The beginning of the first towel on the linen warp.
Spent most of the weekend working on getting the linen weaving project on the loom.
Saturday, I sleyed the reed and completed threading. Sunday, with some help from a friend, I was able to wind on the seven yard warp and start weaving.
The sleying and threading wasn’t all that different from the wool warps I’ve done before. The big difference was in the winding on. It went FAST. No tangling. No fuzzies. No stretching. It was so nice. I can’t believe its taken me this long to try weaving with linen.
I was also concerned about winding the perns, thinking that the “springy-ness” of the fiber would cause the perns to spontaneously unravel. That has not been an issue so far.
I’m using an end feed shuttle, as I normally do. I have a 15 inch Shacht end feed shuttle I’m using for the bulk of the weaving. The white stripes are being done on my Bluster Bay 11 inch end feed shuttle. I’m not using a floating warp. The design has plain weave on the selvage and it seems to be taking care of itself.
I’m being really careful with throwing the shuttle. I’m really not throwing it. I’m kind of “handing” it through the shed. I’ve notice that if any of the linen threads get caught, they stretch or become lose, which just causes them to get caught more often. I’m not really sure what to do about that other than hang weights off the back which I’m reluctant to do, so my solution is just to make sure it doesn’t happen.
At this point, I’ve completed the first towel and started on the second one. There are seven total designs in the kit.
