Leno-Lace Table Runner

Leno-Lace Table Runner

©Shireen Nadir 2014

For my latest loom experiment I wanted to try making something for the home, instead of another scarf. This is not even a little bit because I’m bored of scarves, but because all the delicious yarn I want to use is sock or lace weight and I’m waiting on my 10 and 12 dent heddles before using them up.

©Shireen Nadir 2014

I don’t know why I thought a table runner would make sense in my home, considering that I own a cat who likes to eat yarn, but that’s where I ended up going with this one.

  • Warp: Alternating threads of misc. black scraps in worsted and sock weight.
  • Weft: Cascade 220 Heathers in turquoise

I’ve tried to do something new with each of my pieces to help me learn. For the table runner I warped up alternating strands of sock and worsted weight black wool – 3 worsted, 1 sock, repeat, ending with 3 worsted. When I was ready to start the pick-up stick pattern I picked up the 3 worsted and skipped the sock yarn warps.

©Shireen Nadir 2014

Resulting in these long weft floats on the back.

I wove 20 picks of plain weave with scraps of navy blue yarn, and hem-stitched my edge before continuing. To dress up my edges, I’m using 2×2 Leno on an open shed, which is a fancy pants way of saying that I twisted the bottom warp threads over the top and ran my weft through them. Changing the shed and running your weft back locks the twist in place.

©Shireen Nadir 2014

Leno feels a little tedious because it’s done thread by thread, but the results of this simple technique have huge potential. I can definitely see myself trying different variations for more complex lace on future projects.

©Shireen Nadir 2014

I’m using a pick-up stick technique again to add warp floats to the work. Unlike my first pick-up stick project, I’ve left my outermost warp threads out of the pattern, so there is a 6 warp edging on each side of plain weave. This was intended to stabilize the piece, because I knew I’d be leaving long weft floats on the back, but it ended up giving me a different problem.

©Shireen Nadir 2014

The edges of my piece appear to be a little longer than the centre of my piece, resulting in slightly buckled edges which no amount of blocking or steam ironing seems to fix. I’m not entirely sure how to avoid this, other than to reduce my edging width.

©Shireen Nadir 2014

©Shireen Nadir 2014

On a side note, this post seems boring, and possibly irrelevant to my usual readers (pretty pics aside) but I decided to keep all the details in. Learning weaving techniques, lingo and best practices has been an interesting journey this past month, and it’s been good to document what I learned. Hopefully these posts can be useful to another new weaver as well :)