Category Archives: Weaving Tips

Towels, Weaving, Weaving Tips

Naughty Knots

Posted on by Jean

I took eight autumnal color and weave towels off the Liisa loom last night. They are amazing and will be in the shop when it opens. The warp is cottolin (50/50 linen/cotton) and the weft is cotton bouclé. The bouclé adds beautiful texture and absorbency. The colors are so rich and make me think how beautiful they would be lining a basket of bread on the Thanksgiving table. I found the perfect band in my basket of handwoven inkle bands for the hanging tabs, a little extra somethin’ that I like to add to my towels.

When I’m winding a warp there are knots in the thread sometimes. If I come to them near an end of the warp, I cut the threads (all of them) and pull the knot past the cut end, then re-tie as if I was tying a new color into the warp. If I come to the knot in the middle of the warp, well… that’s a whole other story. I tried pooling all the threads on the floor once and getting the knot out … let’s just say it was a mess. I leave them now. They are MUCH easier to fix on the loom.

There are a zillion ways to do this, but this is the way I do it most of the time. I watch for the knots as I advance my warp. That’s easy to do on the Glimakra and the Toika, because I actually have to be at the back of the loom to release the brake. I “time” it so that I can fix the knot in between towels (or whatever the project is). In this case, the knot was in front of the reed when it was time to fix it. I cut the thread at the knot and tie on a new end from the yarn source.

  • cut at knot
  • new end tied on

I leave the tube at the front of the loom and pull the thread back through the reed and heddle towards the back of the loom. I make it long enough so there is plenty of slack. I go back to the front of the loom and cut the thread off the tube and tie a knot right at the fell line. Remember… this is between towels, so the new knot won’t show in the finished product.

  • pull to back of loom
  • tie knot at fell line between projects

Then I go to the back of the loom, gather up the excess and clamp it in a pair of hemostats to hang off the back of the loom. The hemostat adds the perfect weight for tension and holds the threads together well.

  • handiest tool in my cart
  • hemostat weights the threads

You can see that I add a lot of thread, so it’s hanging almost to the floor. It has to be hanging over the back beam so it can keep the tension on the thread with the weight.

Tee pin used to anchor thread at fell line

I keep an eye on it and as soon as the original warp thread is long enough to make it to the fell line in a new towel, I remove the hemostat, pull the thread back through to the front, tie at the fell line between projects, making sure the tension is about the same as the rest of the warp and then I’m ready to go. This is one of those things that takes much longer to explain it than it does to do it. I’d say it’s maybe a couple of minutes total. Obviously, this only works if you’re in between projects on the loom. If a thread breaks in the middle of a project, instead of tying at the fell line, I place a T pin parallel to the fell line and wrap the old and new threads around that.

A treasure basket of bands. I love to add a hanging tab to the hems of my towels and there’s almost always the perfect one waiting for me in this basket.
Weaving, Weaving Tips

Finish Line

Posted on by Jean

Edited to add on Nov 2019 – Funny how we evolve. I don’t hem like this anymore. I wrote a new post on how I do it now. You can find that here: https://jeanelizabethstudio.com/finish-line-2/ Try them all and see what works for you.

Oddly enough, I used the same title even though I didn’t remember I’d written a post on hemming already. Who knows, I may find another way and do a Finish Line 3 in a couple of years. I thought I’d leave this one up because someone might prefer it to the new way I do it.

Thought I’d share a trick that is new to my weaving arsenal.  Fusible thread (FT) is my new best friend.  On these towels, I threw three shots of FT at the beginning and end of each towel with two shots of a contrasting thread to give me a cutting line.  This is the first time I’ve tried this and I love it.  I took the whole length of toweling to the ironing board and ironed each of the FT areas.  Make sure to use a pressing sheet on top of and under the FT or you’ll get it all over your iron or ironing surface.  I threw caution to the wind, cut between the lines and threw the towels in the wash.  A couple of them lost a few picks of weaving where I hadn’t ironed quite enough, but it worked out really well. 

This saved me SO much time as I didn’t have to haul the serger out and stitch down each end.  Obviously, it saved serger thread as well.  It also saved the extra bulk that the serger stitching puts in the hems, which already always feel too thick for me.  I’ve tried the trick of weaving with a finer thread in the hems, but I don’t like how it draws in the selvedges.  Speaking of hems…  I usually weave them in the same structure as the rest of the towel.  If you weave a plain weave hem on a twill towel, you are going to get the little flared out ends when you sew up the hem.  When doing twill sometimes I do a different twill pattern for the hem, sometimes I do the same as the rest of the towel.  Just depends on my mood when I sit down to weave.

Back to the FT.  A nice surprise was the fact that when I pressed the hems up to get them prepared for stitching, the FT held the hem!  I didn’t really need the clips, but I like them as a back up.  Next time I’ll use four shots of FT at each end to help facilitate this added little bonus.  

So here are the eight towels I cut off.  I’ve already been weaving on what I retied on and will most likely get five more towels.  One will be short because I was trying out different white wefts and ran out.  Anxious to feel the difference in the hand of the fabric from using the different manufacturer’s 8/2 cotton.

A couple of other things… After washing, I always take the towels out of the dryer before they are fully dry.  The dampness helps in the pressing.  When I finish hemming, I wash them again and it usually is enough to get the creases from the first wash.