Sharon and Kelly - A Week of Carpets

freshly dyed yarn before warping

designing the warps

writing up warping sequences

5# of warp!

Kate working out a few threading bugs

Sharon threading

Kelly's warp beamed on

Kelly weaving

Kelly

Sharon

Sharon's carpet

Sharon weaving

samples that Lynnette wove last week

Well, you can tell it's really fall. We held a class on four block rep weave carpeting this week. Sharon came from St. Louis and Kelly came up from central Pennsylvania. I was busy the week before, skeining, weighing, and custom dyeing all of the wool for their projects. When they arrived Monday morning their first task was to design the pattern in their rugs and write up a warping sequence. For each design there were four colors to create the different color blocks, plus a background carried across the whole warp. And those colors are decidedly autumnal, as you can see.

These are wonderful, if not somewhat more head-bending designs to execute, as there are four different threadings that create four different patterns. There is much more design versatility in these carpets than in plain-old-plain rep weave. There is a pattern on one side that is completely reversed on the opposite side. And, along with four different threadings, come four different treadlings that correspond to them.

These rugs are a great body work-out to weave. There are two alternating wefts, a thick cotton carpet filler and a thin 8/2 cotton. The shed has to be cleared with a sword for each shot of weft, and then beaten in with the sword. But once you get the hang of it, it rolls along pretty quickly, much like a rag rug does.

And they're beautiful.
And they feel good under your feet.

This is the lush-est thing to put in a hallway as a fancy runner!

Stay tuned...I'll be putting some posts up about the various tie-up knots we use on barn looms, for all those of you out there who have a hard time remembering the knots.