Fabric for a Gladstone Bag

This is a project that has been lurking with intent for more than a year now, since I fell for the Gladstone Bag in “Carry me” . 

At the beginning of the year, I got all the bag hardware from  U-handbag but an oversight in clicking the purchase forms left me with red handles and the brown/black/white fabric from my yarn stash wasn’t going to work out (Of course I could have got more handles, but where’s the fun in that!). The project sat around for a while longer.

This month I spotted some interesting wool, cones of singles for weaving in lovely tweedy colours from Jamieson’s (Shetland)  and took my red handles to visit a friend who had a Jamieson’s shade card! 3 cones in Sholmit(grey), Ruby and Moorland speedily arrived, weaving drafts were studied and the loom warped up with a bit of each colour for samples.

Unfortunately my brain went on holiday, and I threaded for sample A, with the colour sequence of sample B. Bother … project went on hold for another week or so while I tried to decide the easiest way to fix the mistake.

Last weekend, I pulled out alternate warp threads and rethreaded them to change the colour order. Finally, I took today off work today to recover from  “Amazed by Science” on Sunday at Jodrell, and wove off the first set of samples.

These are various shadow weaves. The warp set was ~15epi ( I have a metric reed so it was really 60ends/10cm) which looked about right for  a plain weave. There are quite a few patterns and colour combinations tested here … some are just too subtle. It looks like the Ruby/Sholmit colour combination is the best here.

This sample is very open, but the yarn it tight spun and oiled, when test washed some of it, it fluffed and filled a fair bit. So the sample needed  good wash to see whether the set was right.
Cue a Runrig CD and a few gaelic tweed waulking  songs while I gave the sample a good thrashing to full it. The piece that started as 14 x 32cm ended up 11.5 x 28cm.

Here we are post-washing. It has potential and is about the right heft for a scarf (but a bit too scratchy for that) but could doing with a bit more solidity for a bag, though I might try it with the interfacing to check.

(Or I could send it back to the wash for another few Runrig tracks.)

SampleB next, I want to try some twills…and here they are:


twills
Twills

 

About spindizzy

A handweavers blog
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