Decisions, Decisions

 

Playing around with more options for the upcoming warps, I think I will be going with this one.

The warp will be 2/16 unmercerized cotton, the weft 2/20 mercerized cotton.  The play between the shiny and mat yarns should make this an interesting textile.

These will be 'proper' tea towels.  The yarns are light enough and absorbent enough that they should work well.  With a finer weft than warp, I am planning on increasing the epi I've been using for the 2/16 towels from 32 to 36 epi.

Someone asked me (in another context) if increasing the epi by one or two ends actually matters, and I said 'yes'.

One of the exercises I did for my master weaver monograph was weave the same yarn at a variety of densities.  I chose a singles wool and used a very open density, then increased that by one or two epi to make a variety of different qualities of cloth.

I then wet finished them, including fulling as part of the experiment, but I did the fulling in pre-set times - 2 minutes, 4, and if I had enough cloth 6 or 8.

The changes may have been subtle, but they were absolutely discernible, if not to the eye, certainly to the hand.  And they would have made a difference in how the cloth functioned.

In most cases, the 2 or even the 4 minutes of fulling left the cloth unstable in the more open densities, and my conclusion was that people should not be afraid of fulling.  It does, however, need to be monitored in order to not go beyond the state you want it to be when 'done'.

Cotton, however doesn't full, so you do have to pay careful attention to density.  Given that 2/16 and 2/20 are pretty close in size, I might not have increased the density very much.  But mercerized cotton is more slippery than unmercerized cotton, and the fancy twills I've been working with are less stable.  So the 32 epi I had been working with seemed too loose to me, so I'll be using 36.

If I find that the cloth still isn't stable enough, I can change the tie up and add some plain weave, but for now it's a 1:3:1:3:2:2:3:1 tie up.  (I like using tie ups where I can arrange to lift fewer shafts, even if it means weaving the cloth 'upside down'.)

My goal today is to finish threading the 2/8 cotton warp which will use up the last of the thicker linen for weft, and may even use up the slub that is one ply cotton, one ply linen.  If there is still warp when those are gone, there is a fairly large cone of textured cotton.  

Little by little I am making headway on the my stash.  

It feels a bit awkward to be ordering more yarn so that I can use up what I have, but the 2/20 mercerized cotton simply is beyond it's best buy date for warp so it will get used up as weft.

My story, sticking to it...