Mum’s tea towels are done:

A close up:

The pattern is #49 from A Weaver’s Book of 8-Shaft Patterns by Carol Strickler. I liked how it formed pinwheels, but it’s not the traditional pinwheel pattern. Mum likes blue the most, green secondly. I used these same colours to weave her some plain weave tea towels some years back.

That’s two items off the schedule of out four. I thought I had another done – warping the Katie ready for the rug weaving class – but I ran into a snag with the reed. I only have a 10dpi reed for it, not the 12dpi one specified. That ought to have been fine, but when I looked up a sett chart for how to space 6 ends per inch on a 10 dpi the only option was to dent at 5dpi or 7dpi. I opted for 5dpi, which made it two inches wider. While I can just fit the threads across the reed, the ends at the sides bulge around the unused heddles.

I thought about removing the heddles, which would be fiddly but doable. Then I remembered that I have an old reed in the garage from the Osbourne floor loom that I made a mess of de-rusting by using a spray on derust with a primer that gooped up the slots. If it was a 12dpi reed, I could cut a piece off of the right length. The short piece would still need cleaning up, but it wouldn’t be as big a job as the full length of reed.

Sure enough, there is a reed in the garage. In fact, there were four! I’d totally forgotten that I’d got three reeds with the Lotus loom, all of which needed a bit of de-rusting. I’d bought a new stainless steel reed for it. I wasn’t going to cut up those reeds, however. Thankfully, the really old reed is 12dpi as I’d hoped. I’m going to get Paul to cut a piece off tomorrow and I’ll set about derusting it and the three newer reeds. Then I’ll rethread the reed on the Katie loom and that’ll be another item off the schedule.

Which leaves the last of the Rigid Heddle samplers to weave and write notes for – the Vari Dent one. I’ve been looking forward to this one!