Rome | Marc Smollin Designs

One For the Road

When I woke up yesterday morning, I realized that it was only 24 hours until my one-week trip with Andy to Rome and Naples! However, the day before I had warped a two-meter piece on the Kromski, and I knew I just couldn’t possibly enjoy a vacation knowing there was unfinished work on the loom.

Still, I had to run a lot of errands — so it wasn’t until 6pm that I finally had a chance to sit down, thread, and start weaving. We watched “Muriel’s Wedding” and episodes of “Drawn Together” while I wove non-stop. By 2:30am this morning, the piece was finished, blocked, and drying.

For the warp, I used Dibadu Funnies. It’s a great yarn for the warp, actually, because it’s really slippery, so you don’t have to deal with unsticking your warp threads ever. This meant that I could work faster than I have been able to on other pieces.

For the weft, I used a high-twist handspun that I made last year. And this is really where the problem with this piece comes in. I was using the two-float warp texture again to attempt to create some sections with Xes in them. I discovered the following things:

1. A high-twist, handspun (and therefore somewhat inconsistent-in-thickness) yarn will not lay comfortably in the weave. This, in and of itself, is a kind of limiting texture, in that additional layers of texture tend to get lost in the overall picture.

2. While diamonds and diagonals look great as a warp-based float, crosses do not. They look much more pleasing to the eye as weft-based.

3. When I finally accepted that Xes were just not going to happen, everything became much easier and looked better.

I managed to capture some nice pictures of the piece, and I particularly love the second half of it (when I finally gave up on the double-texture). However, this was much more of a learning-how-to-deal-with-yarn-and-not-rushing moment than a showing-off-my-design-skills one.