Tag Archives: Thrum

Craft, Knitting, Tutorial, Uncategorized

Afterthought Thrums

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A couple of years back I was asked to teach a class on thrummed mittens. Naturally, I experimented with heaps of patterns in my quest to concoct the perfect mitten– but ultimately found that the most important thing is the construction of the thrum. I thought I’d share my recipe for the perfect thrum, plus a neat trick to replace missing thrums in your finished object.

How I make my thrums

My method is based on the Yarn Harlot’s technique, but there’s one important difference: instead of twisting in step 3, I use two fingers to roll the center of the thrum against the palm of one hand until it’s lightly felted.

This creates a much more durable thrum than the twisted technique, and keeps the inside of the mitten from getting scraggly with wear. The poor half-mitten pictured below has been much abused as a teaching model, but the thrums are still as soft and puffy as when I made them. (Once washed and worn, they’ll felt and stick to one another a bit more.)

Your thrums should be a little bit thicker than the yarn you’re knitting with, but not so much that they distort the shape of the stitches. Once you knit them into the mitten, they’ll compress down to about the same size as the yarn and look like neat little hearts.

Inserting a thrum after the fact (i.e., “afterthought thrumming”)

Because the Perfect Thrum is neatly felted, you can treat it as if it were a short piece of yarn, and insert it into your knitting even after the mitten is complete. Reasons you might want to do this:

  • You accidentally left out a thrum while knitting.
  • You accidentally pulled out a thrum while knitting.
  • One of your thrums was mangled in a tragic accident, and you yanked it out in pity.

To fill in the empty spot on your mitten, you’ll need a crochet hook in a size suitable for your yarn (or slightly bigger) and a spare thrum.

  1. Find the stitch where the missing thrum belongs, then insert the crochet hook under both legs of the stitch immediately above that one.
  2. Catch one end of the thrum and pull it through.
  3. Put the crochet hook inside the mitten and bring up the hook at the base of the stitch you’re thrumming.
  4. Catch one leg of the thrum and pull it down inside the mitten.
  5. Repeat with the other leg.
  6. Smooth the fabric around the thrum with your fingers.7. Admire your handiwork!

More thrumming tips

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  • To take your thrum knitting out on the road, prepare a batch of thrums in advance and carry them in a small organza gift bag– the fabric is stiff enough to protect your thrums from squashing, and keeps any fuzzy bits from escaping.
  • Whether you’re working from a kit or following a pattern, you probably have a bit of commercially prepared top or roving with which to make your thrums. Don’t cut your fiber– just grab a pinch from one end and pull! If the fiber won’t come apart, make sure the roving isn’t twisted and move your hands farther apart. You can also strip it down lengthwise to help keep the width of your thrums consistent.
  • You can insert afterthought thrums with a very short tapestry needle using duplicate stitch, but I find this rather more fiddly than the crochet hook method.

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Craft, Language, Weaving

Talking Craft: Thrums

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As a kid, I had a penchant for unusual science fair projects. One year I undertook a detailed investigation of the limbic system. (I’d gotten hold of an illustrated anatomy book and liked the shape of the fornix.) But my favorite was the topic I chose at the age of eleven: etymology, the study of word histories and not of insects. Not that there’s anything wrong with insects, but my delight was in gluing a bunch of Greek and Latin roots to magnets, sticking them to the back of cookie sheets, and encouraging my fellow preteens in the haphazard construction of classical-sounding if ungrammatical neologisms.

A very few years later, I started studying Tolkienian linguistics.* Aside from permanently establishing my nerd credentials, this led me to approach morphological paradigms and grammatical structures in a way that many modern language courses, well, don’t. This interest led more or less directly to my university studies in linguistics. These days the field encompasses rather more than the casual collection of Greek roots**, but I still have considerable affection for good old dictionary-style etymology.

So what does all this have to do with the professed theme of this blog—crafts?

A surprising quantity of terminology from weaving and other ancient handicrafts survives into modern (if specialized) English. I’d like to make exploration of this terminology a regular series on this blog, so let me know if this sparks your interest!

Today’s word is one I mentioned in my last post: thrum. According to the traditional definition, thrums are loom waste: the scraps of warp (yarn) remaining after a piece of cloth has been cut off a loom. Merriam-Webster gives this etymology:

  • Middle English, from Old English –thrum (as in tungethrum ligament of the tongue); akin to Old Saxon thrumi end part of a spear, Old High German drum end part, fragment, Old Norse t-hrömr edge, verge, brim, Greek tramis perineum, term n boundary, end — more at TERM

Observation 1: thrum is a distant cousin of terminal. It is, indeed, the terminal portion of a warp.

Observation 2: Tungethrum is a fantastic word.

Thrums on the loom.

Webster’s also gives the obsolete but interesting definition of “a ragged beggarly lout”. There’s a joke in there somewhere about people who buy weaving equipment.

Anyhow, I get the distinct impression that weavers have been faced with the problem of what to do with thrums for as long as there have been weavers, resulting in such inventions as hooked rugs and thrum-decorated garments like these and these (using unspun roving rather than loom waste). Thrums seem like they ought to be useful, but if anyone has any suggestions for dealing with the heap below, I will be most grateful.

Continuing the blog theme of tangled yarn messes!

*On the off chance that you share this particular hobby, the lack of mutation in the compound of my blog title is out of fondness for the word “tintinnabulate”. I suppose a more probable but less reduplicative Sindarin name would be something along the lines of Tithinniel.

**Which might indeed be more entomological than etymological.