Celebrating
This has been a busy long weekend in the Northern Hemisphere with a variety of celebrations. Canadians celebrated last Saturday, and our neighbours to the south are celebrating today. However, if that’s not enough celebration, you missed the chance for World UFO Day on Sunday and Plastic Bag Free Day yesterday.
Since we aren’t sure what colours UFOs are nor do we know what colour to use for the absence of plastic bags…we decided to feature the colours that represent the celebrations in our part of the world.
And therefore – from the photo above – we have featured red, white and blue…
The yarns going clockwise around the photo are:
- 20/2 Bombyx Silk B.B. Blue
- 20/2 Bombyx Favourite Wine
- 20/2 Bombyx Silk Bleached
- Harrisville Shetland Red
- 8/2 cotton Bleached
- 8/2 cotton Royal
- 8/2 cotton Red
We’ve also just added 8/2 cotton Blue to our inventory!
Holly Berry Tea Towel Kit
The Holly Berry Tea Towels are a fun, relaxing project for summer. There are two versions of this kit – one with cotton and the other with cottolin (a 70% cotton/30% linen blend), which, by the way, is a wonderful yarn to weave with. We can also make the kits in any colour, even make it in our new 8/2 cotton ‘blue’. At checkout, add your colours to your order note.
The structures you would weave into these towels are plain weave and Atwater Bronson Lace.
There is even a bonus hidden inside this pattern – a mini-lesson from Jane on how to design with Bronson Lace that you’ll be able to use when you design your own lace project.
Kiki’s Bambu Scarf
While focusing on red in this newsletter – we thought that Kiki’s Bambu Scarf kit would also be a fun red scarf to weave.
Christel Knoth is another talented weaver from Salt Spring – known to all as Kiki. One of her favourite weave structures is Turned Twill, which she used to design these three scarves, woven on the same warp with different weft colours and treadlings.
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From Our Inbox
This week we are featuring another weaver from the southern hemisphere – an Aussie. Jessica Norris lives in a magical place In Australia called the Southern Highlands. She wanted to share with us the project she took on to reproduce a medieval cloth stored at the V&A Museum in London, England. Enjoy reading about her amazing journey of discovery and the help she was able to find through the School of Weaving that made it possible for her to create this remarkable towel.
Dear Jane and the JST team,
I recently sampled for a project way outside my comfort zone that drew on a bunch of your lessons. I wanted to reproduce a “Perugia towel” (a medieval cloth like the ones in the V and A museum. (e.g. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O123093/towel-unknown/ )
These towels are woven on a linen warp, with cotton pattern weft. The body of the towel is typically point twill or broken diamond twill. After doing the Huck and Twills project (season 5 episode 9) this felt like a familiar idea!
I wound my warp with 2/8 cotton (what I had in stash in white) and used all 12 shafts with a point threading. I watched the Monk’s Belt and Overshot episodes (season 6 episodes 3 and 4) to understand how to do the pattern sections (this is also called Opphämta I think, but I’m still researching the history of the weave to understand how it’s woven on a draw loom).
I used the episode on Block Analysis (season 6 episode 9) to draft some 6-unit block designs and interpreted each unit with two shafts as a simple float. Then I got to weaving!
Discovering how to reproduce the blue repp weave sections on the same warp took experimenting with sett. I ended up opening to 15 epi and using 2/8 cotton over three and four ends to be able to pack the weft down to cover the warp.
The end result looks exactly like the historical towels, and I’m over the moon! This project used so much knowledge I’ve acquired from the online school of weaving that I thought you’d love to know how I’ve applied it!
Attached are pictures of the finished towel sample showing the amazing drape, details of each pattern band, and the cloth from the “good side”. One final note: the middle section with lettering was done with a pick up stick, since I don’t have a draw loom. It was laborious!
Kind regards,
Jess
Jessica Norris | Living Simply in the Southern Highlands
W: simplecraftylife.com
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