Naked Underwater Linen Weaving

In one of my books, which I can't seem to put my hands on at the moment, there is a very silly picture of a guy sitting at loom in his drawers and nothing else weaving linen in a pool of water.  I now understand exactly why he is doing this.  I finally sat down this morning to work on the long-languishing Perugia towel and holy cow does weaving that blasted linen ever work better if it's damp!  Hurray for naked under water linen weaving!

It's also helping that I took a friends recommendation to use paperclips and small weights to keep the floating warp in place.  It was tending to get lost in the first few warp threads, making my selvages messy and ugly.  With the clips on I am getting a much neater edge.   I've decided to abandon the idea of doing a proper Perugia towel with the pick-up brocaded sections though, that's just not working well on this particular loom and I have other things I want to weave sometime in the next year, so I'm doing a faux-rugia instead.  I'll just be weaving in some stripes of the indigo dyed cotton at either end.  Given that my edges are still kind of funky looking, I am happy with this compromise.  Just getting this linen woven off will be a huge accomplishment.  It's still slow going but now that I have my handy spray bottle (and some flax seed sizing, that's a big help too) it's a whole lot easier to make progress.

Edited to add that I found the picture of the naked underwater linen weaver!  It's in the Textile Production at Coppergate book, plate 821, which you used to be able download here but seems to be currently unavailable.