Splice, Splice, Baby….

A handwoven towel wrapped around a bottle of great wine would be an awesome gift to give to a hostess or friend!

The Christmas towels in the last post sold out before I even finished weaving them, so I tied on another warp of them. A very long warp of 26-ish yards this time. Now those are selling fast, so if you’d like to pre-order please reach out. I quickly learned that was going to be a weaving issue, so I changed to just a plaid band on each end of each towel. And then, of course, I had to revert to just playing with Color and Weave because it’s what I love.

For my weaving friends… The Christmas Towels started out as an all-over plaid design. Oh, how naive I was. It didn’t take me long to realize that was going to be a problem. You can not make that many color changes, tucking in the ends as you normally would, without your fell line getting all out of whack. An occasional tucked in end, where it doubles the thread at the end of a bobbin or a color change here and there, is not a problem. If you are changing colors as often as you do in a plaid and just tuck in the ends, you are adding a lot of extra doubled threads to your selvedges, but the center of the cloth stays in single threads in each shed. That doesn’t add up and you will quickly start noticing that your fell line is curving up on the selvedges. Of course, if you’re weaving yardage where the selvedges don’t matter, you can just leave the ends at the color changes hanging out to clip off after wet finishing. If you’re working on a plaid in wool, you can do the same because the wool will somewhat felt together.

In a towel though, you have to do something about those ends to keep the integrity of your cloth. Unfortunately, that something is splicing and it takes a great deal of time. It suddenly makes the sale of a towel with an all-over plaid just not worth it. I am working on a custom 70″ table cloth. I can’t just have one band of plaid on each end on that much of a length of fabric. It wouldn’t be proportioned right. I need to do several bands of the plaid on each end, so I learned to splice. I’m getting quicker at it, but a band of plaid takes me about twice as long to weave, but I do love the effect. Here’s how I do it (Click on pic to make it larger):

Edited to add: I shared my info on the Rav Warped Weavers thread and a kind soul told me about a method for two pick stripes, like the gold stripe in my plaid border. Instead of having two splices on the selvedge (which end up on the same side), you can achieve one splice in the center portion of of the towel (doesn’t have to be dead center). I threw the first pick leaving tails long enough on either side to meet in the middle. I then changed sheds, layed the weft ends in by hand and then pulled them back out to separate the plies and placed them back in the shed on top of each other. Worked like a charm and will keep extra bulk off the selvedge. I think with practice it’ll also be a little quicker. Funnily enough… I learned this once before… It’s in Janet Dawson’s Floor Loom Weaving class on Craftsy (now Blueprint). I purchased it in June 2013. It’s an excellent class for beginners and maybe this experienced weaver needs to go back and rewatch. lol Here’s how I did the 2 pick splice pictured above:

If you are still here and would like the wif file for the towels, send me an email and I’ll send it to you. WordPress won’t allow me to add the file here. If you don’t want to wait for the .wif it’s plain weave, so that’s simple enough. The color order is:

Christmas Plaid Warp 2019  G=Green R=Red = O=Gold (Oro) W=White

19G / 4R / 2O / 4R

4G / 2W – 2G 4x / 2G / 4R / 2O / 4R / 22G / 4R / 2O / 4R

4G / 2W – 2G 4x / 2G / 4R / 2O / 4R / 22G / 4R / 2O / 4R

4G / 2W – 2G 4x / 2G / 4R / 2O / 4R / 22G / 4R / 2O / 4R

4G / 2W – 2G 4x / 2G / 4R / 2O / 4R / 22G / 4R / 2O / 4R

4G / 2W – 2G 4x / 2G / 4R / 2O / 4R / 22G / 4R / 2O / 4R

4G / 2W – 2G 4x / 2G / 4R / 2O / 4R / 19G