Skip to main content

Rags, rags, lots and lots of rags


So, yeah, a lot of rags.

The sewing workshop has recently bagged up a great deal of fabric waste, which I have taken, in order that my rug loom may never go hungry.

I am currently sorting these rags by colour. I am less than a quarter of the way through what i have the now, which is less than a tenth of what is available and i have a whole sack of black and a whole sack of beige, and half a sack of white and multiple bags of other colours.

It may seem a little mad for me to be filling me itny house with all this scrap, but the idea is that at some point in the future I'll be either partially or wholly unemployed (who knows what the future holds?) and this is my bank. When money is rare and time plentiful there'll be plenty time spare to weave rag rugs. Rag rugs from this kinda material are relatively time-consuming to make, but on the other hand you can be a bit more arty with them as you're only working with little bits so you can be a bitty tapestry-like with it and make all sorts of lovely patterns and that. Happy days.

It's probably worth mentioning that I also aquired three massive sacks of leather scraps and a half sack of sheepskinny scraps, from which I can expect to be making wallets and purses and the like for a long time to come.

Besides that I have had multiple recent enquiries about selvedge-rugs so I need to acquire some more loom-waste for weaving those things. And some 2-ply cotton while I'm at it, for warps. I also have two massive bolts of single jersey cotton fabric that need to be ripped down to rags for weaving too, who knows when I'll find time to do that.

It's nice to have something to work with.

Andrew

Comments

Laura Fry said…
Wow! That's a *lot* of rags! :D

Happy rug weaving,
Laura
Andrew Kieran said…
It certainly is, isn't it? There's plenty more where they came from too. Scary amounts to be had, I'll probably get another car load tomorrow, then sort them in the evenings.

I like to stock up on supplies in times of plenty, things always go round in cycles and if I can get a decent stock of rugs built up then it'll be worth my time and money advertising and things.

If only winter wasn't such a busy time it'd be perfect for building up stock
Michelle said…
Awww, look at the little puppy in amongst the rags!!

Popular posts from this blog

Tablet Weaving Lesson #1: Backstrap weaving a simple diamond motif

This is the first in a series of video and photo tutorials showing basic to advanced tablet-weaving concepts. These lessons shall each build on the last and hopefully take the viewer from simple diamond patterns up to more complicated double face pattern weaving with finer yarns and eventually onto the heady heights of brocading and other fancy techniques (just as soon as I learn how to do them myself). In this first lesson we'll learn the basic weaving steps involved in weaving a diamond pattern in the backstrap style. This lesson is meant for someone who has purchased a ready-made warp from me. The next lesson shall detail how to design and make this warp oneself. And we begin This is the basic pattern we are making. The woven band is tied to my waist with another strap. I am holding a small stick shuttle in my right hand which contains the weft. In front of me are the cards, each card has 4 warp threads going through it. The gap that you can see is called the

treble-cloth construction

I am currently in the process of designing a triple layered fabric. One layer shall carry conductive warp threads (one out of every three), another layer shall carry conductive weft threads (again, one out of every three) and a third layer shall lay between them and act as an insulator, keeping them apart and preventing unwanted contact between the two conductive layers. Constructing a treble cloth is a compicated process. The way that a treble cloth is woven is that first the face cloth is woven, then the centre cloth is woven, then the back cloth is woven. This is a draft for a treble cloth. The crosses indicate weaving marks for the cloth currently being woven, the dashes are lifts and are used to indicate shafts that are being lifted in the case of layers that are above the layer currently being woven. Blue is back, Red is front, Green is centre (All three layers are plain weave btw) The cloth is constructed like so 1: Back cloth is woven. All red and green marks are lif

Building a jack loom Part 1: Vague plans and messy diagrams

I've been thinking about it for a while to be fair. What I'm thinking about is an 8 shaft folding jack loom. The interesting part comes when I point out that I'm going to build an electric dobby controller into the bottom of it so it operates from one pedal and a computer program. So far I've been thinking and thinking and I'm basically roughly copying the kind of frame you'd find in a Siever's school or Baby wolf loom. Basically it's like an X that folds up on itself with the castle in the middle. Should be able to reduce it's depth from 3 feet to about 1 for storage. I don't think it's really that difficult to design the loom frame, aside from building the beams and making the ratchets and so on, which I may just jigsaw out of thick MDF. I have most of the wood I need asides from some panelling and I need to buy some aluminium sheet to make the shaft dividers with and also to hold the shaft bodies together with. The rising levers w