discover,A small cotton chenille sampler

After my twill sample blanket was off the loom, I had a couple more metres of warp to use. I'd been quite generous with allowing extra - the sample blanket is 3m long, loom waste on my Toika Norjanna requires 1.5m and I'd made a warp of 6m just in case anything went badly wrong and so there was plenty to play with.

After a couple of days of thinking about trying different patterns, or a different colour weft, I just picked up the nearest interesting yarn which was a cotton chenille from Traub (via Fibrecarfts, UK stockist of Traub yarns).

It's a white yarn, and my warp for the sample blanket is a natural cotton (nearly white) with a couple of green threads diving the different weave threadings. White on white was not going to show the patterns the same as the blue weft I used before, but I wanted to explore texture, so white was going to be fine.

I wove the first 9 sections of Janet's twill sample again, which include plain weave, 2/2 twill, point twill, 3/1 and 1/3 twill. Then I wove a couple of patterns from later on in her sampler - bedford cord and a weft faced rib.



The result was at least as interesting as expected, and has a lovely soft towel feel. Close up there's some very interesting textures. I thinking now about weaving patterned towels with coloured chenille (or whtie plus coloured bands) on a warp of either the 2/6 cotton (which works very well) or a cotton/linen yarn.

The textures look a little like soft snowfall over fields or the garden, you know that soft bumpy look as it lies over plants, hiding them from view?

It feels so soft, this is the first time I've woven anything soft to touch and I love it.





I'm now winding a warp for a colour and weave sampler, in the same 2/6 natural and royal blue cottons I used for Janet's sample blanket. But I thought you'd like a peak at the colourful yarns I have lined up for the following project, which will be a sampler to look at colour interactions.


The following pictures are for Peg. I think I was astounded to discover how low humidity is where Peg lives as she was to discover how high it is in Derbyshire, England. I just checked our humidity meter, it is 82% at the moment. It has been fairly cool today, only 15.3 degrees centigrade when I went out just before 1 p.m. today. We did get temperatures up in the mid 20s last week, when the sun shone for a few consecutive days, but on the whole this has been a cool, wet summer.

We live on the west side of the southern end of the Pennine chain of hills that run like a spine down the centre of northern England. Much of our weather comes from the west. The prevailling winds blow air from the Atlantic across the Cheshire plain and then the air reaches our hills and is forced to rise (we live at around 700 feet above sea level.) As it rises, the air cools and there is condensation. Similar climates are found in Ireland and Wales, western Scotland, New Zealand and Japan.

Hence this view from my window one morning last week, fairly typical weather:


We were in the clouds that day, so it was misty, and raining as well.

This photo (above) is one I took last October. This was a morning that started hazy, with cloud resting down in the valley (sometimes we are in sunshine, looking down on the cloud). The sun is coming through now and the haze is evaporating, later on it would be a clear, sunny day.

The following pictures are all taken when I was out on walks in summer 2005 in the Peak District National Park (all within about 10 miles of home).