Washed

Making some progress here, step by step.  This is the cloth off the loom and mended.  It is starting to relax a bit, you can see some bits of tracking which I like in this piece.

off the loom, mended

I started with 14′ of warp and 20″ at the reed.  I beat it as hard as I could with a sword and bubbled the weft.   Off the loom, the cloth part measured 139″ x17.75″. Next step is to wet finish it.  The hand spun single yarn was lightly steamed to calm the twist but I did not want the yarn to bloom before weaving.

My philosophy is finish gently first, you can always do more.  So for this I used room tempture water with a touch of ORVUS paste.  Soaked for several hours, it took a while for it to really get wet.  Then spun out and put in rinse water with vinegar and fabric softener and let soak overnight.  Spun out and dried  draped over a drying rack.

washed, ready for construction

As you can see it closed up mostly in the warp direction.  In fact the width is now 17.25″ but the length  is is 128″.  It looks more solid but still very textural.  No pressing here.

awaiting construction

Just a note here about shrinkage.  The width started out at 20″ and ended up at 17.25″, which is 26% shrinkage.  Most of this happened on the loom, very little in the washing.  The weaveable length of the warp was 154″ and it ended up 128″ for about a 17% overall shrinkage.  Lengthwise was different,about half of the loss was in take up, off the loom before washing was 139″ and half shrinkage, down to 128″.  I think I need two panels 31″ long to make a quechquemitl so I may have enough to make 2 quechquemitls!