Hooded Shawl

Yes I weave too.

Once I started spinning, knitting couldn't keep up with the amount of yarn coming off my wheel. Frankly, weaving can't keep up either, but it puts a wider dent (sorry) in the stash.

I have a rigid heddle, and it does a good job of eating up the yarn, but I discovered early, that extra care had to be taken in spinning the warp. The heddle can wear through handspun yarn quickly. It takes a lot of time and care to spin warp that is strong enough to stand up to the punishment. While it is gratifying to spend the extra time spinning yards and yards of worsted two-ply, there's a lot of loom waste -- that is -- you end up cutting off and throwing away hours of yarn.

You can pretty much forget about using handspun slub singles, granny knot, beehive coils or any of the other fun-to-spin novelty yarns as warp. Either they won't fit through the heddle, or they are too delicate to stand up to the abrasion or the tension necessary to weave cloth on a loom that depends on heddles to create sheds.

But you can use novelty yarns on modular looms. I won't go into what a modular loom is here, because you can google Tri-Loom or Triloom and find a lot of sites that will explain it far better than I could here. You can even watch a Fineweaver working on a rectangular modular loom on Youtube. She also has a great video of Weaving with Mohair on a triloom. Mohair, with it's fluffy loose construction is a particularly challenging fiber to use, and as you can see from the video, even handweaving it without the mechanical intervention of a heddle can be daunting.

I belong to a Triloom Group on Yahoo where we talk about looms and making them and weaving on them and design ideas. That's where this post started with an ascii art experiment.

I was trying to explain how to put a hood on a triangular shawl and I'm afraid I didn't explain it well.

I'm going to try again with lots and lots of words and some illustrations.

I've not tried this yet. It's just theory here. But this looks like it would work.

First, I'm assuming that the person who is making the hooded shawl has a 7 foot Triloom and a 14 inch square loom, and further that they know how to weave on both.

After weaving the triangle and two squares, you sew/crochet/knit the two squares together to make a 14 x 28" rectangle, then center and attach that rectangle to the top center of the triangle. At left is an illustration of a 7foot triangle with two 14 inch squares centered on the hypotenuse -- the longest side of this right-angle triangle.

If you only have a 6 foot triloom and a 1 foot square loom to work with, the proportions would be the same. Two squares attached to each other are equal to 1/3 the length of the triangle's hypotenuse. I'd think that after fulling the weaving, you'd probably want to crochet or knit an edging to extend the depth of a hood made with a 12 inch square loom, but that's something to decide once you've pieced it together.





Now let's say you don't have a square loom at all, but you do have various sizes of trilooms. You could piece together several triangles as shown here.

Or, let's say you only have one triloom -- and that is the most probable scenario since trilooms are handmade and not a small investment.

That's when it pays to belong to the yahoo triloom group, because you can find instructions on how to run a line/wire/rod part of the way down a large triloom to create a shorter hypotenuse -- and thus weave a smaller triangle. With a bit of ingenuity and a great deal of swearing, you can do it with a single large loom. With a lot of patience and an eye for mosaics or quilting layout, you can do it with a single small triloom.




Once you've got your pieced-together rectangle attached to your shawl triangle, fold it in half and sew/crochet/knit together the top of the hood.

Now, I'm also assuming here that you've made hoodless shawls with similar yarn on the triloom prior to the hood experiment and have a fairly good idea of how much the shawl will shrink with fulling. You can expect the attached hood to shrink in a similar way.

Measuring from the center back of my head to my nose is about 1 foot. With take-up in fulling, a 14" square won't quite meet my nose ... and frankly a good hood from my point of view should have some windbreak on each side. But again, this is a matter of preference.

So, now. There you go.

P.S. Recently, yet another member of the Yahoo Triloom Group mentioned a way to make hoods using triangles only, and this would actually make an attractive medieval type with the longer tip on the hood.

In this example, equal sized triangles are joined to create a shape that will open into a pyramid shape. I believe this would make a much more agreeable drape to the hood ... but again, this is something which would need to be tested.