Chair pads

My chair pads with Ghiordes knots are finished! They are such a joy to sit on and I smile every time I see them, especially considering they are made of handspun thrums and stashed handspun yarn only. The old store-bought pads with their innards crawling out of them are buried, forgotten and forgiven.

Stashbuster chair pads

During the fall I started making rya chair pads. The inspiration came from when I took a craft leadership course. For the classes we sat on stools with woven pads with rya knots that felt very cozy to sit on. I kept the pads in my mind and one day I connected them with all my saved handspun thrums and odd skeins of handspun yarn.

The warp is Shetland wool and the weft is Värmland wool that just hadn’t found their project yet. My plan was to make all the knots from saved thrums, but I ran out of thrums at quite an early stage in the process. The blue/white and the thinly striped in greens are the only ones made completely of thrums.

The numbers

The pattern consists of four parts: One row of rya knots and three shuttlings. One such series takes me around ten minutes. Every chair pad has around 40 such series and according to my calculations one pad has taken around seven hours to finish. Plus of course the time it took to spin the yarn. You can see how I made the knots in this post.

I wanted to replace the ugly pads on our eight chairs, so I warped for eight pads. Perhaps I should have thought of the bulk of eight knotted pads on the cloth beam before doing that. I will tell you more about why further down in this post.

I used just under one kilo of handspun yarn for this project. One kilo of odd skeins, colours that I had found no use for and early creations that don’t match the standards I have today. It feels so good to have used these precious skeins for warming our behinds.

The pads

I decided to just use the yarns I had and make a new pattern for every new pad. The only theme of the pads is the stashbusting. I must say that it has been very satisfying to find such a good use for these yarns that have been filling my handspun stash.

Blue and white

My plan for the first pad was to make it blue. The plan worked perfectly until I ran out of blue thrums mid-pad. So I simply used white for the rest of the pad. Which turned out to be less than half of the pad. But still, a pretty pad. I spun the blue yarn from Swedish Leicester wool and dyed it. The wool has beautiful shine, just like rya knots are supposed to. The thrums comes from a twill pillowcase I finished just before I started warping for the chair pads.

The white yarn is a rya/Swedish finewool mixbreed. The thrums comes from a blanket I wove a few years ago. Yarn from rya wool is the traditional yarn you use for rya rugs. The fibers are strong and make durable and shiny knots for any rug.

Green waves

For my second pad I did have a plan. I wanted to alternate colours and number of rows in the stripes in sort of a continuum – there are three colours in the pad but every other stripe is light, making a four stripe series. The stripes is a series of three: 4 + 2 + 2 rows in the stripes. This means that the total repeat is 12 stripes.

The thrums comes from two pillowcases, the Blanka pillowcase and the non-Blanka pillowcase in Shetland and Dalapäls wool. The yarn is a bit too thin for a pad, but I still like it.

Hjärterum – room for the heart

There is a saying in Swedish going: “Finns det hjärterum så finns det stjärterum”. This translates to “If there is room for the heart there is room for the bum”, meaning that if you have room for a person in your heart you will scooch over and make room for that person to sit, even if there aren’t enough seats.

This is the only pad I made a chart for. Or, well, I made it and used it until I lost it around the time the picture above was taken. But I think I did all right even on the chart-less part. The heart and the filling is thrums of Shetland wool, from a blanket and a scarf. The white background is a stashed yarn from Pia-Lotta the Swedish finewool lamb. She was my very first fleece.

Moo

Each pad has been planned during the weaving of the previous. So, mid-heart I realized I needed to weave a cow. And so I did. A typical Swedish landrace cow in white with dark brown patches.

The dark brown patches are Shetland wool, the same yarn as the warp. The white is the same Swedish finewool as the heart background.

Textured whites

My idea for this pad was to make an all-white pad with different thicknesses of yarn to make a textured surface. The bulkiest yarn was too bulky to fold in the knots, so I made these knots single.

It didn’t really turn out as I had expected, but I still like the pattern and it fills its bum warming purpose.

Grey waves

This is one of my favourite pads. Therefore I have placed it on my favourite chair – my spinning chair.

I decided to make a pad with bulkier yarn and I do like the effect. The white stripes are Icelandic wool and the grey are Shetland wool. All the stripes consists of four rows, but since the white yarn is bulkier and less elastic it takes up more room. I like how it sort of floods over the whole pad. The shading of the lighter grey was a coincidence in the first row of the first stripe and I liked it, so I repeated it for the rest of the stripe and the second light grey stripe.

Zebra

Obviously my animal theme wasn’t finished. I needed a zebra too. In my naiveté I thought I just needed to make an irregular striped pattern, but after having studied some googled zebras I realized there was more to it than that. So I added some branches, which resulted in a more accurate zebra pattern. I read somewhere that the mare makes sure to stand very close to her foal just after giving birth to make sure the foal remembers and recognizes her unique pattern and doesn’t get lost in a sea of stripes.

While the pattern looks like it is moving, I have only changed 1–3 knots for each row. After having finished one row I have marked the spots on the next row that I will change. To plan for one stripe to move I have had to make sure there is room for that stripe to move by slowly moving the adjacent rows. I have also stepped back to see the whole picture to plan upcoming movement in the stripes.

This is also one of my favourite pads and the pattern I am the most proud of. Despite the small changes in each row the overall pattern looks alive and, well, zebra-esque.

Sloppy warp edgings

As always, I learn a lot from my mistakes when I weave. This time I learned about keeping a close eye on the edges when warping. This was a long warp and apparently it wasn’t evenly spread over the width of the warp beam. This resulted in a tighter tension in the edges of the warp and bubbly chair pads. You can see this particularly in the turquoise, cow and heart pads.

Once again my woven project creates a map of what I have learned. I am sure someone has told me to keep a close eye on the edge of the warp. But I need to feel it too and understand with my hands what is happening. I am grateful for that.

Trouble shooting

I wrote in the beginning of this post that I had warped for eight pads, but I only made seven. By the beginning of the seventh pad, the zebra, the cloth beam started to fuss. The handle unclicked itself from its clicker pawl and the warp went very loose. The handle was all loose but I still couldn’t get it off the loom to investigate what had gone wrong. I contacted my supplier and she quickly sent me a maintenance kit with a new handle. When I saw the kit I quickly understood how it was assembled and could remove the handle from the cloth beam. I realized that there was nothing wrong with the handle or any of its parts. Instead, the thickness of the cloth on the beam had gradually loosened the screw that connected the cloth beam to the side pieces. This had caused the handle to turn loose and disconnect itself from the clicker pawl.

So, the seventh pad took ages to weave. The warp was very loose and I had to stop and tighten the screw every few shuttlings. But for some reason this made me pay extra close attention to the warp and this last pad turned out to be the most even one!

What about the eighth pad?

I had made plans for the eighth pad. I was going to make it into sort of a rag rug – using the last yarn I had in a striped pattern with white and coloured stripes and letting them replace one another as I ran out of a colour.

Due to the unscrewed cloth beam the eighth pad didn’t happen. Yet. I don’t feel finished with this technique. Although very time consuming, it has been a joyful an educational ride and a very satisfying way to relieve my handspun and thrums stash.

Happy spinning!

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