The Wandering Vine Coverlet
I pulled it off the big loom on Saturday morning last weekend. 12 yards of fabric -- 2 panels for the coverlet. Only 2 panels because this is a wider loom. I finished up the extra warp with all cotton towels in the same wandering vine pattern.
I cut the coverlet panels apart and did the work of piecing them together. This should be done before wet-finishing or any other tinkering.
I explain in more detail (with pictures) how I pieced the panels together in this post for the last coverlet:
I had some concerns that the pattern in the panels might not
match up -- the tape measure seemed to say that the 2nd panel was longer
than the first. In actuality, they were pretty close at 104 inches.
I think the measuring tapes much have shifted while on the loom. No surprise there. Things are under tension while I'm actually weaving, but on the off days the rest of the week, I loosen things up. There's a lot of back and forth on that tape. When I took them off and measured them side by side, they matched up well enough. Whew!
This photo shows the zigzag used to pieces the panels together.
In any case, I was able to match up the pattern easily enough. I overlapped the selvedge edge by 1/2 an inch. Finned it in place with safety pins (less pokey that way), and took it to the sewing machine to piece the panels together. I used a narrow zigzag 1.5 stitch length and 2.5 stitch width. The zigzag covers that selvedge edge and contains it. Then on the flip side, I sort of stay-stitched it with a straight stitch, and then went back over it with the same 1.5 / 2.5 zigzag. You can hardly tell there's a seam in the middle unless you are looking for it. The wandering vine pattern matched up pretty well. ;-)
I did the hems a little different this time. I trimmed the cream-colored cotton plain weave hems to 3/4 inch. Then I folded them over 3x so that none of that white plain weave shows--like it would for towel hems. Then I stitched it down with a blind hem stitch. I think it looks more professional that way -- more of the classic look where the pattern is all you see.
Pulling the nylon fishing line used to fortify the floating selvedge edges. It's hard to see, wound around the medical pliers.
I almost forgot to pull the nylon fishing line that I use for the floating selvedges. It works like 2 charms to keep those edges straight. But I do need to pull it out of the final cloth. I already had the panels sewn together when I remembered to do that. It wasn't hard to pull it from the outside edges, but a little trickier to get it out of the seams that joined the panels. Trickier, but still manageable -- I used a handy medical forceps to grab onto that fishing line, and then twist until I had all of it extracted.
The thing about nylon fishing line is that you should cut it up into little pieces before you throw it in the garbage. This prevents animals from getting tangled in it when it goes "wild."
Hemmed and pieced BEFORE wet finishing. If you look closely, you can barely see the seam moving horizontally about halfway through the piece -- but only if you know what to look for. It came together better than I thought it would. It looks good -- if a little flat. But wait for the magic of wet-finishing!
After wet-finishing. The reds seem to bloom so nicely! It really comes alive after the wet-finishing. The wool yarn gets a 3D texture--I'm not sure how to describe it. Almost like that old flocked wallpaper.
And no running reds either -- That's always a concern with red dyes.
It has a really nice hand, too. I love this combination of 10/2 cotton with a wool yarn about 2x that weight.
The sectional warp worked marvelously and mitigated most of the tension issues I've encountered in the past. Hurray! What a good investment that was!
Materials:
10/2 American Maid natural cotton warp and tabby
Red Wool yarn for the pattern weft -- I don't really know the specifics more than that.
Measurements:
Off the loom and BEFORE wet finishing:
Each panel was 35-1/2 in x 104 in.
Together, the full coverlet was 69-1/2 in x 97 in. (after hems top and bottom)
AFTER wet finishing, the full finished coverlet measures 65-1/2 x 94 in.
I am very pleased with how this turned out. Not quite as fun to work on as the Mountain Cucumber pattern, but I DO love weaving! I DO love my looms!
I will see if I can put it in the Fly In Quilt Show this summer -- in the bed turning again. I will take it to Quilt Guild this week for show-and-share.
Now the loom is naked -- such a sad state. I'll need to run a warp for the next project soon!
Here are the other blog posts about this project:
