Cord Mania

 



It started with a rather out of proportion tassel that  I finished off during  my Tuesday 'Calico' meeting, the outcome was rather disappointing. I wanted elegant - and ended up with a dumpy looking thing  that was far from what I had wanted to achieve. Whilst making it I needed some co-ordinating cord which took ages to make by hand. (I'm not very partial to those quick make zig-zag cords that you make on the sewing machine). I want a proper cord. It got me thinking how often I use cords and wouldn't it be useful to have a good selection of colours and weights of cord to hand.

Looking through my stash of threads I rediscovered about a 150 skeins of stranded cottons that I had inherited from a friend, I rarely use stranded threads and every time I glimpsed them I felt a twinge of guilt that they were going to waste. 

The next thing to do was to buy a cord maker - £195.00 put paid to that idea. Beloved husband - source of all things practical, took one look at what I wanted and emerged some time later from the loft bearing what looked like the very first Meccano set ever invented. A bit of trial and error and the mark 4 version works perfectly.

I'm producing 2 metre lengths of cord from this wonderful Heath Robinson set up and it hasn't cost a penny. With John's help I have made 36 pieces today of a medium weight cord. Tomorrow we will make the same amount of a much finer blend.

A double length of stranded cotton is used on each hook and then spun so that each colour is twisted quite tightly - then with a small adjustment to the machine all four strands are twisted together giving a multi -coloured cord.

When we had achieved 36 cords we wound them onto cardboard tubes - and gloated!!

A good day's work!