Rug album completed

I took a little time today to add another photo album to my Facebook.  This newest album is a record of the rugs I have woven since I started weaving 5 years ago.
Handwoven rugs link to album.

Here are a few of my favorites.  This one was one of the most recent, finished last summer.  There were four rugs from this warp.  I used rug warp that I already had and the weft was a heavy cotton in a bundle of five or six strands in greens and oranges. 

If you click on the photo, you can see that the wide warp stripes are alternating burgundy and forest green in one stripe, and turquoise and blue in the second stripe.  They are separated by narrow white stripes. Because my warp colors alternate, I can keep any of the four warp colors on top by throwing a pic of narrow yarn between each pic of the heavy bundled yarn.  When I wanted the alternate color on top, I just skipped one pic of the narrow yarn.  It opens up all kinds of possibilities for color changes.  Threading green, burgundy, etc. in one stripe and burgundy, green, etc. in another stripe (as long as the stripes are an even number of threads) can also create another color in the same row. 

A huge cabinet of the weft yarn, in many "Fiesta" colors, was given to me by a wonderful friend when she was preparing to move to an apartment.  Three of the rugs were sold to help fund a church mission trip to Kentucky.

 This Giant Fancy Twill pattern caught my eye in one of the first weaving books I had lent to me when I first started weaving.  It was in the book, Weaving, Spinning and Dyeing, by Rachel Brown, page 176.  I was quite new to weaving when I wove it, and have since learned many things that I would do differently now, but the main thing that still makes it a favorite are the colors.  It was fun planning it out to get a nice mix, and I would do the colors like this again if I ever repeated this pattern.

A valuable class that I took a while ago was taught by Jason Collingwood.  The following sampler of techniques was done after I came home from the class.  It is also woven with the free heavy cotton yarn that my friend gave to me.  Most rugs of this type are woven with wool, but I wanted to see how some of the "Fiesta" colors would work up.  Unfortunately, I was testing it on the end of a rug warp and it wasn't enough to make a complete rug.