Rags to Riches: II

Its January and I'm taking sunny pictures outside. WTH?

The weaving part of rag rugs is relatively easy. Well, I said "relatively."

4 epi, straight twill. 

Tip #1 Set it wide. Yes, wider even then you think. 4 ends per inch you say? Only for a twill. Three per inch is a safer bet. I've even used 2 epi for plain weave.

A slightly fancy edge.

Tip #2 Stay away from rug warp. Yes, it's super strong, but it's also thin. Rag rugs aren't woven at very high tension, in fact the washcloth on the loom right now is far tighter then I ever pulled my rug warps.  A thick cotton, I use coned kitchen cotton, is far easier on your fingers when tensioning and produces a far nicer finished edge and fringe. Thin rug warp at 3 ends per inch is almost impossible to pull into a neat finish.  Bonus: 2 or 3 passes with your warp yarn in the weft makes a sweet weft protector during finishing.

None of these "in progress" pictures are off the rug up top. 

Tip #3. Be prepared to place your weft by hand. Sure there are rag shuttles that will hold tons of rag at a time. But let's be honest, none of your strips are more then 6 feet long. Any piece shorter then 3 feet will just fall off your shuttle, so at most you can use the shuttle once, and then hand place the rest. Really, it's not so bad.

Tip #4 Random striping is harder then it looks, but worth the pay off. Trying to make sure it's balanced while still being random will drive you bonkers. A quick solution is to divide all of your colors in half. Use half of each before you get to the middle, use the other half after the middle. Beyond that, let randomness take hold. It'll be fine, I promise.

Shuttle Launch.

I'm pretty fly.

I got these babies at the MDSW under the assumption that they were end-feed shuttles.  They were in positively awful shape. The wood was dry, the metal was rusted, and the bobbins didn't come out. Why was I so eager to snatch up these dilapidated wrecks? Because size matters. End feed shuttles hold three to four times as much yarn as a boat shuttle. Careful application of Sweet Reason (a hammer) popped out the bobbin. Two afternoons with my Dad, sanding and polishing and varnishing fixed the rest. Had I known they were so easy to fix up, I would have gotten a lot more.

Sweat Reason also helped get the bobbins back in.

Through some extensive research (about five minutes on Google) I discovered that these guys aren't actually end-feed-shuttles. They're fly shuttles, meant to work with a type of mechanized loom. From a practical stand point, all that means is that they're heavier then end-feed-shuttles, and if I become Cyber-converted I'll still be able to weave. If the weight is a problem I'll just drill out some extraneous wood and metal (there really is a vast amount of metal in these guys), but I don't foresee that being a problem.

U.S.S. Make Shit Up.

Fly or End-Feed, either way the bobbins don't spin. Instead the yarn feeds straight off them, and through a tensioner device. If you buy your shuttles from a source other then someone who ransacked a closed down mill while hunting ghosts (I might be making some assumptions here), then they probably come with an instruction manual that will tell you how to tension your yarn by following a specific path through the tensioner. Since I learned to weave with shuttles that didn't tension at all I didn't worry too much about this, I just pulled the thread through a sequence of holes that would allow it to come off cleanly. I've woven a few inches and everything is working fine.