A wedding invitation usually means a woven gift needs to be made and an excuse to leave other jobs to weave is never passed up!
With a warp in progress on my floor and table loom I decided that with a weaving width of 55cm; wider than my rigid heddle loom and able to take a much longer warp Anni was the obvious loom choice.
Happy with my choice of colours from a somewhat limited stash I set up Anni with a long warp and got weaving. I cut apart the three pieces I had woven on the warp and used my preferred method of wet finishing New Lanark Wool which I know works well.
The first process is to scour out the spinning oil with 2 wool washes at 30 degrees in the washing machine, drying them outside on the line. After joining the 3 pieces together and plaiting the fringes it had another 30 degree wool wash followed with some supervised tumble drying until I was happy with the finish. This finishing process closes up the weaving and the cloth develops a lovely fuzzy nap, just the job for a snuggly blanket.
Incidentally this project gave Anni and excellent work out. I pushed her to the limit with the long warp in a thickish wool that can be a bit sticky if the tension isn’t quite tight enough. She coped really well and the weaving is always so much quicker when your feet rather than your hands change the shed. This has been the start of a bit of a love affair between myself and Anni! She will be appearing again soon in the next blog post.
