Making of Christmas stuff

For some reason I find myself trying to make a set of six napkins for Christmas, as well as knitting a scarf and possibly a pair of socks. The knitting is not implausible, since it's nice and portable. I hope to be nearly half done with the scarf by the end of today, and I only started it on Sunday night. The socks are still debatable, although I'll have to decide soon so I can buy the wool I want...

The napkins will be interesting though. I'm going away for Christmas - leaving home on the 21st, so that's my self imposed deadline. (I say self imposed because I don't think it will matter if I don't get them finished before New Years...). I just finished threading the loom last night, just needs tying to the front beam. I hope to get at least half a napkin woven tonight. I have a feeling I may be deluded in thinking I have any hope of doing this.

Project details:
420 ends, 18epi
Fairly plain summer and winter design, just with patterned borders. I'm vaguely considering doing a pickup motif in one corner on each napkin.
Warp is the same cotton I used to do the tea towels, wefts will be blue and natural cottolin. I'm not sure whether the pattern weft will be blue in all of them, or if I want to do some with the natural weft. I'm going to start with pattern weft blue, tabby weft natural though, and take it from there.

I think the (almost) 60cm width of these napkins is pretty close to the limit of what my table loom can handle. Luckily I've just bought a floor loom. I don't get to pick it up until Christmas though, and then I'll get to have fun working out what makes it tick. It's a 48" 8 shaft countermarche, and I've only seen one picture. It looked like what I was wanting though, so I gave into temptation.

And on the theme of looms, the aprons were attached before I started setting up for napkins. They're just stitched onto the beams through the holes that were already there, and are possibly not quite perfectly straight. I'll have to see how they behave when actually weaving, but tying onto the back beam was definitely more pleasant than without the apron.

I should have photos of various things, but they're still sitting on the camera. I expect I may not have time to do anything with them until holiday time, when there will be no loomy distraction...