When the Cardboard Falls

I use corrugated cardboard rolls to pack my warp beam and one of the most satisfying parts of a project is when the cardboard falls off and thunks onto the floor. That means the project is almost finished and ready to come off the loom.

I recently heard about something called rosin paper, though, and bought a big roll at Home Depot and plan to use it instead of the cardboard. It is a thinner paper, but very sturdy. More on this in some later post.

I got my crackle scarves off the loom last week but don't plan to post pictures until I get them finished and washed. They are quite different. On one I treadled 24 picks of each block A to H and back to A and repeated that for the whole scarf. I got a nice diamond an X pattern. On the other one, I had a regular pattern but I varied the picks per block and I did five blocks in sequence, then backed up three, then forward again ... On that one I got a series of wobbly V's. The patterns are both pretty subtle, though, and I'm anxious to see how they look when washed. But not anxious enough to be in a huge hurry to twist fringe ;-)

Next project, in the planning stages, is a bunch of tea towels in an 8/2 Cotton/linen blend using different fancy twill patterns. I haven't decided whether to use 8-shaft or 16-shaft twills. The latter, of course, have more variety, but they probably mean I have to crawl under the Macomber in the middle of the project to change the tie-up. That prospect alone heavily favors the 8-shaft twills.