I recently wove a set of kitchen towels using slub cotton from R&M yarns. Having never used it before, I followed the seller's recommendations exactly: that is to say, I used a sett of 10 epi and one strand of 8/4 carpet warp for the selvedges. Ordinarily I'm too stingy with my yarn to do any sampling before I jump into a project. That has come back to bite me more than once - I usually find out at the very end, after I've finished the whole warp, that I should have been doing things differently from the start. But this time it was immediately apparent that I had some problems to deal with. It was easy to tell right away that my selvedges were coming out far too loose. So upon finishing the first towel in the warp I cut it off the loom and washed it to see how bad the situation really was. Unfortunately, my worst suspicions were confirmed. The edges were downright embarrassing, and steps had to be taken.
My solution was a combination effort. I added 6 new ends of 8/4 carpet warp to both edges of the towels, and sleyed them with two ends per dent in my 10 dpi reed. Like floating selvedges, I wrapped them around weights (in this case, half-filled water bottles) and suspended them off the back beam of the loom. They weren't actually floating selvedges though, because they were threaded into heddles like the rest of the warp. It was very interesting to me that, looking at the towels under tension on the loom, it was impossible to tell that the final 8 ends at the edges were threaded twice as densely as the rest of the towel. Before my salvage efforts, the last half-inch or so at the edges had appeared extra widely spaced. They naturally settled into the perfect spacing with the extra threads added in, but you wouldn't know to look at them that there was anything special about the edges.
Off the loom, I couldn't be happier with the results. I didn't know what to expect up until the moment I took them out of the drier, because it had been such a series of mishaps along the way. In addition to the selvedge issues, I was also battling tension problems and smiling edges the whole time. I attribute both of those to the uneven way my towels were winding onto the cloth beam rather than anything to do with the set-up, but that's another story. The short version is that I needed to (but didn't) wind a rigid separator between layers on the cloth beam, and without it the unsupported edges made the tension worse and worse as I wove. It looked and felt awful, but once I took the towels off of the loom -- hey presto! All of the tension problems corrected themselves once the towels were no longer under tension, and my horizontal stripes were perfectly straight after all.
For a dreaded project that lay on the loom unfinished for months because of what a nightmare it was, I'm actually shocked to say that I'd love to do it all again, and soon...now that I know how to head off all those problems from the start.
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