8/2 Bamboo, tabby & twill, on a 4 shaft jack loom

I love bamboo yarn almost as much as I love cotton yarn. After years knitting and crocheting with bamboo, weaving with bamboo was the natural progression. A few months back, I wove with 8/2 bamboo on my rigid heddle loom(see previous post). I used two 10 dent heddles to get a sett of 20 epi. I was having problems with broken selvedge threads, so I cut the fabric off the loom and it has since been my favorite sample. The bamboo is light and luxurious with a fabulous drape and shine. 

Fast forward to the floor loom. After finishing a backlog of projects with different weights of cotton, it was time to revisit the bamboo. I warped the floor loom with the same colors as the rigid heddle sample, just in a different configuration. 

 Yes, I'm still warping on my dining room chairs ;)

Threading the heddles 

I wound a warp long enough for two scarves. For the stripe pattern I used 24 ends for the wide stripe, 8 ends for the thin stripe and the center stripe was 28 ends for a total of 224 ends. My 1st scarf was plain weave. 

After trying out a few inches of twill, I hem stitched the bottom of the scarf. Surprisingly, the hem stitching on this finer fabric went much faster than most of my other pieces. 

The bamboo has a tendency to slip, but for the most part, the plain weave scarf was smooth sailing. 

Onto the 2nd scarf. Since I had threaded the loom in a 1,2,3,4 straight twill, I thought I'd see how a 2/2 twill looked. I added a floating selvedge at each edge and began weaving. 

I noticed a few things right away. Because I did not change my sett of 20 epi from the tabby weaving, my ppi was way off. I tried to count it and it's somewhere near 34 or 36 ppi. I also noticed that I had to beat the weft harder for the twill. With the tabby, I sharply angled the weft and on an open shed, didn't beat, but squeezed the weft into place with the beater. With the twill I had to use more force to keep the fell straight. I also realized, that in weaving almost 6 yards of fabric, I had only broken 2 warp threads 😀

Here is a side by side picture showing the rigid heddle cloth on the right and the 4 shaft floor loom cloth on the left.

Now for some wet finishing experiments. I'll post the results soon. 

Happy Weaving!