Double heddle twill project

 It's been a while since I've posted. I have been spinning and weaving still, but nothing particularly interesting till I started this epic double heddle project.

I bought this loom early in lockdown, to replace my small scarf loom which is kind of .... permanently on loan to the school that had it when we locked down. Also because I wanted something much wider.

I bought a second heddle for it, because the possibilities seem to be endless. My first project using it, though, was an utter failure. I used handspun singles for the warp, which absolutely did not work. The heddles shredded the yarn. But the heddle is 15 dent, making it too small to fit the same yarn if I plied it.

So I decided I should use storebought yarn for my first twill project. But most storebought yarn is too chunky for 15 epi as well! I finally found some lovely thin yarn in a variety of blue shades. Till I got it home and found out it was not actually thin yarn. It was four thin strands, laid together but not really plied.

Well. That really stymied me. I tried winding the different strands into separate balls, but then someone would startle me and I'd drop a ball or two, and they'd tangle, and it was just a nightmare. Eventually, though, I had a brainwave to use my spinning wheel to separate the strands. I just tied each strand onto a different section of the bobbin, held the strands between my fingers, and treadled. The whole unwinding was done in under an hour!

I taped down the ends of three strands to wind off the fourth into a ball, and then untaped and wound off each other strand in turn.

Then it was time to warp the loom. I used the various shades of turquoise and aqua for the warp and saved the dark blue, medium blue, and very pale blue for weft.

This is a 3/1 twill (pretty much the only one you can do with two heddles), meaning one end went in the hole in the first heddle, the next went in the hole in the second heddle, and the third went in both slots. So my shafts were first heddle up, second heddle up, and both heddles down.

The sheds were sometimes a bit narrow, but luckily weren't sticky like my handspun had been. (It probably helped that this yarn was synthetic and quite smooth.)

As I got weaving, the twill pattern slowly took shape.

After a few inches of the lightest blue, I started phasing in a darker color, first as one pick of dark separated by a few of light, and then one pick of light separated by several dark, and finally all the next darker color.

This took forever. Usually the actual weaving is the quickest part of a project, but the yarn was so thin it took many times as long to get an inch as anything else I'd done before. I moved in the middle, still not done. It didn't help that I had nowhere to put the dang thing. It's a large loom, and it has to be braced against something as you weave. Initially, I'd used a table. After our move, I sat on the floor and used the bed. I noticed that if I changed my position too much, my beating also changed detectibly. You beat harder when it's propped up on something than you can when it's laid flat on the floor.

The cats were excessively interested. (Pardon the mess. There may be people who weave AND have kids AND have a clean house, but I am not one of them.)

Toward the end, I did have a lot of warp threads break and had to fix them. I also had several threads mysteriously lose tension. I shimmed them with socks, because if there's one thing I love it's slapdash fixes for problems I don't understand.

At last it was finished and gorgeous.

As you can see, one side is more warp-dominant and the other more weft-dominant. Because of how I had it set up, the side visible while I was weaving was the weft-dominant side (bottom picture). I think I like the warp-dominant side better. I mixed up the colors a bit more subtly.

Washed and finished, it looks pretty great. Does it look good enough to justify taking a year for me to make? Maybe not. But I enjoyed working on it.

All I need is a fancy occasion to wear this to!