Thrums

Day 365: Appropriate to the last day of my twelfth year of continuous daily blog photos and essays, I'd like to talk about ends (no, I am not planning to discontinue my posts). When a finished cloth is cut from the loom, there will be a certain amount of warp waste at either end of the fabric, the bits which were tied to hold the warp onto the front and back beams. A delightful word, the technical term for these ends is "thrums." Depending on the type of loom employed, thrums can be up to about six feet long per warp strand. Let's say your warp was 400 threads wide. That would mean 2400 feet of thread going to waste! That, to a Scot like me, is simply too much to throw away.

I weave primarily with 8/2 cotton. It's inexpensive and versatile, and of course by sticking with one type of fiber in one size, my thrums match in everything but colour. When I take a project off the loom, I gather the thrums together in bunches and stuff them in my "thrum bag." When the volume reaches a certain point, I develop a project to use them up. If they are long enough, they can be strung on a rigid heddle loom and woven into towels or washcloths. If they're shorter (perhaps leftovers from a previous rigid-heddle project), I weave them into bands using a band loom, an inkle loom, tablet-weaving cards or even a backstrap loom. The bands can then be used to make lanyards, to decorate reusable shopping bags, to apply to Christmas ornaments or cards, etc. Eventually, though, all good things must come to an end, and when my thrums are too short for any other purpose, I cut them into tiny bits to incorporate into handmade paper. Waste not, want not! Or as my grandma used to say, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."