Seeing Stars

Its the Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend and I hope my Canadian readers are enjoying family and good food!  Its a busy time of year with getting  the flower beds and gardens cut back for winter and other preparations. We were both inspired to get out and get busy one day and it seems our timing was perfect as its rained ever since!

I have been soldiering on and finally wove off the last of eleven yards of kitchen towels. The first post is here  including the draft and story. Since then that loom has been busy every day with weaving the yardage off and makes for dull reporting! My Louet has been sitting idle and 'naked' (horrors!) but that's changing soon.  More on that another time.   :)

Since this warp was all white with a few stripes, I can recall going through 3-4 cones of 8/2 cotton while winding the warp and about the same again as I wove. Once the warp came off the loom and I carried it all rolled up to the sewing table I was quite taken with the sheer weight of all that effort!

This is nine of the ten towels all rolled up beside the serger, with the first towel stretched across and being trimmed up on the serger. I usually cut and tie onto my new colour of serger thread and pull through. An acceptable cheat I think given the dismal all black and white hand drawn sketch of where the threads go for all four cones! Well, I forgot to take off the tension and some threads broke mid way. Two hours later I finally had it rethreaded and now my machine and sketch are colour coded against future faux paus. Something I should have done years ago! 

So here they are all folded and piled up waiting for the hemming !

I didn't think you'd want to wait another week or so while they are hand hemmed! They'd look like this after anyhow  :)

They are quite different from my other towels I've woven up in the past two years. Simpler pattern, and colours. They were easy to thread and treadle and I wove one up every day at 34 inches (okay most days!)

They are also a bit different in how I placed my pattern stripes. Its hard to show you clearly so I got out our little step ladder and took this picture. Not very artistic but it gets the point across!

(Click to enlarge)  The hems will be a small rolled hem so they are generous sized towels. I'll have to check the shrinkage once wet finished.  There are blue stars on the front and yes, it finally worked out right so they are reversible and have white stars on the back:

Once the holiday weekend is over, all heck is going to break out around here (again) as the work will begin on hooking the newly dug well to the house which is 300 feet away. Our driveway will look a bit rough for a few days. Three days if things go well and five if not! Wish us luck! I am so looking forward to a shower with full normal water pressure again...

Oh, and our new well is  'artesianing'  as we found to our surprise! The water level had filled all 182 feet of the pipe, plus the two feet above ground and has been trickling out the top cap. This caught our plumber by pleasant surprise and apparently its a good thing!  We will have lots of water for all our needs.  

Something to be thankful for....