Thursday, January 19, 2012

Inspiration from Afar

Hi Bonnie,

Last summer we spent some time dyeing lots of wool with mainly plant material and cochenil.

I ended up with 2 kilo's of wool in beautiful soft colours. As my old blanket started to wear out, it was a good idea to make a new one.

I have used your woven words-system to organize the colors.

My words are: TRUST(vertrouwen) and GRATITUDE (dankbaarheid) for the middle-part and LOVE (liefde) for the side-parts.

Quite a few things went wrong, but I am very pleased with the result and it feels lovely to sleep under.

Before weaving the blanket I had to weave a sample to determine the sett.


As I wasn't sure to have enough wool I decided to alternate thick wool and very thin cotton.

The threading was 1-2-3-4 and I've tried several threadlings.

Twill 12-23-34-41 looked best. I've also tried plain tabby without the cotton threads

I wouldn't mind the texture, but didn't like it in my coloured stripes.

The sett was 5 thick and 5 thin threads in 1 cm, which is about 25 threads to an inch altogether.


I've tried to weave the whole blanket in one go (double width), but made a mistake in calculating the thick and thin threads.

So after dressing the loom I found out, that I only had half a blanket. So this became my middle panel.

After weaving this I've warped my loom again for the side panels.

Photo below shows the connection between two of the panels sewn by hand in the green stripe. It also shows the finishing of the top- and bottom of the blanket.



Yours, Irma Spaargaren

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