I'll Figure That Out When I Get There...

In almost any project there is a delicate balance between careful organization and planning as well as being able to go with the flow... take things as they come... and make it all perfect in the end.  Some things just need to be attended to before you start your project.  Other things really can be figured out when you get to them.  Or not.

I have been working hard over the last few weeks on getting my big Louet loom ready to weave linen bath towels.  It has taken months and months to get this thing under way.  Well, actually years.  It started back in 2014 when I ordered a couple of linen bath towels from Vaxbo Linens in Sweden.  The towels are thin but amazingly absorbent and feel wonderful on your skin.  I was smitten.  I have to weave some of these!  Then two years ago our Swatch Swap group picked a theme that revolved around seasons, the season for this or for that.  Whatever you could think of that had a season to it.  I decided on Bath Time as my season.  Perfect for weaving a linen bath towel.  

Of course, I didn't start on the project right away.  It was January 2018 when I really got going.  Our swatches needed to be ready in the late spring.  I picked my weave structure and ordered my 28/2 linen yarn.  This is thinner yarn than I have ever worked with.  And because I want my towels to be bath sheets, I'm weaving nearly at the maximum width on my Louet.  That is about 38" wide.  Thinnest yarn yet and as wide as can be... what could go wrong?

I had started to wind the warp when I fell and broke my ankle.  All work ceased for the spring and summer.  I apologized to my Swatch Swap group and told them I wouldn't be participating for now.  Then this past fall I started back at it.  I wanted to do a waffle weave.  Linen doesn't really lend itself to waffle.  It would work better if there was some stretch in the yarn.  But I want my towels to have texture and this one is nice.  It's the same weave structure I use in my linen face cloths.

This project was years in the making and you would think I would have ironed out all the components before I got to the end.  But no.  I knew I wanted to do a plain weave border around the towel with all the center portion in waffle weave.  No problem.  I'll figure that out when I get to the edges of the warp.

Here is the thing about a border.  You have to have a couple of shafts to thread it on.  My loom has 8 shafts and I chose a waffle weave pattern that uses all of them.  When I got to the edge there was no place to thread the border.  At that point I had threaded one half of all the warp threads or a total of 532 threads.  Well, crap.  Yes, I could have taken those 532 threads out and re-threaded them to a waffle weave pattern that used only 6 shafts but seriously.  Of course not.  I played around with what I had to work with and came up with a border pattern which is a smaller version of the overall pattern.  There will be a border but it isn't what I had envisioned. 

So much for planning, organization, thinking the project through and paying attention.