Weaving on the "Perugia" towels.

 

Last night I tied on and began weaving the Perugia towel warp. 

Mostly very good - oddly, I ended up having two places where the threads were crossed into the wrong dents, but I attribute that to my super-fast eager sleying the night before last.  I fixed them, and everything's fine. 

I find I don't love the shade of the blue (synth) perle cotton - it does not look like an indigo-based color at all.  I think that when I get to the state of the warp where I make our challah cover, which won't need to be machine-washed, I'll use the real indigo-dyed thread. 

 

Mostly problem-free, apart from the two twisted warp threads.  I also discovered that the beater reed, the 15-dent that I'm using, is not 'tall' enough for the beater, so it rattles a bit and can slide from one side to another.  I think I'm going to shim it with some folded paper or something so that it doesn't rattle or shimmy.  The tension of the warp does seem to hold it generally aligned with the warp, but I don't like the noise or the unsettling movement of the reed in the beater.

 

The reed was rusty.  Odd as it might seem I do prefer carbon steel reeds rather than the stainless.  I brushed off most of the rust but left a little bit in order to experiment with the iron oxide rubbing off on the cloth.  It stopped after about six inches, but what is there is very interesting.  But is it art?  ;-)

 

I'm using the same pattern I used in the Screamy Bollywood color gamp, but since it's mostly white-on-white here it comes out as a texture.  I'm going to weave a sample, and then 'punish' it by machine-washing and drying it.  As I look at the interlacements, and see the floating threads, it occurs to me that the web will probably retract quite intensely in the wet finishing...it's cotton, and it's a slightly more open web than I'm used to (I measured the reed, and it's 15 dpi, but the web looks more open than I thought it would.)  I know from experience that it will of course tighten up as the web is removed from tension and then again in the wet-finishing, so we'll see how the pattern shows after all that.  And after steam ironing.

 

Overall, I'm delighted with how it is going.  It looks like 'real' linens on the loom!  Tonight I'm going to keep on with the sample using the cottolin, and also the bleached white perle cotton.  And some silk, too - why not?  It'll have a different shrinkage rate, of course, but I love the adventures in sampling.  I'll also use some unbleached natural 100% linen of which I have just a bit, and then wash it all to see how it behaves.