Hobnobbin with Hemp Bobbins
We LOVE weaving with hemp and love the fabrics it produces. We have several kits that use a combination of hemp and cotton to produce amazing towel fabrics.
Check out the Tidepool Treasures Towels, Splash! Towels, and Enchanted Windowpane towels for a taste of weaving with hemp and cotton yarns.
Our Anni Alber’s Masters Towel Kit which is originally a 100% cotton kit, looked like another perfect place to combine a 10/2 Tubular Spectrum mercerized cotton warp and our Bold Lyte Hemp yarn for the weft. The colors in that kit fit perfectly into Michele’s décor and she wanted to weave them with hemp weft.
As Michele wove samples of these new versions of the Masters Towel kit, she made some great observations about weaving with hemp.
Tidepool Treasures Towel
Splash! Towels
Enchanted Windowpane Towels
Masters Towel, Anni Albers Colorway
By Michele B.
As I started weaving on the 8-shaft version of the Anni Alber’s Master towel with the Bold Lyte Hemp yarn, the dry weft yarn wasn’t behaving. It was flaring out at the edges and my selvages looked horrible.
The trick to making hemp bobbins behave is to soak them before weaving. Oh yes, we’ve covered this before in previous blog posts: see Weaving with Lyte Hemp Yarns. But I was so excited to weave the towels that I started weaving with the yarn without pausing to wet it.
So, after weaving the first 3 treadling repeats with dry yarn, I switched to using a bobbin that had been soaked. And the difference was so dramatic, I knew I had to call the already woven fabric an experiment (or that dreaded word…sample) and start the towel over using only the soaked hemp weft.
Let’s get the whole thing wet!
I intended to cut the sample with its half wet and half dry sections off to study the differences when it was washed. But in the rush to get the towels ready for Show and Tell at the Rocky Mountain Weaver’s guild meeting, I tossed the entire piece in the washing machine. Who’d have thought the fabric from wet bobbins and dry bobbins would be so different, even after a trip through the washer?
Besides finishing up a full half inch wider (over a mere 19.5”) the 3/1 twill boxes woven dry became VERY textural. The part of the sample woven wet had much nicer selvages and laid flat and smooth. And even after ironing, the extra texture of the dry hemp portion is still present. Probably as result of more weft going in when it was dry than when it was wet.
But wait, there’s more!
But naturally I wanted to know more. If the bobbin of hemp yarn has been wet and then dries out, does it retain wet qualities or revert to the unsoaked state? I am not a super patient person, so waiting for that bobbin to dry thoroughly was kind of torture. However, in the pursuit of answers, I persevered. And the previously well-behaved wet bobbin immediately returned to its misbehaving. Hemp is like all bast fibers. It is stiff and needs some coaxing to behave.
And now I want to see all the same iterations using the Fine Lyte Hemp yarn. But that will need to wait for another warp….
A few tips:
- I tried several vessels for soaking the bobbins and found quart canning jars (I have lots of them around) work well.
- After you finish weaving, take that wet bobbin out of your shuttle, and dry off the metal post. Rusty shuttle pins are not your friends.
- When you stop weaving for that session (oh come on, just a few more repeats…) put your wet bobbins in a sealed plastic bag or jar to keep them moist. If it will be more than a day or so, put them in the refrigerator or even the freezer to keep them fresh.
Shoot. Now I need to do samples with frozen bobbins, woven from the freezer and thawed. We weavers never get bored!!!
Best of Both Worlds!
We now have a half hemp, half cotton version of several the Masters Towel Kits! It is the Best of Both Worlds! As beautiful as they are absorbent, and delightful to use! Click here to check them out!
Wouldn’t it be easier to use unsoaked hemp as warp and cotton (either mercerized or unmercerized) as weft?
Great Question! Of course you can use hemp as warp with a cotton weft! That is the combination that we use in the Over the Moon Towels, Tide Pool Treasures towel and the Enchanted Windows towels. The texture of the fabric is different with a cotton warp and hemp weft. And when you want to use hemp for weft, you can control the hemp’s exuberant tendencies with a quick soak.
Wished I had known about soaking the hemp bobbins before weaving Over the Moon Towel kit!!!! Thank you Michele now I know before heading to Australia to teach hemp spinning. I will give you credit for that GREAT tip.
Question: How long did you soak the bobbins of hemp yarn?
5 minutes of soaking is plenty of time. When the yarn is saturated, it sinks in the container. It is then ready to pull out, blot dry and put onto your shuttle.