Handweave Adventures: huck lace

460 ends of 30/2 silk on the loom for a new project in huck lace. It's a shawl design by Susan Foulkes that caught my eye. You can see hers here

It's the first time I've used pure silk. Its slipperiness meant an overhand knot was necessary on the warping wheel to prevent each section from sliding off as I warped it onto the beam. The weaving went easily although a gentle beat was required to to stop the square motif becoming diamond shaped.

Normally with lace weaves the warp and weft are the same colour but I used brown for the warp and yellow for the weft. The result is a gold, lustrous fabric. With so many ends I decided to hem stitch and leave a fringe. Hem stitching a fabric with 26 epi was excrutiating and required a large magnifying glass and several hours!

The cloth has a lovely softness and drape as you'd expect from silk. I gently wet finished than hung to drip dry.

Close up of the structure

The shawl with the plain weave border and fringe

One repeat of the draft, 9 shafts and 9 treadles

759 ends to thread and sley

Another experiment with double cloth overlaying different weave structures, this time huck lace over a pointed draft twill - both in cotton. 8/2 for the twill and finer 16/2 for the lace both set at 10 ends/cm (25 epi). The two cloths are joined at intervals in the weave. This didn't work at first so I had to add two more treadles to the draft and cut and re thread about 40 warp ends. Fortunately, the tension wasn't affected noticeable.

After washing, the lace structure has appeared, revealing the colours of the twill below, perhaps not quite as clearly as I had hoped. A very dark cotton or the lace may have helped and next time perhaps more blurred transitions between the colours underneath - maybe an echo weave.