onto the back beam.

After that the threading went perfectly and I was finally able to get weaving.

However, by then my back was hitting a bad phase and I had to stay away from the loom for a few days, which was hard after all the preparation that’s gone before this. I just want to weave!

Rainbow Rugs

These were a joy to weave. So bright and cheery.

The plan was to weave two 1x2m rugs, both using a spectrum of colours but with different approaches, so the recipient can choose which they want.

For the first rug, I wove neatly delineated stripes that form squares with the warp stripes. I used dark blue fabric for the blue stripe. For the second I wove a single sweep through the spectrum achieved by using two shuttles: creating a solid colour section for 20 rows then a mixed section of alternating stripes with the next colour for the following 20. I used a sky blue fabric for the blue stripe. I also had red on both ends, which made it longer than the planned 2 metres.

I wove hems rather than fringe because there are fringe-eating cats in the household.

The amount of preparation to weave these rugs is kind of crazy. A very rough calculation puts them at about 24 hours per rug. But the result is so good, and the use of a waste product so satisfying, that the time and effort is totally worth it.

There’s going to be a lot of rag strips left, so I foresee more brightly coloured rag rugs in my future. I’ve gone through the rest of the flannelette fabric and there are seven more rugs I want to make, not including the two in other kinds of fabric on the to-do list. Most require a different warp colour, so that’s going to bump up the hours per rug count. Still, the wide sett of a rug warp makes for very fast threading.

Now I’m just waiting for restrictions to be lifted so I can visit the recipient and let them choose which one they’ll keep.

Tablecloth Pants

But not what you’re probably imagining! No gingham or embroidery, though that could be awesome. Years ago I requested a black tablecloth for a birthday or Christmas. Mum couldn’t find black so she opted for this dark charcoal which kinda worked in our old place.

We live in a different house with a different colour scheme now so when I culled our table linens recently I decided the charcoal tablecloth should go. But where to? Op shop? I like the fabric, with it’s subtle textured grid pattern, though not so much as a tablecloth. It seemed more suited to clothing. So I popped it in my fabric stash.

I imagined it becomming a shorts jumpsuit at first, and when I found a pattern I snapped it up. But after my recent decision to retire and replace two pairs of summer cotton pants it was kinda obvious what the tablecloth needed to become.

After I made the Bed Sheet Pants I made some adjustments to the pattern. I also decided to put back pockets on this pair. The fabric was slightly stretchy, so I had to take care when sewing to avoid wobbly seams. I got the waistband right this time, too.

You’ll have to trust me that they look good on! It’s not the most flattering way to photographing grey pants, hanging them against a door, and these days I just don’t have the energy to set up a tripod or chase Paul in order to have a pic of me modelling clothes.

The sewing bug hasn’t been exhausted yet, so I am now making a new dress out of one of Late Lucy’s. Or I will be, if the test run of the pattern works out. And that has been interrupted by the start of a weaving workshop that I’m really enjoying. More on that later…

Pants from Sheets

Finished yesterday. Wearing them today.

The pattern instructions lost me where the waistband attaches to the waist. I matched up the notches but there was no overlap for the button. I thought maybe I’d misinterpreted the zipper part, but it turns out the notches were wrong and the extra cinching in of the gathering thread would have got me the overlap. Which also explains why the pants were so big around the waist that I had to take them 2cm at the sides and add elastic across the back.

I didn’t discover the mistake until after I’d taken them in, so there could be no unpicking and regathering. So I just added an extra tab. The elastic will add a bit of room around the waist for varying girth.

The legs were about 5cm too short so I did as small a hem as I could manage. I noted all the adjustments on the pattern.

Though I’m kinda chuffed to be wearing a garment made from old sheets, I’m not a big fan of light coloured pants, so these will be dyed at some point. Natural dyed, if possible. It’s a pity I didn’t make these a few weeks ago, as all the windfall from recent stormy days has got a bit dried up now. Maybe the leaves still have dye potential, but I wouldn’t be able to do eco printing as they’re all curled up and brittle.

Now that the test pants are done I intend to make ‘actual’ pants from the pattern. They’ll be made from a dark grey cotton table cloth with an interesting grid texture that seems to be about the same weight of fabric.

Rainbow Rug Ready

For months now I’ve been creating a big pile of rags in the colours of the rainbow. Back in May I posted that I’d been cutting rag strips from the big bag of flanellette for weeks. I wove the Country Rug in June, as a test rug. Since then I’ve been preparing rags for the second rug.

Of the usual rainbow colours, I didn’t have much orange, yellow or green. Nor could I find much flannelette in those colours in online stores. So I bought solid colours of fabric and used fabric pens to add pattern. And then I dyed a pile of mostly white strips.

Several sessions followed of carefully laying out even sequences of pattern in each colour then and sewing them together with the overlocker.

And many hours of using a bias maker tool to fold over the edges of the strips so I could iron them flat. I now have a huge basket full of rag strips ready for weaving.

Next came winding the warp.

And finally, four months later, I’ve started weaving. But I’ll leave that to another post.

The Country Rug

While waiting for my flannelette orders to arrive two things happened. First, I wound up going in person to the shop I’d ordered from. It seems like everyone is coming out of isolation much faster than they went in. Which would be fine, if everyone was physical distancing. But that’s another grumble for another time and place…

I bought a half metre of plain purple and red flannelette as back up, figuring I could weave it as it was, or draw all over it with a black fabric pen to create an impression of pattern. Part of my order arrived faster than before, so I now had three pieces of fabric to cut up and weave.

However…

In the meantime, I’d hit upon another solution to the need for more strips for the rug. The problem with using the rest of the strips I’d already cut was that they were half an inch narrower, so they would form visibly thinner weft. But what if I cut strips half an inch wide and wrapped the 1 1/2 inch strips around them?!! That would bulk up the thinner strips equal to the larger.

I was certain it would work. So I plucked out some strips in colours that would suit – burgundy patterns and a plaid – and sewed those strips together with a thin filler strip at the centre, cut from strips in colours that didn’t match any of the batches I’d put together. Then I carefully folded in the edges and ironed them flat.

I got weaving, starting with the blue batch I’d already prepared, moving onto the burgundy plaid then the two burgundy patterns… and ran out of warp.

I didn’t even get to the point of cutting up the red plaid I’d ordered. And I also found that I didn’t have enough warp left to weave a 15 cm header. So some unweaving began. I removed the first batch of burgundy, then the second as without the first it was too bright against the rest of the rug.

Finally I was able to weave the header and finish the rug. All without using any of the fabric I’d bought. After I cut it off the rom I took it into the kitchen, I flung it out over the floor.

It looked good. I got out a measuring tape and noted the dimensions of the rug, and then the distance from the start to when I ran out of weft the first time. And I discovered that I had stopped a few scant inches shorter than the rug was supposed to be. All the waiting and adapting of strips and buying of more fabric had been totally unnecessary.

How could this be? I had measured the length of the rug on the loom by winding the tape around the front beam following the woven fabric. But I must have missed a round somehow. Such a doofus!

Well, at least I now have confirmed that my maths brought me reasonably close to the actual result, confirming that I can weigh strips to calculate how much square meterage of rug I’ll get from them.

Once I’d sewn the hems, I took a deep breath and threw the rug in the washing machine on the delicates-cold setting. Why? If the rugs are going to be sold, I need to be able to recommend how to wash them, and know whether I should prewash before selling them. The rug shrank about 5% in the weaving and another 5% in the washing. The hems shrank more, but a good stretch while they were wet got them almost back to the full width.

The next rug I want to make will be a colour gamut – a rainbow of warp yarns and a graduating rainbow of weft rags. I’m hoping to get a 2 x 1 metre rug. It’s for a friend’s daughter, either birthday or Christmas depending on when I finish!

The Rug of Waiting

As I mentioned a few posts ago, one of the batches of flannelette had a horsey-plaid-camo-sporty vibe, in greens, blues, greys and browns. I cut them into 2 inch wide strips before realising that I wasn’t going to get many strips out of the flannelette if I made them that wide, and switched to 1 1/2 inch wide strips.

I figured this batch would be my first rug. After working out the size of rug the rags should make using the rough equations I’d come up with based on Tom’s ook, I considered the rug’s design. Do I mix up the strips, or weave bands of each colour? I hung the strips over the front beam of the loom, then tried mixing them up. Nope. Didn’t look anywhere near as good as when they were arranged in groups of the same colour, going from green to brown to grey to blue. But there was quite a jump from green to brown. I had two strips of an khaki camo which would fill that transition nicely, so I googled camo flannelette… and found only one shop in Australia that had any. I ordered some, but the shop was supposed to ring me to get my details and they never did. I also found some nice grey-blue plaid in another shop, and bought two metres of it because it was cheaper that way. I waited for the order to arrive but when it arrived it was not really the same sort of fabric, so I decided I would just weave the rug as it was.

(I did consider contacting the woman I’d bought the flannelette scraps from to ask if she had any more in camo, but I didn’t want to risk ending up with another enormous bag of it! At least not until I knew I wanted to keep making these rugs.)

Black seemed the obvious warp colour, but just black or should I add variation? In Tom’s book there are a couple of projects with staggered stripes of a second colour in the warp. I wanted to try this some time. Well why not this time? But of the colours I had, would any suit? Not really. So I ordered another cone, in grey.

More waiting for an order to arrive. In the meantime, I had been joining strips. In Gerlinde’s class she’d shown us how to overlock them together quickly, and her method certainly was satisfyingly fast.

No shuttle of mine was going to hold the whole rug’s worth of strips, so I did them in batches of the same colour. That also meant I could add a batch of camo or plaid when the fabric arrived. After the joining was done I used a bias binding thingamejig and iron to turn the edges of the strips in. Then I wound them onto rag shuttles.

With the rags ready, and the grey warp yarn having arrived, and the Lotas loom free, it was time to get warping. I got winding, and a niggle started straight away. The yarn was thinner than expected. The project in Tom’s book had a very dense sett – 16epi – compared to what I was used to for rugs. Gerlinde’s recommendation had been 6. I’d reduced that to 12 for this project. I reasoned that I should stick to the instructions, but once I began sleying the reed I knew it just wasn’t right. The warp would cover the rag waaay more than I wanted. So I rethreaded… while watching Eurovision on SBSOnDemand.

So where the warp staggered from black to grey, from 1 grey/1 black, I rethreaded to 2 grey/2 blacks. Then, when I wove, I wove 1/2, 3/4 rather than 1/3, 2/4 so that I had two warp ends together all the way across, effectively halving the sett to 6epi.

I wove a three 15cm header, then got weaving and immediately knew I’d been right. The balance of weft and warp looked great. The warp colour pattern was breaking up the bands of colour enough to unify them but not obscure them. The Lotus was coping with the heavy beating well. The rag was nice to work with. It was all very enjoyable and a relief to FINALLY be weaving.

Then I hit the next snag: I ran out of rag strips two thirds of the way to my intended length.

Well, this was the test rug!

I needed more rag strips. So I considered the colourway so far. Green to brown to grey to blue. Combing through the flannelette rags I hadn’t yet cut up, I found some dark blue with red designs. Perhaps I could transition from blue to red. I looked for flannelette I could buy online. Mostly pastels, a few brights and tie-dye effects, but also plenty of plaids. I ordered a metre each of a dark blue and red tie-dye, and a red plaid.

I’ve cut up the small bundle of rags in blue and red, joined and ironed them. I knew I’d have to wait until the order arrived before I could finish the rug. And the shop I’d ordered from had taken two weeks to deliver last time.

So it was time to start another project. A scarf on the rigid heddle? Or a quick one on the Jane before the next class? Or something else? Sewing? Machine knitting? Jewellery?

Or maybe none of the above, as RSI has flared up in my left wrist. Hmm.

Strips

I’ve been cutting strips out of the flannelette scraps for weeks now. I started out using a self-sharpening quilter’s cutting square and a rotary cutter, but after a couple of hour-long sessions my hand began to hurt – my right hand from pressing down with the cutter and the left from pressing on the square to hold it still.

Looking at the amount of cutting still to do, I nearly gave up on the whole idea. Instead I delved into the back of the sewing cupboard and found this electric rotary cutter:

I’d used it before, and knew the resulting strips are in no way as neat as those cut with a rotary blade and square, but perfect edges don’t really matter for rag rugs strips. The cutter also has some annoying tendencies, but I eventually worked out how to minimise them.

It’s not faster than doing it by hand, but my hands didn’t complain – and my back didn’t so long as I kept sessions down to half and hour to an hour. After a couple of weeks I had got through over half the scraps and had enough for a large rainbow inspired rug, a ‘brights and whites’ rug, and a smaller mat of earthy colours.

I stopped then, figuring that I ought to work out whether I hated weaving the stuff before spending months cutting it all up. In the meantime, I’d bought $400 worth of rug cotton in six colours plus black.

Purchased a bias binding jigamething from Spotlight.

And consulted this book:

I wanted to get an idea what width of rug I should warp up for. Tom shows the results of a test he did, where he bought a yard of several kinds of fabric and wove it on the same warp, to see how many inches of fabric he got.

This would be a useful rough guide if he’d mentioned what the fabric width had been to begin with.

Flannelette on the Spotlight website is 112 cm wide, so I decided to gamble that it was sold at the same width in the US, too. Based on the guess that his fabric had been 112 x 91 cm. Doing the math, I worked out this was pretty close to 100 x 100cm. I laid out strips until I’d covered that much area of my dining table, then weighed them.

So to know how big a rug could be, I can take the weight of all the strips for it and divide that by the weight of the 100 x 100 cm batch. Then I multiply the width by length of Tom’s sample to get the square meterage of his sample rug. Then I multiply the weight of my batch by the square meterage to get the square meterage of my potential rug.

All I need to do then is divide the square meterage of my rug by the width of the rug I want to make, and I get the length. Or divide the square meterage of my rug by the length I want to get the width.

To be honest, I won’t really know if this will work until I try it. I might be wrong about the width of Tom’s fabric. I might have the math all wrong. But I’ve got the weight of 100 x 100 of flannelette and the weight of the rags for a rug, so after the first rug I can use those numbers to make a more accurate square meterage number to work out the slightly less rough size of future rugs.

But before I get to that point, I need to sew together a LOT of strips, use the bias binding jig to help me iron them into tubes, finish the jacket I’m weaving on the Lotas, and warp the loom.

It’s slow going, but I’m in no rush.