26/07/2012

Twist and ...

then, more twist.

One can go to any lenght in search for the perfect fringe.
I don’t.

What I do is cut (in this case both layers) the unwoven warp to the desired lenght, on a gridded cutting board with a rolling knife. Usually I cut the other end to the same length (but not always – the double-layer shawls with offset selvages and offset beginnings/endings don’t necessarily need to be symmetrically fringed, IMO).

After that, I knot all "half-fringes", Then I twist them two-and-two, and trust my fingers to make all end-knots "the same".

The reasons I knot "half-fringes" are two: I don’t like too skinny fringes, and I don’t like too big/wide knots. In this case the fringes contain 12 ends, and at 10 epcm that would be over one cm, which I think is too much.

Of course I take care to count the number of turns, adjusting for yarn grist (in this case the blue warp is finer than the brown, so the blue fringes need relatively more twisting), adjusting for different lengths. (A longer description of my way can be found on my website, here – for Swedish, click here.)



Does it work to use fingers for final length-adjustment?



As you can see, the answer is yes (and no – but I think it is "good enough".
(For those of you who think my practices are sloppy, I recommend Susan Harvey’s tutorial. Myself, I never twist "backwards", for reasons given here.)

Fringes done, it is time for wet finishing.
I forgot to change the spin-cycle, so I had some very wrinkled scarves to deal with. No pressing was gong to help... but I decided to try mangling before I put them back in the washing machine. A small smoothing with the iron, twice through the mangle and another good press with lots of steam took care of the wrinkles.

Here they are, on the rack for the final drying:


All the same, but all different...

2 comments:

Laura Fry said...

I do as you do - trust my fingers to set the knots at the end. When being worn the fringes will all be different, anyway? ;)

Good to hear the mangle worked to get the creases out!

cheers,
Laura

Anonymous said...

I line up all the knots on a grid. I love the way they look when they hang on display and perfectly even. On the other hand I use an electric twister. I see no difference between counting twists with a twister and the electric twister. After using the electric twister for a while you get a pretty even twist on all the strands. It is faster and easier... I am talking about a tight twist. If twisting loosely a hand twister would be better.