This morning when I woke the very first thing I did after coffee, was start to work again on the dishcloth. This is what I had left at the end of yesterday.
Not too much to do.
The closer I got to the end of the work, the more a particular little trouble reared it's head. As I was warping the loom, I messed up the groups of three. It meant that at the end, everything was just a bit offset.
It didn't take much to fix it because all the errors happened on the same layer of the warp (there are three layers). I just had to move threads along the side where they were out of place and move them to a different set of pins. You san see on the completed cloth above that it went well. I was lucky. It could have been a fatal flaw, though I think I could have made a wee fix happen so the cloth would be stable.
After I wove in the ends, it was time for the cloth to pop off the loom. It was kind of cool.
And there you have it. A completed dishcloth. Not perfect, it has a couple spots where I missed going under a thread but overall, it worked and worked well.
Including the warping, actual work on the cloth took about 5 hours. I consider that decent for a first go.
The warping had to be done twice and then corrected after that (note that it still wasn't right per the twisted last bit), but it will be much faster the next time.
With this style of weaving, you work with a continuous thread, and the normal practice is to wrap the thread around the loom 4 times or eight time (I heard both on Youtube videos). I wrapped 16 times because I wanted to be sure. I had 12 wraps left at the end, so all that additional thread meant that for each strand of woven yarn, I had to pull through a very, very , very long tail. All that pulling extra thread made it go much slower than it would have had I used the shorter weft thread.
And lastly, the first half was a bit slow till I sorted out the who, what, where, and why. I had to adapt tools and mangle needles, and find just the right size of crochet hook to do certain jobs. Once those things were done, it went marvelously fast. It could, with a bit of practise become a very speedy craft.
All I plan to make with this loom at present, is dishcloths. I know that this seems like a foolish thing, to have spent the money for a one trick project maker, but I already have the yarn. Maybe eventually there will be blankets and towels made of the product of this loom. For now this is enough.
And it is enough to know that my precious knitting time will not be devoted to such plain things as dishcloths. Unless someone special asks particularly for knitted ones.
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