Mending Sleaziness

I’ve been mending and burling the Birthday Blanket. This means painstakingly going over the fabric looking for flaws and fixing them. Most errors, like skips and floats, are easy to fix.

The one that’s been puzzling me is sleaziness.

Sleazy spot in the fabric

In places where there are two consecutive shots missing, it’s easy, simply needle-weave in two new shots of weft.

But what do you do when you only missed one shot? Needle-weaving in two shots of weft in a space only big enough for one would result in fabric that was too dense. Needle-weaving in one shot would mean doubling the thread in one pick and also stand out.

I puzzled over it last night and then went to bed.

This morning I woke up with an idea: split the two-ply weft into two single plies and needle weave both singles in separately.

splitting the plys

The first step is to needle-weave along one of the wefts, in the same shed. To make it easy to come back the other way, I made sure that the new thread was always on top of the existing weft.

needle-weaving in first singles

Then I came back the other way, weaving between the normal and the singles weft that are in the same shed. As you can see on the left, I’m getting good results. The fabric density with the two singles closely matches that of the rest of the cloth.

weaving in the second singles

Here’s a before-and-after shot of what the sleaziness in the cloth looks like, and the repair (pointed out by the needle ).

before and after, repairing sleaziness

If you look closely, you’ll see singles ends sticking out of the cloth. That’s a repair where the single ply broke while I was weaving it in. You could prevent this by adding twist to the singles after you un-ply them. In this case, I was working with a sticky wool, so I just fixed the error and continued on.

And that’s my new trick for repairing sleazy areas in cloth!

 

Weave on…

—Syne