Not as bad as it sounds! I’m having fun with this project. A customer shared a photo of a well-loved blanket with me in the hopes of getting a replica made. It had been woven many years before and was perfect for their preemie baby (now in her 20s). Soft and cushy.
After quite a bit of examination and several consults with weaving friends I decided that this is a block waffle weave. So I set up the Katie using 6-shafts and wove some samples using a cotton/bamboo blend (Hannah, now sadly discontinued) that proved the weave structure for me. These were done at 8 epi in a much larger yarn than the original.
We will hem them and put them out in our gift area for sale as spa cloths. Turns out I love this yarn for a quick project, and once washed, the yarn makes wonderful fringe. Thinking scarves are in my future…
I realized right away that I didn’t have a good reference point for how large the yarn in the blanket really was. So I asked for and got some photos with tape measures included so I could count the threads per inch. That ended up counting to closer to 16 or 18 epi.
That matched a yarn size that another weaving friend had suggested: an 8/2 cotton flake (or cotton slub). I ordered some from Maurice Brassard. So, we now have the cotton slub yarn in stock! It took awhile before I could find the time to wind the warp on our small warping board. I ended up with 4 warp chains. The photo shows them all on the loom ready to wind onto the back beam in the stripe pattern. I’m currently working on threading the heddles.
Hope to start weaving this weekend!
