What better way to enjoy heavier handwovens than as throw pillows?! These two were added to my spaces this winter. Here are their stories.
The Irish Wool Seat Cushion
A long time ago (probably 2018, before Covid anyway), my daughter took a trip to Ireland. Knowing I love fiber, she brought me some lovely Irish wool yarn as a gift. It was heavier and coarser than yarns I usually work with, so it entered my stash pile to wait for inspiration.
Fast forward to the fall of 2020 when my local weavers’ guild announced a challenge to make something with something from our stash. To facilitate the process, the first meeting of the year was devoted to brainstorming ideas for our projects and inspiring each other. Everyone had uploaded photos of their yarn to a common folder so we could look at them during a Guild meeting on Zoom. We each provided as much information as we could on our yarns, and then opened it up to ideas from the floor.
So many inspiring ideas came out of this meeting! Many were the usual things like a scarves and towels, but people also suggest creative weave structures and finishing techniques that would be appropriate for the specific yarns. I remember being very impressed by our conglomerate creativity!
For my yarn, among the suggestions was a seat cushion. I had never thought of that – what an idea! So that’s what I ran with. I found an interesting 8-shaft pattern on handweaving.net that I thought would be fun to weave on my 8S LeClerc floor loom. I found another contrasting but similar weight yarn in my stash (double points there!) to use in the warp. Having so little of this precious Irish yarn though, I needed to sample. The most important information would come after washing and fulling the sample. So I simplified the structure and wove a small sample on a 4-shaft loom. The shrinkage was much less than I had anticipated, which was really good news. My 775 yards of pink wool would be enough for the weft for 2 pillows! I used every last yard of the Irish wool and the darker burgundy wool warp.
During the spring of 2021, I finished weaving the 8S fabric and fulled it in time for our annual end-of-year supper (alas not “pot luck” this year), which we gleefully held outdoors in person! The weather was threatening, but we were eager to see each other and share our projects, and the outdoor gathering was a success.
Then the fabric sat for awhile longer, waiting for another burst of inspiration on how to make the seat cushion. The original plan had been complex, comprising a trapezoidal shape with 1-2″ side panels and high density cushion foam inside. But that was intimidating, so it was put off. Then I ran across a blog post on Gist Yarn’s website on how to make an envelope pillow using handwoven fabric. Looking around my studio, I saw no fewer than 3 pillow forms sitting unused. So the plan was hatched.
With the size defined, the pillows came together with a pretty multi-colored cording around the edges made from mercerized cotton (also from my stash!) One was stuffed with a feather pillow and is on my chair now. The other became an 18″ couch pillow that I’m thinking of giving to my daughter, who was kind enough to purchase the yarn in the first place. What goes around, comes around.
Honeycomb for my Honey
In 2021, my husband and I became beekeepers. We love our bees! (The queen is named “Bee 39.” Hehe!) It was my idea really, but I was more than pleasantly surprised when Dan took the lead with them. He spent hours watching YouTube videos and reading books and just going out to the garden to observe our industrious hive of black and yellow honeybees. So, most of his Christmas gifts this year had a bee theme. (Men are so hard to shop for. It pleases me to no end when I can give him something he’s not expecting and he loves it!)
True confessions: We usually eat dinner sitting on the couch watching Jeopardy! Hubby Dan props his plate conveniently on an old couch pillow that is dedicated to this function. However, dedicated or not, the old one was getting pretty ratty looking. He didn’t know it, but he needed a new “dining pillow.”
Last fall I was playing with crackle. One of the variations was to treadle it as honeycomb. As I looked at the structure, the wheels were turning, and I knew that his new dining pillow was going to be a honeycomb structure. Back to my stash I went. I found some pale yellow and taupe Tencel and some novelty yarn that would work perfectly for little honeycomb cells outlined in black. I decided to keep it very traditional, with 8-end/8-pick cells for the entire width, as evenly structured as the comb in our hive.
I jumped right in with a 20″ wide warp with enough length to sample some weft colors and wash it to make sure that the cells would behave as expected. I’m glad I did that because I was debating about single or double stranding the black outline yarn. Although I was leaning toward the double, the single ply looked best. In the end, that was a really good choice, as I would have run out of the doubled yarn.
The pillow wasn’t finished in time for Christmas, but that was OK, because the loom attachment he was building for me in his workshop wasn’t done either. We’re a good pair!
One of the holdups was waiting for a 6-treadle retrofit for my little Harrisville floor loom. After treadling the crackle sampler with a 4-treadle direct tie-up, I knew I didn’t want to weave a whole length of honeycomb fabric dancing on 1, 2 and 3 treadles through the whole thing. So it was worth the wait for the convenience. It wove up quickly, finishing off one cone of the Tencel and all the novelty yarn.
The fabric done and vigorously washed and dried, I decided to use the same envelope pillow cover structure for this one. I added a black and yellow twisted cording on the edges and stuffed it with the pillow form from Dan’s now-retired dining pillow. Since the honeycomb structure is so elastic, the cover did require a couple snaps on the back.
If anyone walked into my studio today, they wouldn’t notice that I am down several cones of yarn and some pillow forms, but I know, and that makes me happy.