First Rug Woven

The first rug on the warp chugged along steadily all weekend. It made a good contrast for the Open Studios visitors, to see such different things being woven - a rug on the Glimakra, another series of small black and white panels on the 24-shaft AVL. Plus a rack of fine silk scarves, which are vastly different from what's on either of the looms.

Here, I'm doing the reverse of the process I showed in the last post. I've finished the Pendleton selvedge weft portion, have woven a border in the warp yarn, doubled, and about 6 inches of waste yarn. Much as I dislike the traditional temple, it's the right tool for this job - there's nowhere on this loom to suspend weights off the side, and this temple can exert way more pressure than a few fishing weights.



I thought I might be able to weave 2 rugs before cutting the cloth off the loom, but as you can see from this cloth-beam-level view, the rug is beginning to interfere with the action of the upper lamms, even though I deliberately didn't run the apron over and behind the knee beam. I figured that would give me a little extra leeway, and it did, but I will still have to cut off and retie between rug 1 and rug 2.



I've only used maybe 1/3 of the bag of selvedges. I spent a little while sorting the selvedges that are left, mostly to get rid of the ungodly amount of garbage off the mill floor that finds its way into these big bags (for which Pendleton charges by the pound). There's a spoon on the floor next to the garbage, for size reference. This pile weighs just under a pound - about 14 ounces. Some of it is globs of weft that has no warp "core" in it, and some is just crap - not even the same fiber or color as the stuff I'm working with. Some red, some brown, this and that, whatever was on the mill floor when they scooped up the selvedges into bags.



Of the good stuff that's left, I discovered an interesting thing. Exactly half the selvedges are a different width than the others. Maybe the cutting machine on one side of the web cuts closer to the extra warps than the one on the other? Dunno. However, I don't think I can mix the two in one rug without the rug looking like it has sparse rows and fat rows.



The pile on the left is the stuff I used, with equal amounts of fluff on both sides of the warp yarns; the pile on the right is the narrower stuff. I'll use one pile for the second rug on this warp, and the other pile will be re-bagged and go to the guild sale in the Spring. I need to measure and count the picks in the first rug and calculate whether there's enough left of the wider stuff for another rug the same width before deciding which pile I'll weave with next.