For quite a while, I’ve been fascinated with this image from Ancient Hungarians of conquest era magyar boot mounts lifted as they lay from the grave site. There are multiple examples of ornamental boot mounts scattered throughout the book, but this is the only one that shows how they were originally found. According to the book, the boot mounts were collected in 1961 during a rescue excavation from graves discovered during the laying of...
Weaving the kaftan cloth turned out to be so much more challenging than I anticipated due to underestimating how much time I would need to complete the project, but I also underestimated the physical toll that sitting at the loom for so many hours/days would take on me. There are so many “firsts” for me, though,and I learned so much, that I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. First time skeining yarn from a...
I am ready to start weaving the kaftan cloth. I am excited to see the pattern emerge and to see if the reality was going to match my vision. I always weave a few picks in the header with toilet paper to set the distance between the threads. Then I wove several repeats of the pattern with commercially dyed yarn so as to not waste any of the hand dyed thread. The yarn was...
Because this project is on a fairly tight timeline, I am lucky enough to have several friends volunteer to help me out with the time consuming aspects of preparing the loom for weaving. Here is a gallery of photos to enjoy showing some of the steps involved in dressing the loom for the kaftan cloth.
Now that I know the sett of the kaftan cloth based on my sampling, in order to start winding the warp and to figure out how much dyed yarn the project will require, its time to recalculate my yarn needs. To see my previous estimate, go here. I’ve chosen wool as the fiber for the Kaftan fabric, and the yarn I have selected is a 20/2 lace weight worsted wool made by Jaggerspun called...
