Friday, October 19, 2018

My First Full Width Project on Bertha

The napkins I posted about last recently are now with Marie and are thankfully out of my hands!!!!  It is nice to have my mind free to take on the next project, this time it is a shag rug for my granddaughter.  I wove a sample a couple of months ago using t-shirt material for the shag, and one thing I learned as I cut off that sample, is that t-shirts would be entirely too heavy to use on a  60x90inch shag rug!  I decided that I would use the polyester fleece that is used in the Weavers Craft magazine article that I am relying on heavily for my inspiration.


My granddaughter will pick the colors that she wants me to use, and I am making the rug twice as long and over twice as wide as this Rainbow rug that is in the magazine.  I will also be precutting the shag before I weave so that I won't have to spend time fishing for those loops that were so hard to find when I wove the sample.







Since I was changing so many things, I had to do some math, not my strong point, but I had to know how much 8/4 I needed so that I could choose what color to use.  The warp will not show in the rug so I was able to use a color that I had gotten for a different project that never got off of the ground.








Yep, put on your sunglasses because it is this bright!  I started with 5 cones and  ended with 1 cone and 4 partials.


















I held 4 strands together and carefully wound 15 inch bouts of 5 yards, 4 times, to make the 60 inch warp width.  I did something a little different to hold the cross this time.  I took a drinking straw or 2 that I had on hand, and I cut a couple of lengths.  I placed them at the cross and used blue painters tape to hold them together.








So easy to handle!









Warp Chains in a box. (Do you still have those sunglasses?)





Up and over the castle, ready for the lease sticks on the other side.




Getting the lease stick in place.





I removed the straws once the lease sticks were in place and tied in place on the back beam.  Then it was just a matter of spreading the warp through the raddle that I had in place on top of the castle.








The warp was spread and then lashed onto the apron irons before I could wind the warp.  This warp is only 5 yards so it was on the warp beam in record time.




3 out of 5 of my looms have sectional warp beams, so this is an unusual warping sequence for me, and having the raddle on top of the castle was a first for me, but since the warp was so wide, I felt that the heddles were going to get in the way if I tried to go through the castle.  I have to say that I really liked warping this way, and I am going to see if I can implement some of the things I learned today on my other non sectional looms.

I was soon tying off the warp at the lease sticks and I will soon be threading.  The only thing left to do is choose the colors I want to use for shag and then make strips and cut them to size.  Before long I will be immersed in springy shag!

Until next time, keep Weaving, Tina

1 comment:

LA said...

Can't wait to see the run under construction!!!