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

             

                   

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    

Snap, Crackle, Pop

I just tackled another new-to-me weave structure, crackle.  Crackle is also known as Jamtlandvaev in Swedish weaving terminology.  The American name for the weave structure comes from the pottery terminology for a type of glaze.  Some of the colors in the woven cloth just barely peak through, like the crackles on a ceramic pot. And crackle is a whole lot easy to spell and pronounce than Jamtlandvaev.

These towels were woven with a 4 block crackle using 4 colors.  In each single color warp block, there are at least 3 options for color - the warp color, the tabby weft and the pattern weft.  Crackle is similar to overshot because you weave a tabby shot and then a pattern shot.  This gives a huge variety of color options once the loom is warped.  I used 4 colors for the warp: tan, pumpkin and burgundy in 8/2 cotton and a navy blue yarn frogged from a cotton sweater.  The pattern weft floats over up to three warp ends at a time.

Researching crackle, the set up sounded complex, but it's actually easier to weave than it is to read the instructions.  It's a block weave, with the rule that at the end of each group of the same blocks, you need to add another warp thread called an "incidental".

A  is threaded: 1, 2, 3, 2
B is threaded:  2, 3, 4, 3
C is threaded: 1, 4, 3, 4
D is threaded: 1, 4, 1, 2

A = 1
B = 2
C = 3

D = 4

In one of the towels, I used the same tabby throughout.  The other three, I just selected colors randomly.  On some, I was consistent in the number of picks per block - 16 tabby and 16 pattern.  On the other towels, I mixed it up, which resulted in thick and thin rectangles in a wide variety of color combinations.  The other benefit is the front and back sides of the cloth can end up with different color variations.

The starting point for these towels came from Country Rustic Towels, Best of Handwoven, A Dozen Projects Using 8/2 Cotton.

Date Finished  March 2013

Loom  Baby Wolf

Weave Structure  Crackle

Reed  12, 16 epi

Warp     Fiber  cotton

              Count  mostly 8/2

              Color tan, burgundy, pumpkin, navy

              Mfr  Dragon Tail

              Source  Earth Guild

Warp     Width in Reed  22 in

              Ends  354

              Length  4 yds

Weft      Same

Beat        More   Weft Faced        

Size  Finished 19 x 24

Notes  - These towels are wider than a typical dish towel.  Next time, I'll narrow the warp.  Ended up with 3 towels and a small handtowel.