brooks bouquet with a twist

Moving right along with the lace towels, I thought I would try my hand at the brooks bouquet. You don't need a pick up stick for this, you use your shuttle to go under a certain number of threads in the upper shed, usually 3 or 4, then you wrap those threads and pick up the next 3 or 4 threads. I chose to use 4 threads since I thought it would fit well in the space I am using.

Here is the lace with 5 plain picks between the lace rows. Looks good, I thought but a little blah, don't you think?

At this point I began to have real problems with draw in and thread breakage, so I brought out the ancient temple I got with Kathryn the 8 harness. More on that later.

I had only done a couple of inches on the towel, but way more than I wanted to unweave or cut out. So I just did a couple of picks of a contrasting color and started over. At the same time I noticed that the lace was off center just by 2 threads. I puzzled over this for just a minute and I wondered what would happen if I staggered the lace rows.

And here it is! In the first couple of rows I only used 1 plain pick with no additional picks before starting the new row. I then began to use 2 more plain pics before the lace row.

I have found that I need to use the filler rows as well with this lace.

Here is a close up of the wrap.

I have found that I get a more even row if I do all the wraps and then beat, then using my fingers and/or a reed hook, going from right to left I tighten up the lace motifs.

Here you can see the looser wraps to the left of the hook.

Here is the really old temple that I got with my 8 harness. I thought I would never use that old thing. All there was was 2 pieces of wood, so I had to piece something together that would work.

Here you can see one of the screws I am using.

A little 8/4 to keep it all together. I can slip these off easily when I need to.

I went online, to price new temples......... Wow, I guess this one will do just fine!

On the rug warp in blues, I had been using 8/4 doubled in black as the hem weft , and I really liked the way it showed off the bright colors in the warp. I thought it might look good to try a mess of 8/4 as weft material. I got up to 16 strands and it still wasn't enough. I then went looking for black material, and found this in my stash, what a relief.

Now for the rug shuttle full of 16 strands of black 8/4. I see a black warp in my future.

Wally is remembering how hard it was to get that big pile of bermuda grass out of the blackberry patch!

Happy Weaving, Tina