I’m so fortunate that both my daughters live near me and both have recently taken an interest in learning to weave. Both Kassie and Lizzie are married and just starting families of their own as well as many of their friends. So, of course, they want to weave baby blankets. When my second grandchild, Archie, was born I wove him a baby blanket in plain weave using the Monte Cristo cotton. We all loved the soft, squishy feel of the blanket and this cotton became an instant favorite. The girls have friends who are due in March so we put on a warp to weave two blankets and off we went.
Yarn
I purchase the Monte Cristo yarn through the Yarn Barn of Kansas, but it’s also available through The Woolery and other companies that sell weaving yarns. Monte Cristo is only available in white so if you want your blanket to have some color, you’ll have to do some dyeing. For our blanket we dyed the yarn in the following colors using ProChem dyes: Kilt Green, Stormy Gray, Olive (dyed two different shades) and Butterscotch.
Blanket Specifications
This time we will be weaving the blanket in twill so I wanted to sample the sett before they designed the blanket so I wove samples using a sett of 8 and then 10. We waffled back and forth for a few days, touching and feeling the samples and ultimately landed on using 10 ends per inch. Either one would work just fine. 10 epi was a bit more firm than the 8, but I liked how it showed the twill pattern better and it’s still squishy soft.
The size of the blanket is really a personal preference. I’m finding that I will aim for putting on a warp 35 inches in the reed and will weave anywhere between 45-50 inches. For this blanket, we had 353 warp ends (not including the two floating selvages) so it was a tad bit over 35 inches in the reed. Our fringe was 6 inches in length at each end of the blanket. To weave two blankets we wound 5 yard warp which was way more than enough. I ended up weaving a mini blanket to use the left over yarn. 4 1/4 yards would be sufficient to weave two blankets. The girls wove 50 inches each, and after washing, the blanket was 30 inches wide and 43 inches in length.
With just a little guidance Kassie and Lizzie designed their blankets on the iWeaveIt app. They decided to weave the length of the blanket in tromp as writ, which is a fancy way of saying repeating the pattern that was designed in the warp. We have to adjust a bit by adding inches here and there to make the blanket longer.
As you can see from the picture above, they alternated a point twill (threaded 1234321…) and a straight draw (1234..1234). This gave the fabric interesting design elements with straight lines, zig zags and diamonds. We also put a border on each end. Let’s take a closer look:
The border is threaded 34, 1234, 1234 because we will be using the first two pics (the 3 and 4) for our hemstitching. By adding these two pics, we can keep the twill sequence consistent with the rest of the blanket.
Weaving The Blanket
After threading the loom and tying on, it was time to get weaving! Sounds so simple, right? For this blanket in particular, all the pre-work of dyeing, designing, winding and threading took much more time than actually weaving. Lizzie figured that she spent only about 6 hours actually weaving the blanket. It weaves up pretty quick even for a beginner weaver. I want the girls to develop good weaving habits so I was pretty strict about them maintaining a balanced weave ensuring they were weaving at 10 pics per inch. Some of their weaving time included stopping to measure.
The general instructions to the girls were: weave a header to get your ends straight, leave a 6 inch gap for fringe (note: we will untie the warp at the front and use that for extra fringe length), weave 4 pics (3412) leaving a long tail at the beginning of the first pic, hemstitch (using the long tail) moving up two pics and in bundles of 4 ends, weave your blanket, hemstitch again, leave about 13 inches. Next weaver begins their blanket by throwing the 4 pics (3412), hemstitch and on. Here are my little weavers:
Finishing The Blanket
After the blankets were cut from the loom, using a rotary cutter on our cutting board, we cut the yarn 6 inches from the hemstitching at the ends of each blanket. The girls used a fringe twister to twist the fringe. The blanket was washed on a regular cycle and then dried on a low heat setting. The girls then clipped off the hanging threads in their blankets and snipped the ends of the fringe just below the knot to clean it up a bit.
Pictures of the Blanket
The girls are both very, very pleased with their blankets and have plans to weave more for upcoming babies. Let’s take a peek at their first baby blanket weaving project.
We’ll post more pictures once those little babies are born!
