Cafe Grande Mug Rugs

I decided I needed to make some little gifty things for the coffee group this year and came up with the idea of Mug Rugs.  I saw these in an old issue of Handwoven, and the pattern called for using 3/2 cotton for warp and weft.  However, I have plenty of colors of 5/2 cotton in my stash, and decided that the 5/2 would make them a little smaller, closer to the size of a coffee cup or wine glass.  The 5/2 cotton in my stash comes from other projects and some arrived through a Facebook purchase.  A fellow weaver in Red Lodge, advertised a box of weaving supplies, which included loads of yarn, an inkle loom, a Schacht End Feed Shuttle, a double shuttle and lots of stick shuttles.  Oh happy day. The Carolina Blue, turquoise and grey all came from that purchase.

I will need 10 or 11, if I am counting right, but I ended up with 22.  These were begun on one of the looms in Red Lodge and only 7 were completed before we left for the fall.  So the one weekend I was in Red Lodge before Christmas, I was weaving in every spare moment.

If I were to make these again, I would do a couple of things differently. First, I would not use white as the warp and tabby weft.  White just gets dirty too easily and I can envision lots of coffee stains on these.  I would also use a pattern weft that is a little heavier than the warp, so if 5/2 is warp, use 3/2 for the pattern weft.

Structure  Crackle, treadled as summer and winter
Source   Handwoven, May 2006
Date Finished  December 2015

Loom   Baby Wolf

Reed  8, 16 epi

Warp     Fiber  cotton

              Count  5/2

              Color  white
Warp     Width in Reed 5.5"

              Ends 89

              Length 6 yds(?)

Weft      Fiber  cotton

              Count  5/2

              Color  white for tabby and other colors (red, blue, grey, turquoise) for pattern weft

             

                   

Swarthmore Check

Swarthmore Check is a canvas weave structure and which has doubled threads in both the warp and the weft.  Because there are doubled weft threads, it also requires a floating selvedge to catch the double wefts.  I wove this in a number of different patterns, some with just a couple of wide weft stripes and some with weft stripes throughout, looking a little plaid like.

Because there are a number of weft floats, these make thirsty towels.

Structure    Swarthmore Check
Source        Davison, A Handweaver's Pattern Book, page 69
Date Finished  April 2015

Loom  Baby Wolf

Reed  10, 20 epi

Warp     Fiber  Cotton

              Count  8/2

              Color  White and Yellow

Warp     Width in Reed  20 inches

              Ends  400

              Length  6 yds

Weft      Fiber  Cotton

              Count  8/2 and 10/2

              Color  Red, green and navy

Beat       50/50                  
Size  18x28

Overshot Scarves

Two weavers working in the 1950's, Josephine Estes and Bertha Gray Hayes, have studied and designed miniature overshot patterns.  Traditional overshot designs often have pattern repeats that are 200 to 400 ends.  These designs make wonderful coverlets, blankets and throws, but they are not suitable for smaller and narrower woven cloth like scarves and towels.  Josephine and Bertha's drafts are designed with repeats of 20-50 ends.  Weaving Designs by Bertha Gray Hayes was published in 2009 and Josephine Estes drafts are available at the University of Arizona weaving site here.  I picked up a skein of Autumn Rainbow Mini Mochi recently and wanted to make a scarf using the Mini Mochi as the pattern yarn, which would showcase the slow color changes of the yarn.  The draft is Josephine Estes' Rings and Crosses.


Date Finished  January 2015

Loom  Baby Wolf

Weave Structure  Overshot - Rings and Crosses

Reed  12, 18 epi

Warp     Fiber  Tencel

              Count  8/2

              Color Turquoise

              Mfr  Valley

              Source  WEBS

Warp     Width in Reed  7"

              Ends  130

              Length  6 yds

Scarf One Weft      Fiber  wool and nylon

              Count  Mini Mochi

              Color  Autumn Rainbow

              Mfr  Crystal Palace

              Source  Paradise Fibers

Scarf  Two Weft      Fiber  cotton

              Count  5/2

              Color  White

              Mfr  Valley

              Source  WEBS

Crackle Weave Workshop

Teena Tuenge of Western North Carolina Fiber/Handweavers Guild recently taught a weekend workshop on crackle weave.  The workshop was a fundraiser for the Blue Ridge Fiber Show which will be held in the fall of 2014 at the WNC Arboretum.  The workshop was attended by about 20 participants in the auditorium of the Folk Art Center. This was a workshop where we all warped our looms in advance and then spent two days playing with weave structure, treadling, and color sampling.  Teena provided us with treadling and tie up instructions for about 20 different weave structures, all using the same crackle threading.

By the end of Sunday, I had woven over twenty different samples using the crackle threading, mostly crackle tie-up but a wide variety of treadlings.  Granted most of the samples were only a few inches long, but enough to tell how the different treadling affects the final cloth.  The crackle notebook that I created with the samples and treadling instructions, finally inspired me to wet finish the samples and finish the notebook for a class I took a year ago at Arrowmont on Turned Beiderwand.







After weaving the samples, I wove off the balance of the warp in the classic crackle treadling and created a lovely piece of cloth, 8" by 30 inches.  Once again, I am not sure what the future life of the is will be - a tablet cover, a small purse, or will it stay in place as an unfinished table runner.

Date Finished  March, 2014

Loom        Baby Wolf

Weave Structure  Crackle threading, many                                           treadlings

Reed  12, 24 epi

Warp     Fiber   Cotton

              Count    10/2

              Color    Pistachio, Avocado, Quarry and                              Yellow

              Mfr  Uki

              Source  Georgia Yarn Co and Yarn Barn

Warp     Width in Reed  9 in

              Ends 222

              Length  4 yards

Weft      Fiber  same

              

Beat       Weft Faced