Being Boring

Reference

So, when I last talked about the rugs I am weaving, this is how they looked.

I wove in a few more strips since then and decided that I did not like the results. It was boring me to tears. Unlike the warp-face rugs that I had woven before, the weft strips were going to be the main focus of these rugs; and I was going to need a fabric more exciting than a solid quilting cotton whose color is called “tea stain.” (Honest, that is the name.)

So I went back out fabric shopping and came back with these.

I got five yards of the salmon colored one (which is brighter than photographed here) and three yards of the paisley. Rather than get back out the rag cutter, I just cut the strips using a rotary cutter and quilting ruler. The main thing I had to worry about there is folding the fabric correctly so that all of the layers were on grain and that there were no wrinkles in the fabric. That process went fairly quickly.

There is one hitch in using these prints as the weft for weaving, and that is that there is a right side to the fabric and a wrong side, and the difference is fairly pronounced with the ones that I picked. I needed to do something to the strips of fabric so that the printed side of the fabric would show up most of the time. To take care of this, I ironed each strip in half.

As you may have guessed, this is a tedious task. But by taking this extra step, I can count on the right side of the fabric being what shows up most of the time in the final weaving.

And the weaving is underway with the new fabrics. I am liking the results much better, so much so that I have finished weaving the first of the rugs. Unfortunately, for how I am doing the striping in the weft of the rugs, I don’t have enough of the salmon colored fabric to complete a second rug. Hopefully, I can get another five yards of it, otherwise I am going to have rugs that coordinate, rather than match.

Copyright 2011 by G. P. Donohue for textillian.com

3 thoughts on “Being Boring

  1. OMG, that is sooo much work!!! The results are worth it, I admire your weaving and irony endurance. The result is very pretty!

  2. Wow, you are dedicated, or determined, or something like that! For future reference, they make a thing called a bias tape maker. It looks sort of like a funnel. You feed the fabric through it then iron as you pull it out the other end. (I guess you really slide the bias tape maker along the fabric and iron as you go. At any rate, it does the folding.) Might be less tedious than ironing “freehand.”

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