How I Wet Finish Weaving Projects

This post is based off a reply I gave to this Tumblr thread asking about wet-finishing advice for handwovens. The Tumblrite above me gave excellent instructions for gently hand-washing items, a practice I respect but don't use myself. I've edited a bit for clarity and added a few extra things I didn't think of at the time.

My reply

What @crow-crafting said is a great approach for most weaving, especially if your yarn is prone to fulling (felting, but with spun fibres) and you want to be able to control that process completely. The only thing I'd add is that if you're hanging it to dry, it can really help to hang it over a thick bar or rod rather than just a regular washing line. Some yarns will take offence to the line and set a permanent crease if it's the first time they've been washed.

Personally, I tend to be more aggressive with wet finishing. I know I will never have the executive function to consistently hand wash whatever I've made, so I wet finish my weaving at least as aggressively as I expect its future washings to be. Which means I almost always do samples before getting into the actual project.

A Bevy of Woven Bands

I'm in the process of making myself a new shirt. It's square cut, which is my favourite type of shirt construction. I've had a fair amount of practice with this style of garment, what with all the t-tunics I've made for medieval re-enactment, though making a shirt is involves more steps. It's all measuring things and cutting out the right sized rectangles, so there's no fiddling about with pattern pieces (which I despise). Best of all, despite being a fairly simple construction method, there's a surprising amount of room for tweaking the design of the final product.

While I like the idea of the "pirate shirts" that are everywhere nowadays, I live the kind of life where Dramatic Sleeves™ are a drawback. So I wanted something that uses the idea of rectangular geometry, just with a bit less flamboyance. Conveniently, history provided.

Remembrance

I started this project last year, the day after Trans Day Of Remembrance, and the day of the Club Q terror attack. My heart was heavy, and I needed a way to redirect a whole bunch of feelings about a thing I couldn't do anything about.

The warp and weft both came from several balls of a 5 ply acrylic knitting yarn. They had been given to me in one of those many small "I don't know what else to do with this" moments that happen when people know that 1) you're a knitter and 2) you'll happily collect donations and pass them on to various local organisations if you can't use them yourself.

If you wrap the warp chain once around the cloth beam, it keeps tension on the warp while you're beaming it. Much easier to do the job solo that way.

I'd looked at them and immediately went "that's a trans pride bundle of colours if ever I saw them," then put them in the stash and let them percolate. (I don't knit with 5 ply much, I already had more than enough projects that needed finishing, and I had no idea what pattern would do justice to the vague idea I had. Sometimes things need to compost a while before you can grow anything from them.)

The warp, beamed and heddles threaded, ready to sley the reed.

I originally wanted to do a heart twill. After a bit of thought, mostly centred around my lack of experience, I went with a diamond twill instead. This was the first project on my new-to-me floor loom, and the diamond twill was more straightforward.

Plus, counterbalance looms don't deal well with unbalanced shafts - you can certainly weave them, but they take a bit of experience, and it's best to have the majority of the threads on the front shafts rather than the back. The heart twill pattern I had put more threads on shafts 2 and 4 than on shafts 1 and 3, and I didn't have the headspace or the experience to flip the draft.

It took me eight days to wind the warp, beam it, thread the heddles, sley the reed, and tie on. (I wasn't tracking project hours back then, so I don't know how long those things actually took, all up. They certainly weren't full days.) I'd started on the twenty-first, and was threading the heddles by Sunday 27th. On the 30th, I started weaving.

It took me a little while to find a good beat - I started out far too soft, so I had to cut off the first few inches when I'd finished.

Besides me not liking the look of the elongated diamonds, this beat would have resulted in a sleazy fabric.

Once I got the beat figured out, it was (fairly) plain sailing. This diamond twill changes the treadling pattern every eight picks, so I had to pay attention at all times or I'd end up having to unweave sections. I ended up writing down the treadling plan on a piece of cardboard, and blu-tacked it to the castle. As I wove, I moved another blob of blu-tack along every "section" to keep my place.

Even with that help, I found I could only weave for 40 minutes at most before I got too scrambled to keep going. This was not a project where I could put on a podcast in the background. (Good for ergonomics, not so great for getting things done in a timely fashion.)

According to my project notes, I only actually wove for eight days between getting the loom warped and cutting the finished fabric off. Given the thickness of the threads, that seems about right - I'd roughly guess at six or seven hours of weaving time over a ~2.3m warp.

Fresh off the loom.

After that it was a matter of wet finishing (I washed it on the wool setting, with a bunch of socks that needed cleaning, in the washing machine), trimming the loom waste and the weft ends, and doing double folded hems at each end (I am Not A Fan of fringe).

Draw-in was only about 2cm (0.75"), and take-up equally small at ~4cm (1.6"). There was practically no shrinkage when I wet finished it, too - I'm told that's common with acrylic. All up, the finished wrap is 161 cm (63.5") long and 67 cm (26.5") wide.

Is it perfect? Hell no; there's at least two threading errors and the beat changes from start to finish. But it's soft, and warm, and it's full of the hope and productive anger that I managed to find after the beat of the loom helped me climb out of the pit of helpless despair.

How to keep your shafts steady while threading

I have a counterbalance floor loom. It's my pride and joy. (Counterbalance looms are like hen's teeth in Australia.) I've finished one project on it and am well under way warping the next, so I'm still in the honeymoon phase. However, this honeymoon hasn't been without its issues.

The Problem

Like a lot of pulley-based looms, mine has wooden shafts top and bottom that float freely in the castle - no sides or guide rails. This can make it difficult to thread the heddles. They wave around and bump into each other, and before you know it you've threaded shaft three with shaft four's intended thread, or worse - threaded *both* together.