King's Flower

Day 23: I've flipped this image over so that the emphasis is on the right side of the fabric (lower portion), although the reverse is also attractive. It's called "King's Flower" in Marguerite Porter Davidson's green book, and I had intended to weave it entirely in 8/2 cotton. However, once I actually began weaving, I felt that the floats were too long for the fineness of the thread. In a fit of, "How do I salvage this?" I cut the initial sixteen or so inches off the loom, re-tied the warp and changed up to the 3/2 blue cotton you see here. It was a less than optimum solution (the thread is lumpy), but it will yield roughly five yards of usable fabric, even though it's not the Christmas tablecloth I had in mind. As Murphy would have predicted, once I washed and dried the section I had cut off, it wasn't as airy as I'd expected it to be, even though the floats were still a little longer than I would have liked. I'm chalking this up to a learning experience, and now I know what the design demands. I love the pattern, and I will warp it again at a closer sett of 20 epi instead of 15, which will shorten the float length by 25 percent. Weaving sometimes requires you to think on your feet in order to tame an uncooperative project.