The Napkin Project is Underway

Now that the last craft show of the season is over, and everything is finally unpacked and put away, I can get back to the loom (and the blog!).

The napkins will be woven in 30/2 mercerized cotton, with 40/2 mercerized cotton for weft. I've been able to dye the yarns for the project, working in small chunks of time between other projects and events. The design is going to be a 3-color echo weave. Fortunately, I had cones of 2 appropriate colors for the warp, so only 1 color needed to be dyed (the mid-tone cone in the picture below).



All the weft colors needed to be dyed. It's been a while since I dyed cotton in Procion MX dyes - usually I work with lyocell, and it takes the color much more easily than cotton, so I ended up overdyeing a couple of the skeins to get the depth of shade I wanted. Here are the weft yarns, wound onto cones:



The threading is offset advancing points, with the first design line beginning on shaft 1, the second on shaft 8, and the third on shaft 15. With these fine cottons, and a parallel threading, the sett needs to be fairly close - 65 epi in the reed, and somewhere around 55-60 ppi.

I'm planning to make each set of 4 napkins a color study, with each napkin woven in a different color weft. Not sure yet if all 4 will use the same liftplan, or if each will be different. This threading, woven with a liftplan of long curves, makes a series of variegated feather shapes.
Here's a partial screenshot of the drawdown:



Next up, winding the warp and threading. With over 1200 ends to thread, it'll take a while!

BTW, the bookmarks did pretty well at the KPFA show - I think I sold 8 of them (about half). It always helps to have some lower-cost items in the booth. Actually, Mike's half of the booth did very well - you can see examples of his woodturnings on our homepage. His inventory includes lots more items in the $15 - $50 range, and at this time of year folks are shopping for gifts, so that price range moves well.