I received a request to weave some towels to match some woven back in 2015.  That presented a couple of problems, not least of which was that the warp and weft were 4.5/4 cotton which is not a standard size cotton.  Originally sourced as an end of line/job lot from the carpet industry it does make very nice absorbent dish towels (or bread cloths) and because of the thickness it is very quick to weave.  The good news is I found I still had a cone of the yarn.  Very good news actually as I did a search around all the normal sources and couldn’t find any currently for sale.

The original towel had blue stripes which were indigo dyed here at home.  The second problem was that my indigo pot came to a melted end in the shed fire.  That wasn’t necessarily a problem as I have other dyes for cotton and knew I had suitable blues. But while going through the thought process I decided to check to see if I could make a 4.5/4 cotton. Cotton yarn is made up of plies (the second number, so in this case 4) of a certain thickness (in this case 4.5, with 1 being the thickest).  The first number is multiplied by a standard 840 then divided by the number of plies to give yards per pound.  So in this case (4.5 x 840)/4 which is 945 yards per pound.  I had a suitable 8/2 cotton in the required blue so undertook to ply it twice (first time equals 8/4, then 8/8) which needless to say works out at 840 yards per pound – not a huge difference.

First job was to wind bobbins full of the 8/2 cotton.  Luckily the spinning wheel bobbins fit onto my Leclerc bobbin winder.  The ply two together.  With the tension sent right it is fairly straight forward to keep some tension on the two yarns with the left hand and some final tension with the thumb of my right hand.  I could watch as the plied yarn travelled over my right index finger and see the twists forming. Keeping this at about 10 twists per inch seemed to work.  The wheel Scotch tension was adjusted to pull the yarn through my hands with the slight pressure from either hand slowing that speed and allowing more twist as appropriate.  It turned out to be a pretty smooth process.  Once two full bobbins of the doubles were done I repeated the process to get the 8/8.

By the time the plying was finished I had one and a half bobbins of finished yarn which match the white yarn closely enough.  I wound the yarn from the bobbin to a center pull ball to make the job of winding the warp yarn easier.

Ultimately the process was a lot quicker than if I had dyed the same amount of yarn as I could get on with winding the warp straight away versus the wet dye process then drying time.

Will have photo’s of the next steps in a future blog.