Labels

Double Weave Blanket, Part 6

This is it! The last three things I did with the blanket before I declared it completely and utterly done!

You should be excited; this means you might actually get to see photos featuring colors other than white, light green, dark green, and marigold. Well. Colors other than white, light green, and dark green. The marigold is here to stay, along with lemon, mustard, sunflower, honey, ochre, Kraft mac'n'cheese, highlighter, straw, No. 2 pencil, and gold.

A medium blue-green book, with light green yarn wrapped thickly around the width for about an inch at one end, sitting on rust-brown leather body armour made of woven straps with large steel washers and copper rivets. A white plastic bobbin sits on the armour above the book, also wound with light green yarn.
Featuring my armour, because I will do fiber arts anywhere.
I decided to add fringe to the long sides of my blanket, as well as having the loom fringe on the short ends, to hide my wobbly selvedges because I like fringe.

I also really really struggle with "waste," and didn't want to waste the odds and ends of bobbins and too-short-to-use-but-too-long-to-toss bits of yarn. So I found a book a little wider than I wanted my finished fringe to be, and a crochet hook, and started winding! And then I restarted winding! Because when you wind springy wool yarn under tension, you lose dramatic amounts of length when it's at rest!

I inserted my shears under the wrapped yarn (I stopped when I was bored...there's a lot of blanket, and I knew I'd use what was left on the bobbin before I needed to start counting threads) and snipped it into a pile of double-length pieces. (This is where winding on a book is handy, because the covers and the pages make a neat little channel to slide your scissors into, like the slot in the cutting counter at a fabric shop.)

In the foreground, a white hand pinching a loop of light green yarn just left of a steel blue crochet hook inserted through the edge of a light green piece of cloth. The cloth is fringed at right. In the background, a slim, unmarked blue-green book, a white plastic bobbin of light green yarn, and the handles of silver sewing shears are piled on rust-brown woven leather armour.
For someone who very rarely crochets, I own a lot of crochet hooks.
Double-length pieces, because I was using lark's head knots to attach the fringe—my favorite for attaching cord where all or nearly all stress will be pulling on the tails. I looped one piece of fringe through each turning of weft thread, catching the outermost warp thread in the knot for better stability overall.

A white hand holds the edge of a piece of green cloth, through which a steel blue crochet hook is inserted, with a loop of light green yarn around the shaft of the hook, and the tails of the yarn wrapped over the shaft ready to be pulled through. At right, the cloth is fringed. In the background, a slim, unmarked, blue-green book is visible on rust-brown woven leather armour.
Loop de loop.
This went remarkably quickly. I got all the sections of light green on one side of the blanket fringed in the time between arriving at practice and everyone else arriving and arming up.

A fringed piece of cloth, marigold and light green at left, and solig light green at right. The fringe makes a slight ridge at the very edge of the fabric, and draps off teh edge of the photographer's lap, toward the background of the photo.
More satisfying patterns for me.
I also really like the neat little ridge the heads of the knots make along the edge, and they very nicely conceal my wibbles at the selvedges.

A crumpled and twisted length of plain-woven plaid cloth, in white, light and dark green, and marigold, with long fringe, hanging over the edge of an open dryer. A few fluffy tails of yarn protrude from the surface of the cloth.
I named this file "soggy waffles." There. That's a thing you know now.
After the long edges had been completely fringed, I got to dampen the whole blanket (or...most of the blanket. More on that later) and then chuck it in the dryer. For real. My handwoven, 100% wool blankie went in the dryer for the first and last time in its life.

And it fluffed. Gloriously.

The crucial bit of information here is that the blanket really was just damp, not sopping, and that it was in the dryer for only twelve minutes. That's long enough to fluff up all the fibers and full the cloth, but not long enough to felt the fringe into blocks of fuzz, nor to glue unrelated sections of blanket to each other irretrievably.

The corner of a piece of plain-woven plaid cloth, in white, light and dark green, and marigold, with vertical strips that varrow from left to right. The cloth is fringed at the edges in colors that match the color of the stripe that abuts the edge.
The photo does in fact make the inconsistency look better than in person.
Unfortunately, because I didn't get the blanket damp through everywhere, there were a few sections that didn't full—the moisture and the heat and the agitation are all crucial—so I had to go back and re-dampen the unfulled sections without getting the finished bits wet again. Fiddly work. You can just see, in the photo above, that the horizontal marigold stripe is a touch wider in the middle of the photo than at either end: that's an unfulled section. I found it easier to search the blanket with my fingertips than to look for visual differences; the textural change is much more dramatic.

Close-up of marigold, dark green, and white plain-woven fabric, with large water droplets beaded up on the surface.
I love wool and water.
Okay, so there were two times it went in the dryer, but if I'd done it right the first time, it would've been once. And the second time was the charm—the whole blanket was properly fulled afterward.

A large piece of plain-woven white, light and dark green, and marigold plaid cloth, spread flat on a dark wood desk in the foreground, and crumpled at the far edge of the desk. Short, uneven fringe extends from the edge of the fabric to the near edge of the desk. A rolled-up pink tape measure, black plastic scissors sheath, and unsheathed pair of silver shears rest on the fabric.
My work desk counts as a tool of the trade, right? It's the largest horizontal surface I have regular access to.
And at long last, the final bits of finish work: trimming the fringe neatly, and trimming the tails of the repair threads flush with the surface of the cloth. I did both at work, where I have access to a reasonably large horizontal surface that isn't the floor. Mostly that worked well; there were a few tricky bits that involved carefully piling the excess blanket out of the way, but still on the desk, to keep the weight of it from tugging everything to the floor.

Low-angle shot of plain-woven light green, marigold, dark green, and white plaid fabric, laid flat on a dark wood desk with knotted fringe runnign from the edge of the fabric at left to the edg eof the desk at right. A pink tape measure is unrolled in the foreground, showing that the fringe is three inches long. A pair of silver shears and their black plastic sheath rest on the fabric in the background, and the fringe ends are cleanly cut and slightly uneven.
It's even enough for government work, as my grandfather would say.
Originally I was aiming for 4-inch fringe, but after fluffing, my side fringes shrank dramatically, and I could only just eke three inches out of them. I didn't fuss too much over getting the fringe perfectly aligned and even, and I actually just noticed a stray thread the other day that had folded up behind the blanket when I was trimming, and so avoided its fate. Temporarily. I'm coming for you, little anarchist fringelet.

A low wire basket being used as an office inbox, with a few magazines stacked in the base. A small black-faced sheep stuffed animal sits in the basket, along with a very large pile of cut white, light and dark green, and marigold yarn stuck together in bundles. At left, a howling wolf stuffed animal peeks around the pile of yarn, and behind it is a mug with the titles of banned books printed in neon on black.
This strategy did not save me from having things put in my inbox.
I generated a lot of scrap yarn with the Great Trimmening, which obviously I couldn't bear to waste. A bunch of it became pincushion stuffing later, but first I used it to fill my inbox.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment