Friday 28 August 2009

Still playing with 3/1 twills....


...but until I take decent photos of all the pleating experiments I've done lately, I'll leave this up as a teaser. Photos shall be duly taken this weekend and then I'll make a full post of my experiments and what they've turned up.

In the meantime, I've set a new record. I started weaving the scarf in the photo at 9:30 am (actually, a bit earlier, as the time on the photo is 9:21). I had it woven, fringed and wet finished by 4 pm.

I also have a coloured warp in blues, greens and yellows on the loom at the moment, for a commission. There's still one more warp in the black-and-beige warp, but after weaving four scarves from it already, it was time for a change!

Thursday 20 August 2009

Not quite stasis


The predicted summer slow-down eventuated! Between long days at work, fine weather making it desirable to be ourside, being a bit poorly and other distractions, the opportunity to get to the loom for a decent period of time isn't always available.

As I thought, I've not had as much time to work on fibrey things over the last several months, although I have been working on things in dribs and drabs. I've finished spinning the blended merino yarn for the colour-blending-spinning-challenge thingy, and it's now in the weaving queue to be turned into a bag. I've woven off another two scarves from the black-and-beige warp to extend the pleated scarf series (with further experiments, which will be documented in due course, once they're wet finished). I sold a scarf and was contacted by someone who liked it very much, who ended up buying two scarves from me and commissioning a third, so that's next in the weaving queue. The silk cap on the bobbin in the picture above is the dyed and now partially-spun silk cap for the commission, and I have to say that the gloriously soft colours are making me very happy. I've also pulled out all of my existing stock, not all of which are finished, so that I can make sure they're finished, as I'm running a spinning and weaving demonstration at our local Feast in October, and want to be able to show people what's possible - and I may as well have some things up for sale as well. So there'll be a lot of things in the posting queue once all this is achieved.

In the meantime, we're heading off to Wales to spend an extended weekend cycling, and just to add to the mix and slow things down, there's a new distraction as well! We're very much into self-reliance, and we've just been given the chance to set up an allotment/smallholding by proxy on our landlady's agricultural land in return for helping with maintaining the place, and we plan to get very stuck into that. I've been talking more about that here.

Even with all the other distractions I really do want to get back to weaving more. The ideas in my head are translating to the weaving queue far, far faster than the queue is diminishing.