Tangled threads

A day in the life of a loom - 2012

2012-01-01T04:56:00.005Z

A day in the life of a loom is something that Meg has had going for many years. Each year, on New Year's Day, weavers post a picture of their loom. Here's mine, my trusty 8-shaft Glimakra Ideal.

My poor loom has been sadly neglected for much of this year as work was a bit all-consuming and often had me away. After I finished my P2P2 challenge (itself still unfinished and in the condition it came off the loom), the loom spent months undressed with the thrums still on the back beam, while I went off to sea and travelled the world.

When I got back at the end of November, I warped up this warp. It's 2/10 Lunatic Fringe cotton in spectrum colours, making a block twill tea-towel project. Completely in contrast to my normal modus operandi, this is someone else's project, the towels seen on the front cover of Handwoven's Fabrics That Go Bump. I fell in love with them when the book was first published and have finally decided to make them. I bought the cottons back in May and have only just now had the time to weave them. It's true joy-weaving, nice brainless 1-2-3-4.

I'm hoping to finish weaving off this warp today or tomorrow. I'm moving house next week and need to break down my well-travelled loom!

I haven't been neglecting fibres completely. There's been quite a bit of spinning, knitting and warp dyeing going on, the results of which shall be posted soon!

P2P2: FO

2011-07-26T08:43:00.002+01:00

I've been a bit quiet on the weaving front lately because I've either been really busy with work, away with work or away on holiday - speaking of which, greetings from Wales where I've spent the day cycling!

Here's what came of my P2P2 response. My initial thoughts on this project can be found here. Here is the completed weaving, straight off the loom.

I didn't aim to make a literal copy of the heron image, but I wanted to try to use an interplay of structure, clasped weft, variegation and colour to capture the essence of the image, and to make a faux-tapestry wallhanging. I feel fairly happy that I've achieved those aims and taken this method as far as it can be taken with this approach.

Warp: 10/1 rayon flake singles, in alternate threads of dark and light green to give an echo weave effect
Weft: hand-dyed, handspun silk cap in a variety of colours, supplemental weft of thickly spun silk cap and some 60/2 commercial silk. These were chosen to give texture to the main part of the weaving and a smoother texture for the 'sky'.

Draft: a network drafted progressive 8-shaft twill, similar to the one I was working on here. Clasped weft used on top of this to add subtlety and intrigue to the pattern.

There's a good image of the picture I was working from here. The things I wanted to capture the most were the horizontal aspects of the main colour blocks, but also the vertical aspects in the image provided by the reeds. This happens within those colour blocks, so I wanted the clasped weft effects to dominate the horizontal, and the weaving draft to dominate the vertical. I'd also wanted to get a third effect inside the weave, of barbs similar to those found in feathers. I think I got that, in the image below.

A supplemental weft of thicker silk cap adds a highlight in the 'grass' section.

In places I've used the change from 3/1 to 1/3 twill to dictate and highlight the change in colour at the point of the clasped weft :
(but in other places I've used it to downplay it as well, such as in the pink section where I was using clasped weft on two pinks of similar but slightly different hue levels). Sometimes the colour blocks in the clasped weft change from one side of the piece to the other.

The 1/3 sections of the twill itself have provided the vertical structure within the colour blocks. It's given weft-faced areas which develop the colour blocks, and the warp-faced areas give vertical structure and an echo-weave like effect to downplay the colour interaction due to the warp.

The end result has been to provide a fabric which has a level of irridescence to it. The weave structure appears and disappears according to the angle you view the piece from.

My initial thoughts on this exercise were:

Emotive: roundness, warmth, growth, abundance, comfort, connections. (Roundness came in with the draft)

Colours: warm colours, especially in the pink-red-purple spectrum (I took these from the image)

Material: silk, but perhaps with some texture (I didn't stray from the silk idea)

Weave: Something involving flight, movement, possibly feathers (I chose the draft to have a feather-like feel to honour the lovely little hummingbird feathers I received, and chose the heron image to play with)

Overall: strong focus on the connection between colour and weave interplay. Possibly a networked draft on a hand-painted warp (I think I'd originally pictured the colour blocks being warp-derived rather than weft-derived, so this is a real departure.)

It would seem I made my mind up early and it stayed made up! Despite that, this piece looks nothing like the kinds of fabrics that were playing in my mind when I first started working and sampling. I managed to achieve my goal of opening my mind, experimenting and letting the piece take me where it would. I enjoyed the process, but it has brought surprises: when I first started playing with this draft it was in an attempt to create a pleated fabric, and that hasn't happened.

Now I just need to finish this, perhaps this weekend. The top part will be sewn around a dowel. I'm unsure whether I'll dowel or fringe the bottom.

P2P2: dyeing to move on

2011-06-28T09:44:00.002+01:00

I spent last week in Adelaide on a training course for work. I was lucky, I flew over there just before the ash cloud descended and travelled nack 24 hours after Tasmanian airports were re-opened. I spent part of the weekend before I went weaving, and took my second sample off the loom just hours before I was due to leave for the airport. I took it with me, unfinished, to have a look at and think about while I was away. More on that another time.

I also thought more about the photos. I realised that no matter how often I looked at the set, the picture of the heron was the central point of focus for my mind. So I started digging through my stash of handpun silk cap to see what I had that worked with it. I have a lot of handspun silk cap. I bought a kilogram of silk caps a few years ago and have been enjoying playing with dyeing them ever since. The problem was, I was now down to precisely one undyed silk cap - and now there are none!

If you click on the image above to biggify it, you can see that I've been matching colours to the photo. Those on bobbins I already had. The skein of silk and the silk cap have been dyed over the last couple of days.

The skein started out cornflower blue, before I started to fiddle with overdyeing. I tried to match the colours and in a way also textures in the grass. The silk cap, below, was dyed randomly to match not only the salmon-lavender colours in the reeds but also the purplishness of the tree in the background.

I plan to split out the darker and lighter portions as I spin and spin them seperately.

One striking thing about this photo is that the elements pull in towards the centre from either side. That screams clasped weft to me. But having the colour elements in the weft - particularly varigated ones - will give a fabric with the predominant elements horizontal, whereas this photo has a strong vertical element with all the tall grasses and reeds - not to forget the upright heron!

I have a plan for that, but more on that later.

Spinning

2011-06-13T21:40:00.006+01:00

In some ways, this has been inspired by yarninmypocket of Yarnscape. She started talking some time ago about spinning a suitable yarn for the lovely Shipwreck shawl. This reminded me that I'd had that pattern saved to my favourites on Ravelry for some time - the only shawl pattern I've ever considered making.

Some time later, I was browsing through the yarn shop of our guild and found a bag of "winter" dyed tussah silk roving. I don't often buy dyed roving to spin but fell in love with the colours and enjoyed an evening of joy spinning. In a search for things to do with it, I plied it with some pastel blue spun silk cap. Then I thought of the shipwreck shawl - but the yarn was too fine for the pattern, which calls for a light fingering weight.

Enter The Thylacine yarns. Browsing her lovely hand-dyed rovings at a recent open day, I spotted a lovely blues-and-greys silk/merino that would go perfectly with the silk I already had. I'd already plied the silk, but it's passive enough that it would ply with the wool fine.

A couple of pleasant evenings later, and I have about 650 m of a lovely marled fingering weight yarn, in blues and greys with just the odd hint of peach. It would make a lovely shawl...only the shawl calls for 1320 yards of yarn.

At this stage, may I say bugger?

I'm off to the weaving evening at the guild tonight. I may have to stick my head in the shop to see whether I can pick up any more of that silk.

First sample

2011-06-13T12:29:00.003+01:00

Not a success. This was 3/2 silk warp with a 10/1 silk noil weft. The plan had been to use a fine weft to see whether the fabric would pleat, but I think that the warp wasn't set tightly enough and the weft is too passive and fine. Never mind, the alternate motive was to use up a few more cone ends in my stash, and that was achieved. I hadn't intended weaving a full piece but I was having too much fun with the colour progression.

This was a structural test for the P2P2 challenge, using the draft in my previous post. I've decided that trying to use an advancing broken twill only really works with a network drafted liftplan if you have more than 8 shafts. A simple 3/1-1/3 twill results in floats that are impractically large. I knew this from the draft but needed to weave it so I could see how the cloth would work.

I'm not sure what I'll do with this piece. The colours are pretty but I'm not in love with the hand of the fabric. It may make and interesting throw or hanging once it's been properly pressed. I still haven't replaced my ironing board after the move, so it will have to wait until I've done so.

Somewhat alarmingly, when I washed the piece, the water immediately turned purple.

In the meantime, sampling continues.

P2P2: thinking...

2011-06-11T03:42:00.006+01:00

I've been thinking a great deal about how to make a start on my P2P2 challenge during the week. There are two things at hand here for me: the colours of the images, as a set, and the general feel of texture, movement and flight that they suggest to me. For colour, I've pulled out various yarns in my stash that make me think of the images:

These are silk yarns of varying weights, all with texture. I may make a sample with them. But they're not right for the project I have in mind. The project I have in mind is probably going to require some dyeing to be done, but at least these are stimulating my visual mind.

The other thing I've been thinking about is the fabric itself. I've worked a bit with pleated fabrics in the past, and the concept of movement and flight suggests the floatiness and texture of a pleated fabric to me. Not straight pleats, but something more fluid. And I'm really struggling to get the idea of a comfy floaty skirt out of my head. So I started to play with a draft of a broken twill with a 3/1-1/3 pleat tie-up.

Broken advancing twill threading with a 3/1-1/3 twill tie-up and evenly advancing treadling

One thing I like about this draft is that the broken twill is suggestive of feathers to me, and would create a floaty fabric if the right yarns and sett were used. But this isn't enough, because the images I've been sent are also strong on round shapes, and there's nothing round about this draft. So I started to modify the treadling, to incorporate more of a network-drafted concept. To read more on network drafting, I recommend you read this article by Bonnie Innouye in Weavezine. Bonnie also has a fabulous and very informative book on the subject, Exploring Multishaft Design. Networked drafting takes a bit more thought on 8 shafts than it does for those with more shafts, but within the limitations it can be done.

Broken advancing twill threading with a 3/1-1/3 twill tie-up and networked treadling

That's getting more like it. Is this where I'm going to head? I have absolutely no idea. But for now, I'm going to start samplying dyes and samping this weave structure and see what I think. My next decision is whether to sample using the thick mulberry silk and fine silk noil in the top image, or whether to sample using some rayon and handspun silk cap that's been sitting in the queue waiting to turn into a scarf. They're not colours that fit with the challenge but would work for the structure.

Decision, decisions. I'd better make one soon, because I've had a naked loom for nearly a week.

Summing up the cost vs value post

2011-06-11T03:35:00.002+01:00

My thanks to those who commented, it was fascinating to learn the views of others on the matter. There was a real sense of valueing the work of others in the replies.

I must confess that like Sonya, I treat the work of others with more care than my own. My old handwoven teatowels get used every day and tossed in the wash. I received some stunningly beautiful cream cotton towels from Sonya in an exchange a few years ago. I absolutely love them...and I have to confess that they're saved to use to line tea trays and bread baskets on special ocassions.

Meg also hit the spot when she said that her towels are softer and more absorbent than bought towels. That's one reason I make my own. Linking back to the origins of craft hits a spot as well. One of the reasons I weave is because it fits in with my lifestyle of taking responsibility for my consumption. I have one store-bought towel in my kitchen now, and it does tend to be pushed to the bottom of my pile.

Beauty was another good reason. There's love in a handmade item that you don't get from something bought in a shop - great point, Amy.

Laura Sue summed up the point I was trying to form best. In order to be truly beautiful, and item must also be useful.

How many of us have met beginner weavers who think that a handmade teatowel is a waste of effort, and yet give up weaving because there are only so many samples one can make?

The old cost and value argument again

2011-06-09T21:35:00.003+01:00

The tea towel warp, fresh off the loom.

After moving the loom, I wove off the remainder of the tea towel warp in two bouts of a couple of hours each last weekend. One night during the week, I dropped in to the midweek meeting of weavers in the local guild rooms. Having been asked before, I took some samples for show and tell, and tossed the tea towel warp in as well.

The overwhelming comments amongst the ladies there, after exclaiming on their workmanship were "I don't have time to weave tea towels. They're so beautiful I'd never use them. Such a waste to use handwovens in the kitchen."

I replied that I couldn't bring myself to buy teatowels when I knew I could make them from items already in my stash. As many of the cottons I used for these ones were either cone ends from other projects of cottons I was given when I bought my loom, or came with another group of yarns I bought on ebay, these are effectively free save for my time. I estimate those tea towels have cost me perhaps 50c and an hour of my time, each. Some of the cotton was organic, natural-coloured cotton.

Compare this to the cost of a tea towel in the shops. Most will have been made in China, of cotton that's 68% likely to be genetically modified. We live in a world of strange perceptions, when even the people who make things can't appreciate a good home-made useful object. The general vibe I got from the weaver in my group was that their time was too valuable to waste on such a mundane item. It's the old art vs craft debate, perhaps, in a slightly different guise.

What about you? Do you make items for use around your house, or do you define weaving as art? If so, why?

A seasonal migration of sorts

2011-06-06T21:20:00.005+01:00

One of the reasons I chose to rent the house I'm in is the large converted garage a half-level below the rest of the house. With an east-facing sliding door, it's a great space for a loom. There's room to have all my stash and equipment out at the same time and to still be neat. But being in the south-east corner of the house (and the furthest corner from the wood burner), it's cooler than the rest of the house and natural light levels are limited.

While Mr G was here, he pointed out that this house also has a huge, long living room, only half of which was actually being used. The largest vacant space was against a north-facing set of windows which is catching the sun now the light is lower. He suggested the loom would get more use over a longer day there. The only problem was, it was through two sets of doors down a small flight of stairs and it was warped with a half-woven warp. And being a Glimakra, much of the frame is held together by nothing more than gravity and good engineering. And the loom is significantly larger than any of the doors we had available to move it through.

However, in the spirit of experimentation, we measured spaces and checked them twice, then moved the castle and beater to the back of the superstructure, carefully tying all of the heddles, beater and shafts, then lay it on its side. From there we slackened the warp (essential to rotate the castle and base around the doors), carefully rotated the loom castle first then base second, out one sliding door, through the garden to the other end of the house and through another sliding door. A bit of shuffling, and lo: a loom with a view.

It's by the fire, it gets the sun for half the day and it's under down lights for weaving at night. It's going to be a good spot as we come to the shortest day of the year.

I hadn't been sure we'd be able to do it and had been prepared to cut the existing towels off and rethread the warp if anything went wrong, but in the end there was not a single broken warp thread - even the tension was fine.

This warp is the stash-busting warp I put on the lok to balance it while rebuilding it, and to celebrate the move I spent part of Saturday weaving the other 2/3 of it, in the sun. I now have six new tea towels requiring hemming and finishing.

P2P2: my images are here!

2011-06-05T05:29:00.006+01:00

In case you're wondering what P2P2 is, it's Pics to Picks, the second. Details can be found on Meg's blog, here. You can also follow along with the fun there. The general idea is that weavers swap images of inspiration and then use the images they have received to develop a woven piece.

I am very much a time-poor weaver, and as a consequence the projects I make tend to start either as a way to use up my stash or with a specific finished project in mind. That has limited the creativity I've been able to put into my weaving lately. Because of this, P2P2 is going to be a real challenge for me. It's going to force me to think about my weaving in terms of art rather than craft, or at least in terms of practical finished article.

I've made a slow start so far, but in a fit of perfect timing a parcel of joy arrived in my letterbox on Friday. It had come from Alienore, in the US. Alienore has chosen to send me a number of clippings, found objects and a photo of a warp on her loom.

I really like this collection, because these are all things that mean something to Alienore. The photo on the right especially, of a silk warp on Alienore's loom, seems to channel her intention. I found myself unable to consider the images singly, because they seem to want to be a whole.

These are the clippings. Top left is what seems to be a close-up of some kind of egg. Bottom left is ladybirds on luscious wine grapes. Top centre is a delicious-looking collection of differently-coloured and shaped heirloom tomatoes. Bottom centre is an image of a heron in front of some russet-coloured reeds. Interestingly, my eyes sank into the colour of the reeds in the background long before they registered the bird in the foreground. The right image is of a woman, horse and dog sharing a cuddle. Beside this, Alinore has written "I love connections".

Many things strike me about this collection of images. They're strong on colour, shape and connections. Warm colours, round, soothing shapes, and an overall pallete of yellow, orange, reds, mauves and purple with an emphasis on reds and purples. This colour pallette is one that I surround myself with in life, as the soft furnishings in my living room are in these colours and I've recently bought the Tubular spectrum cottons in that pallette, with which to make myself tea towels.

The special treat is below the image of the silk warp:

Hummingbird feathers she has found on her patio. I'm very much a bird person and love hummingbirds (who couldn't? They defy gravity.) so the feathers are a special treat for me. Combined with the heron and the ladybirds, flight is emerging as a theme for me from this set of images. The final thing that srtuck me about these images is the rough, warm texture of the silk in the photo of Alienore's warp. I weave with silk a lot, so the photo of a silk warp has made me decide that silk is probably the right material to use for this project, wherever that project takes me.

So, to sum up, here are my initial impressions:

Emotive: roundness, warmth, growth, abundance, comfort, connections.

Colours: warm colours, especially in the pink-red-purple spectrum

Material: silk, but perhaps with some texture

Weave: Something involving flight, movement, possibly feathers

Overall: strong focus on the connection between colour and weave interplay. Possibly a networked draft on a hand-painted warp, but that hasn't become clear in my head yet.

This has been a great set of images to play with. Thanks, Alienore.

And now I should probably make a start on getting the next warp on my loom!

P2P2

2011-05-18T02:47:00.005+01:00

Having missed last year's P2P, I'm very much looking forward to participating this year. I've you're visiting this blog because of P2P2, greetings!

I'm Geo, a handweaver, spinner and dyer when my day job doesn't get in the way. Unfortunately my day job, being in science, frequently gets in the way, and then I run away to sea to work on research vessels. That's when I knit! I'm an Australian who's recently returned to Australia for work after a long time in the UK.

My loom is an 8-shaft, 10-treadle Glimakra, and I spin on a Majacraft Little Gem. I lust after a 32-shaft mechanical dobby. One day.

The idea of P2P2 is to exchange photos and other items of inspiration, and to use those items to develop a woven piece. Nineteen weavers from around the world are participating this year. I've been chosen to inspire another Australian weaver and am now eagerly awaiting a package from the US.

I expect this to be a great deal of fun.

Spinning

2011-05-16T21:11:00.003+01:00

I haven't been completely quiet on the fibre front, far from it. One thing I can take to sea with me is knitting, and I've now become famous on my new ship for sitting in front of the computers monitoring my instruments with knitting in hand when the instruments need watching at all times. The fact that I was knitting with a chunky handspun merino seemed to particularly excite the New Zealand members of the crew. I haven't talked about my knitting here, because I tend to talk about it on Ravelry instead.

I've also been doing a lot of spinning, as the winter evenings start to close in. I finished spinning the dark camel-and-silk roving I started spinning two years ago here (I had one kilogram of pale and one kilo of dark) and I turned the pale yarn into a pullover for myself, for which I've yet to take pictures. Then I found in my stash, this fetching brown-and-white merino.

I have a vague memory of having bought it at the Christmas party of my old spinning group in the UK - P&M Woolcraft would come and set up a stall of temptation. There's a kilo of this too, so I've been spinning it semi-fractally, trying to keep an even length of colour change, but also allowing the occassional patch of long unbroken brown or white in the singles. The end result is a variegated yarn that will have a semi-solid tweedy look it it. I've been spinning it to a light fingering (4-ply) weight, and I am starting to think that it would be ideal yarn to use for a Lattice Lace Pullover (Ravelry link). I'd originally intended dyeing a semi-solid green yarn, but this is changing my mind.

One thing I've been doing is spinning the singles and plying much more firmly than I have of late. It's been clear to me that I spin singles well, but I'm a bit too tentative with the plying, fearing a tough hand to the yarn. But that doesn't help with the longevity of a garment.

I have two skeins of this yarn so far - about 1100 metres in total - and enough roving for one more skein. Plenty for the project I have in mind. I'd better get my skeins clear though, because I've just heard that my local guild is having a drop-in day this weekend: a handful of people, a big pile of rarer fleeces, and the chance to try them all in a single day. How can one resist taking as many empty bobbins as possible?

Colour happiness

2011-05-16T02:20:00.002+01:00

When I got back from my time at sea late last Thursday night, I found that there was a parcel waiting for me. I collected it on my way to work on Friday morning, but forced myself to wait until I got home on Friday night before I opened it. Inside was pure colour happiness.

It's a box of 10/2 cottons from the Tubular spectrum range, from Lunatic Fringe yarns. I've lusted after these for years but didn't take the plunge until the other week, when the Australian dollar briefly rose to US$1.10. The difference in exchange rate almost paid for the shipping.

Lined up along the window sill. Forgive the shine off the plastic covers, I probably should have taken them off.

What are these destined for? Well: it's unlike me to do a project verbatim, but have you ever seen the front cover of the Best of Weavers Fabrics that go bump? Turned twill and honeycomb tea towels in warm purple-red-yellow spectrum colours. I've lusted after the lovely towels on that cover since I first saw them years ago. Eventually I decided that if I like them so much, it's not a crime to just do a project someone else designed for a change.

First though, there are more tea towels on the loom to weave off. This is a stash-reduction measure I warped up to help me balance the loom when rebuilding it. The warp is the last of a natural-coloured cotton, with a variety of wefts. There was enough of the sage cotton to weave one towel, and I hope to use up a few more ends of cotton from my stash for the rest. These will be star-square honeycomb variant with plain weave hems. You can see the plain weave of two towels with a couple of picks of scrap cotton between in the photo below.

It's so good to have the loom up and running again.

Another update

2011-05-08T01:27:00.003+01:00

I'm almost at the end of my three months of Very Busy, but it's just been pointed out to me by Meg that I've forgotten to mention that I had some news to convey. In the spirit of squeezing as many major life-changing experiences as possible into a single month amongst the craziness of accepting the new job, resigning from my old job and moving to the other side of the world with less than a month's notice at the end of last year; Mr G and I decided to finish a project we'd been meaning to sort for a while. We decided that if we were going to spend the best part of a year apart, we wanted to be married before we did so. We accomplished this by sneaking off to the register office, telling no-one until after the fact. It was more than six months ago now, so in a way it's old news.

I'm still at sea - just offshore the south coast of New South Wales at the moment - but have a huge backlog of posts to write up, once I'm back next week. I've been doing a lot on the fibre front, just not finding the time to write about it!

The seasons are turning: an update of sorts

2011-03-04T01:51:00.003Z

Today marks three months since I moved to Hobart, and it's distinctly autumnal out there today: a sunny day with a cold wind. I found a house to rent while looking for a property to buy, and it has a large converted garage that is technically a bedroom but which will make a great weaving studio. My furniture arrived a month ago, but as I've either been away or had house guests for that time, only the household essentials have been unpacked. The room that will be my weaving studio remains full of boxes, the ~~torture device~~ loom still wrapped in the heavy paper used to protect it during transport.

I've not been entirely unproductive on the fibre front. I've met a lot of lovely people here and have been overwhelmed by how welcoming the local guilds and knitters groups are. Tomorrow I'll be attending the Bothwell Spin-in. And I've knitted a couple of things, including this rather natty Lanesplitter skirt:

I've also finished knitting, but not seaming, the time-intensive knitting project of a whole woman's sweater knit with fine laceweight handspun camel and silk on 2.75 mm needles, the beginning of which I documented more than a year ago (clicky).

This coming Sunday will be my first free day at home in a month, and will also probably be the only free day I have at home for the next month. I hope to get my loom built, and will document the process. I've decided that the first warp in it will be for tea towels, but not what they will look like yet!

Farewell loom...for now

2010-11-10T14:39:00.002Z

My loom is in bits. Lots of lovely chunky wooden bits. My goodness it was dusty!

There's a very good reason for the "in-bitness" of the loom, because my weaving room has been turned into "packing central". I've accepted a job offer that was too good to refuse and will be making a major international move in a couple of weeks. When I finally land on my feet, it will be in Hobart, Australia.

So that's the last I'm going to see of my loom for the next 3-6 months. The next time it emerges, it will be an antipodean!

What became of the sheep

2010-10-29T16:22:00.003+01:00

Oops, I've been having such a busy time I didn't post the end result of what became of the sheep!!!

Here's what happened:

I made a pseudo-boucle and knitted some of it into an ickle lamby.

The tail cracks me up.

The busy will remain for another month or so, because I'm working on cramming as many major life events as I possibly can into November, including just accepted a new job and resigned from my old one. More on that soon. In the meantime, there's actually been quite a bit of weaving and knitting going on....must take photos.

The sheep

2010-08-13T10:46:00.002+01:00

There's still a sheep covering most of the spare floor space in my studio.

I washed it - I think - weekend before last, and what with having a lot of wet, rainy weather and a damp house I still keep finding damp spots in it. So on the floor it sits, and every day I check it and turn bits over in the hope they'll dry. But yesterday, I finally got on to the carding bit.

My drum carder is an Ashford, with a fine set of teeth. Perfect for this kind of wool. I've been pre-selecting the wool and choosing the softest, whitest parts of the fleece to card for the first batch. I run the wool twice through the carder. In the first pass, I break the fleece up into tiny locks with the staple intact and run them through it. It's important not to overload the carder or you end up with an uneven result. Then I doff the fleece and roll it into a rolag. You can see the metal doffer (like a lone metal poker) in the image below.
This gives me a long rectangle of carded fleece, which I break up again into thin pieces and run through the carder again. This breaks out a lot of uneveness in the fleece and gives me a nice smooth piece of fibre, with all of the individual hairs pointing in the same direction.

Four hours of this work resulted in this (pen for scale) :
12 nice, large rolags of fleece which have barely touched the whole fleece, but are enough to get me started. I'm pleased with how even this yarn is turning out. It's possible to get it quite fine, but I'm working towards a DK-weight 3-ply yarn (for strength, softness and longevity) so I'm not spinning as fine as I normally do.
I set to on the spinning in earnest last night, and hold hopes to have the first bobbin of yarn completed by the end of this weekend.

Fleece!

2010-08-03T13:43:00.003+01:00

I've had a bit of a fleece bonanza lately...although it's not like I need any more raw fleeces to add to my stash! I was at a steam fair a couple of weeks ago, and picked up a couple of alpaca fleeces from a couple who keep four alpaca as pets and had brought them along for the public to see. But they're going to have to go into the stash for the meantime, while I deal with the beauty above.

The fleece in the photo above came into my possession last week. I'll be spinning it, but it's not mine. It's from a sheep of unknown breed, and is one of several pet sheep that the owner keeps. The story goes that one of his neighbours had a daughter who would always ask to be taken to see his little boy, but what she really wanted to do was be taken to see the sheep. Many, many years later, his son and the neighbour's daughter have decided to marry. The sister of the bride is a friend-of-a-friend and asked me whether it would be possible to spin the fleece from one of the sheep in time to make something for them. How can you resist a story like that?

So: the first thing to do was clean and sort the fleece, and toss the lot in the bathtub with a pile of dishwashing detergent. I'm fortunate in that I have a huge old cast-iron bathtub, but even so the fleece filled it completely.
I can tell you, even a clean-looking fleece can hold a surprising amount of dirt! It took four rinses of water to get the water running relatively clear. The fleece then spent two days hanging around, wrapped in a sheet on top of the washing line, to dry. Compare. Before:
After (colour not true, this is beautifully white but it was a dark rainy morning when I took the photo):
It's a lovely soft fleece and I think I'm going to enjoy playing with it. I'm going to aim for a DKish weight, probably 3-ply yarn, and may play with it a bit as well. I'll post more about it as I go.

ps: I actually found a happy hour in which to WEAVE, a week or two ago! I'm hoping that free time to do so can become a bit of a habit again, after the reallyreallybusy period we've had this year eases a bit this week.

2010-05-27T11:22:00.003+01:00

It's been a long, long time since I've updated this blog, and that has a lot to do with my complete inactivity in the fibre realm. I loosened off the tension on my loom when I went to sea in January, and haven't done so much as tighten it yet, far less weave a single pick. That's largely because other things are going on in my life. I find myself with little time to slack off on a computer at work at present, and no inclination to look at one once I'm home. In addition, I've been doing all the spring jobs in the garden and working on renovating a flat. Busy!

I've not been totally inactive, however, as the photos below will show. I've still been knitting a little in the evenings, finding it something relatively brainless I can pick up for half-an-hour and put down again. I'm working on a project at the moment that I'm making up as I go along, but I also finally got around to seaming up the sweater I knitted over the xmess break last year. In the finest tradition of yarninmypocket, here's a bathroom-at-work shot:

I made this in some handspun alpaca, in a chocolate brown which unfortunately doesn't show the detail very well in a photo. This is a really simple knit, done mostly in garter stitch, with some increasing and decreasing for shape, and yarn-over-needle increases to make the pretty increases which create the cowl neckline and lacy effect up the sleeves. A close-up of the cowl neckline:

Although I knit this to guage, the small size was still a bit too big for me (just because I'm tiny, I think), so this hangs off my shoulders a little. But that makes it a lovely comfortable sweater which is perfect for those days when you want to hide the body. And the alpaca makes it lovely and snuggly, too.

Another first....

2010-03-06T10:16:00.001Z

Today, for the very first time in my life, I knitted in public.

Our cruise is drawing to an end and I was unable to do my normal work while standing my survey watch. So, as I was tired, I fetched my knitting and worked on that while watching the data come in, to keep myself awake.

Yet another step towards turning into my mother!

Greetings from the middle of the ocean!

2010-02-10T11:12:00.002Z

So what's it like working at sea? This time; mostly rubbish weather (in terms of low cloud and snow/rain), not much in the way of the internet, the odd big bouncy storm, being the only person working night shift and sleeping during the day (the opposite to my natural cycle but mostly a good thing in my book as I'm left alone to work), long working hours, no days off and indifferent food. But also: the odd stunner of a day, great data coming in, the excitement of seeing what we'll find next, peace and quiet to do the work I enjoy, a laugh with good mates, achieving things as part of a harmonious team, an ever-changing and interesting view out the window; chinstrap penguins, killer whales, icebergs and huge volcanoes: some of which make glacier-topped islands, some of which don't quite make the surface of the water despite being 3 km high. Some of which no-one knew existed until we came along. No-one could ever say I lead a normal life.

I love my job.

Interlude

2010-01-13T13:36:00.002Z

Unfortunately for me weaving does not consume the major part of my life. In my day job, I'm a scientist. My nom de net gives a hint as to which flavour. Today I'm running away to sea for a couple of months to do some work, so this blog will go very quiet.

But in the meantime, as I'm about four posts behind on things I'd like to talk about, have an almost completely contextless photo of the silk scarves I've managed to get out of the ugly warp so far. The draft for these is two contrasting broken twills, inspired by a scarf Janet Phillips put in her excellent book. The warp is 60/2 silk set at 50epi, and the weft on the left hand scarf is a pale blue-grey 60/2 silk. The weft for the right-hand scarf is variegated handspun silk cap, in blues and greens. Neither have been finished yet, and won't be now until the spring.

Take care, weave well.

Returning to musings on colour

2010-01-04T13:04:00.004Z

Way back in March of last year, I made a post about colour, and wondered at the time whether it would be possible to redeeem a dyeing disaster (not of my making, I hasten to add) which had been visited upon a rather lovely skein of grey 60/2 silk. So once I'd finished weaving the handtowel for the bathroom (there will be photos in the future. I tried to take some yesterday but the light was too dark for navy-on-dark-blue), I warped up the loom with the silk. Here's a photo of the silk on a swift, to illustrate the dyeing job:

I turned this into a 9 metre long, 7-inch wide warp, with a couple of navy threads at the side for definition. Normally to beam sectionally I'd wind the yarn onto as many cones as I want ends per inch, but this is less workable when you're working at 50epi. Instead, I wound two warps, each with 50 ends and long enough to beam each one inch section one after the other. This is the warp, coming off the sectional back beam just before threading.

I'm sure some people would love the colours, but to me they're insipid. The combination of pale turquiose, fuschia, (ugh)pink and yellow do not fit my prejudices.

I've woven two scarves off from this already, in a broken twill. One with a pale blue/grey 60/2 silk warp, and the other with a variegated handspun silk cap warp in blues and greens. I was weaving a scarf a day towards the end of last week which is an accomplishment in fine silk. I'm pleased with the way each has behaved so far, but appear to have non photos of them yet! So I'll promise to post them soon and leave you instead with a comment on acid dyes.

One problem I've been finding with this warp is the odd breakage. These always occur in the regions where the turquoise is brightest. This is due to the chemistry of acid dyes, and the breakdown of protein fibres caused by acid dyes if not adequately rinsed (there is so much dye still in the turquoise parts of this silk my fingers turned blue while winding the warp).

So there are two morals here: if you're home-dyeing, either rinse your yarn really really well, or don't store it for many years before weaving it!

Fortunately there are not enough of these to cause a problem and when they do occur I use a method I think I learned from Sandra Rude. While I have a few spare warp threads hanging off the back beam ready for replacements and sometimes use these, I often tie a new warp thread to the broken thread, pull both threads through to the back together so that the knot is behind the back beam and the front of the new thread is hanging over the breast beam, and weight both ends of the thread. Then I weave on until I'm well past where the breakage occurred and pull the thread back through taut from the back beam, weight it at the front, and weave on. No-knot fabric with minimum fuss.

I'm back at work today after five weeks at home. That's been a bit of a shock to the system, and will severely cramp my weaving style I think. I've been getting used to my lovely routine of weaving in the mornings, garden in the afternoon!

A day in the life of the torture device

2010-01-01T20:25:00.002Z

January 1, 2010. Because Meg dreamed up the idea and it's fun.

Sectional warping: typing warp bouts onto the back beam

2009-12-23T09:26:00.004Z

A commenter in my blog asked how I go about attaching each warp bout to the sectional warp beam so I thought I'd answer with photos. The answer is to use headers. In the photo below I've just finished weaving the previous project, so the headers are stretched all the way to the back heddles.

Each section of the warp beam has a cotton thread tied to one of the dividers. Some sectional warp beams have a steel bar for this purpose, mine does not so I simply tie the thread to a divider, using the convention that it's tied to the right-hand divider for each piece. These are simply long pieces of sturdy cotton cut to twice the length between the warp beam and the back heddles, then with the ends tied in an overhand knot so that the thread runs around the divider.

The length of this thread is important. It's ideal to have the thread long enough so that they an reach the back heddles, which minimises loom waster, but also a length so that the end of the loop furthest from the warp beam sits between the wooden bars of the sectional beams. This is so that the knot for each bout (which can be quite large) doesn't interfere with the rest of the warp as it is wound on.

Each bout of warp (1" or 2", depending on the spacing of your sections) is tied with an overhand knot, and a larks-head knot is made from the end of the cotton header: fold over the end of the cotton thread and pull the two pieces through the end loop.

This is then slipped over the overhand knot on the warp bout, and drawn taut. Beaming can then continue.

One hint is to cut all of the header bouts at the same time so that they're all the same length. Do this even if you don't intend to use them. It saves having to undo one to check the length in the future. I just leave all of mine on, all the time, regardless of the width of my warp. They flop around a bit but they've never got in my way.

More krokbragd

2009-12-20T13:08:00.005Z

This time actually a floor rug. It's not finished yet because I've literally only just cut it off the loom, but it fulfills my need for a floor rug to catch mud and the like trekked in through the front door. The yarns are assorted scrap rug yarns I've accumulated over the years, in addition to handspun rough wools (mostly Welsh), which I picked up during my British wool spinning experimentation phase. I was surprised at the take-up in the warp on this project. The rug is shorter than I'd planned, but still a good length for a foot-mat.

We've had a lot of snow and ice on the ground since a blizzard blew in on Thursday night (the temperatures haven't really risen above freezing since then, in fact it's -1C at 1pm today), so aside from short walks to enjoy the sunshine and views that's done a lot for my staying in and weaving! The light bouncing off the snow has been marvelous. I can really see why weaving is such a strong winter pastime in Scandanavian traditions. It's just as well: this is the rug I was going to have totally completed a full month ago, before my operation. I've been weaving this in short, careful bursts over the past couple of weeks.

Next up: the handtowel for the bathroom, which I've been threatening to weave for a full year.

Sampling really pays off

2009-12-10T16:08:00.003Z

So: on due consideration and serious inspection under natural light(it was a rare lovely sunny day), my friend and I were unanimous that we liked all-light, and also all-dark, but that the two marled together lost something in the loveliness and subtletly. It's the contrast in texture between the camel and the silk that makes the yarn, and throwing another colour into the mix lessens that. We also decided that the all-light was lighter and more luscious with my complexion. So I'll be going with all-light for the top.

Fortunately I have enough of each for a project, and it may be quite nice to have a top and cardigan /scarf in almost-matching yarns. If there's enough left over, it may be wonderful to weave a scarf utilising the colour differences in the warp and the weft.

And so with that decision made, now to ply.

Knitting: sample, sample, sample!

2009-12-10T09:34:00.005Z

A sample swatch in homespun brown alpaca

With all my sitting down time, I've been spinning and knitting. I'd thought I'd be working on my cross-stitch project, but it's been taking the back foot. I've started to learn that one of the reasons I've never liked knitting is because the yarns normally recommended for beginner knitters are too chunky for my taste, and that I apparently spin a very precise fingering-weight yarn. Who knew? I found that I had some dark brown handspun alpaca in precisely the right weight to give a good sample on one of the projects in the book I bought last weekend, so am currently knitting that on 3.25 mm needles.

I've also been spinning up the camel and silk roving.

Camel and silk roving on bobbins, L-R, darker variation and two bobbins of the lighter.

The intention had been to make a three-ply of two strands of light and one of dark, but the pattern I would like to use this for was originally written for a knitting machine, with a gauge of 33 stitches and 42 rows to 10cm. Three-ply would be too thick for that, even at the fine rate I spin. So I sampled. I tried various plys of the two colours, at various thicknesses of ply, and knitted the lot into a sample on the finest needles I have in the house, 3mm. The different variations were marked with a small amount of dark roving spun into the ply as it was made.

Sample swatch, with dark smudges to mark variations. L-R, two-ply one dark one light, three-ply one dark, two light, two-ply both light, three-ply all light.

It was immediately apparent that three-ply was a bit too thick for what I want here, and that two-ply gave a lovely soft drape and could even afford to go slightly smaller on the needles. In addition, a check of the gauge showed that on 3 mm needles, 33 stitches and 43 rows comes to almost precisely 11cm, so it's still slightly too large. The ribbing and pattern on this project are complex enough that I don't really want to be fiddling with adjusting numbers of stitches. So I'll be knitting another sample swatch for this project before going too much further with the plying. For a non-knitter, I own an awful lot of knitting needles:

But the smallest I have is 3 mm. Or so I thought. I've just remembered that I own a pair of 2.75 mm circular needles, so will have another go on those to try to get the gauge. The question now is, do I want to go for the all-light ply (saving the darker variant for another project) or do I like the dark-light marl?

Top: dark-light marl. Bottom: all-light two-ply.
This photo doesn't really do the colours justice as the darker marl is a beautiful caramel colour. I haven't made a decision on this yet, as both colours are lovely. The project I intend this for was originally done in white and I'm trying to remove that prejudice from my head before I make a decision. A friend is coming for lunch today so I'm going to canvas her opinion on which colour suits me better before she sees the original project. In all honesty there' s little enough difference between the two that it may not matter. In the meantime, until I make a decision, I'm spinning a second bobbin of the dark.

And finally; a photo for Meg, to assure here that I'm not torturing the gumnut babies!

It's December, there must be swag.

2009-12-07T14:28:00.003Z

Saturday was the end-of-year meeting of our spinning group. This is always the Christmas party, an occasion even more social than our normal meetings, with a pot-luck lunch (and oh, so good it was). P&M Woolcraft also bring a substantial portion of their shop to the meeting, and typically we make it worth their while. Yarninmypocket has already commented that she was restrained. I, on the other hand, did my bit to make it worth their while, almost single-handed.

From left to right, some baby camel and silk roving (400g), a fold-down Ashford sampler niddy noddy (to make samples for dyeing) , above and behind the niddy noddy, some brown-and-white merino roving (600g), an Ashford Challenger three-bobbin lazy kate so I can do 3-ply (my Majacraft Gem lazy kate only holds two bobins), one new Majacraft bobbin (I buy one every year) and in the front another 33cm Glimakra shuttle, bringing me up to three of those because I do a number of three-shuttle weaves.

I also splurged a little on expanding my acid dye collection and now feel like a have a workable critical mass. I spent part of yesterday dyeing skeins and caps of silk. I'll post on the dyes and dyeing later in the week.

Although I spent a lot of money, I didn't really buy anything I didn't plan to buy. The hardware was all things I'd requested they bring as I saw a need for it. I rarely buy roving so have none in my stash, and while I've found spinning to be an ideal occupation for my recuperation, carding has proven to be just too hard: so I can't card any of the raw fleeces I have in the house to spin. I'm going to call the roving physical therapy. I've been spending a lot of my recuperation spinning the baby camel and silk roving. You can see two bobbins full of it, ready on the lazy kate. I bought 600g of this last year and want to turn it into a top, but wanted to make sure that I have enough. So I bought a little more again this year, cautiously because at £6/100g it's not cheap...but oh, so worth it. This year's camel is darker than last years, as can be seen in the photo below:

(this year's rovings in the back, last year's in the front). Slightly darker it may be, but it's even softer than the already-soft roving I've been spinning up. At the moment the plan is to ply two strands of the pale with one strand of the dark and compare it to just the pale. The 'dark' is a beautiful caramel colour so I'm hoping it will result in deepening the subtle colour graduations already playing in the yarn. I'm half-way through the third bobbin so will sample within the next couple of days. Eventually this will become a top for me.

The astute will notice that I haven't mentioned the book evident in the to image. Yes, it's a knitting book. No, I don't really knit. Yes, I've already done a sample for one of the projects in some brown handspun alpaca. Yes, I'm being corrupted.

Taunted

2009-11-30T12:55:00.005Z

Last Thursday, I had a much-anticipated operation in which a surgeon cut four holes in my stomach and removed my dying and toxic gallbladder. Suddenly I feel well for the first time in over a year! Now I have two weeks at home to get over the op, which presents me with a problem: with a bonus two weeks at home, I'd normally plan to weave and weave some more, with a goo healthy bit of gardening, bike riding and some glorious cooking thrown in for good measure. But I'm not allowed to do any of that, or anything else which will work my abdominals for a while because I'm literally held together with glue at the moment! So I'm moving around at a granny pace, doing the most mundane of movements s-l-o-w-l-y and carefully.

So what to do? Well....it seems I can still spin, and I'm spinning some lovely silk and baby camel roving at the moment. But also:

I can finally fringe all of the woven items waiting for it, which always get put off in favour of more physical endeavours. To that end, I've taken a page from the book of Susan from Thrums, and drawn up a 1-inch grid on some firm packing foam, so I can work on making my fringes more even and proper. I'll start on that this afternoon.

I can never resist a good book, so I've also treated myself to some new (and new-to-me) books bloggers have mentioned, so can kick back on the sofa and enjoy The Primary Structures of Fabrics, Woven Shibori, Weaving in the Peruvian Highlands and a couple of classic old books I've picked up in recent months but haven't had a chance to absorb, Mary E. Snyder's The Crackle Weave and Palmy Weigle's Double Weave. I also have several books on gardening, self sufficiency and permaculture and one on basket weaving to enjoy. This time is also giving me the chance to settle in and enjoy Bonnie Innouye's wonderful Exploring Multishaft Design. But that really makes me want to weave. Which brings me back to this....

Temptation at the loom. It's earning it's nickname 'The Torture Device' at the moment. It sits in its room and taunts me. There's a heavy kokbragd floor rug on it for the front hall at the moment, and the heavy beat required would be too much. I'd thought I might be able to get all six feet of it woven off in the weekend before the operation, but I spent the weekend finishing the heavy work on the allotment and wove all of six inches. I'm itching to get stuck into playing with the colours but I've faithfully promised that I'll wait at least a week before trying to do anything on it.

Maybe in a few days if the weather's nice enough I could use my spare time to see if running some fleeces through the drum carder wouldn't be too much work?

Of course, aside from the reading and drinking lots of herb tea, I haven't actually done any of these things yet!

The making of the krokbragd tote

2009-11-20T09:58:00.009Z

Krokbragd is a traditional Scandinavian weave, most usually attributed to Swedish and Norwegian weaving traditions. Katherine Larson, in her fabulous book The Woven Coverlets of Norway describes how most Norwegians spent their summers in the field, retiring indoors in the dark days of winter, where the women would spend long winter days by the fire carding, spinning and weaving yarn to produce the yardages of fabric required to produce clothing and bedding for their families and their farm labourers (who were partly paid in clothing). Only if there was enough time and fleece left in the winter after producing these vast quantities of yardage would they attempt to make a bed coverlet. The larger and more advanced the coverlet, the higher the mastery of the mistress of the house. The most valued coverlets tended to be woven in tapestry, but krokbragd was also a popular technique (albeit less valued than tapestry because it's faster and less finicky). Often the bed covers of fishermen were of krokbrad. In Sweden, krokbragd is often used to make floor coverings becasue of its durability, and there is a Finnish variant, Flessberpleg, which is often used for rugs and bed covers as well.

Krokbragd is a weft-faced weave which is effectively double-sided, but with the pattern only on one side. Peter Collingwood describes it well in his book The Techniques of Rug Weaving. It is threaded on three shafts in a 4-thread repeat draw, so 1-2-3-2-1-2-3-2 and so on. Three treadles are tied up: two are a 2/1 twill, with the third being plain weave. Having a pick of plain weave in every third pick not only helps to create the pattern, it also creates a flat fabric rather than one which will want to curl at the edges, which a pure twill draft will create.

The warp should be something fairly chunky and sturdy, but it doesn't matter too much what it is because if krokbragd is woven correctly it won't be seen. For this project I used medium-thickness, high-twist Lancashire cotton (also known as "loom cord") from Texere. I now have a warp for a floor rug on the loom, which is made of medium thickness raw linen thread. You want a very wide sett: I threaded this at 5 epi, one every second dent in a 10-dent reed. You also want to use a *very* heavy beat. I double-beat heavily enough that the loom was 'walking' across the studio floor despite having non-slip feet on.

It's best to tie up so that the pattern side is face-up. This can be done by tying to that pedal one lifts shafts 1 & 2, pedal 2 lifts shafts 2 & 3 and pedal 3 lifts shafts 1 & 3. The pattern is treadled 1-2-3, which allows the thread on the first pick to sit below shafts 1 and 2, but over 3 (so the pattern on the surface will be over every fourth warp thread), the second pick apears over shaft one (so every fourth warp thread again, but this time in between the colours of the first pick), and the third pick will appear over warp threads threaded on shaft 2: so every second warp thread, but this time in between every previous colour pick. This way, three picks are required to fill every 'line' of the pattern, but the warp thread is completely covered. You can see this in the image below: At the bottom of the image, think of red as treadle 1, blue as treadle 2 and green as treadle 3.

(I'd like to point out that you can't actually see the warp in the finished item. This yarn was a bit on the thin side for this project, and I chose to photograph in this particular spot because it shows the interlacing of the warp and weft nicely. The warp was hidden once the yarn was fulled.)

You can weave this with a single solid colour, or choose to create all kinds of patterns according to the order in which you throw shuttles to create colour. Because there are only three options for colour in a single row with krokbragd, it's best not to use more than three shuttles at a time.

The colours I was using for this project weren't entirely traditional (originally dictated by the availability of nartural dyes, but often involved dark red and navy with various earthy colours in between), but were dictated by the results of the spinning challenge we had for our spinning group. I laid these out on my work table to try to get a sense of how they would work together, and in which order the colours should go before I started weaving.

To start a krokbragd project off (and ignoring the orangey colour of the sample header at the base of the image below), choose a colour and designate it 'colour A'. In this case, colour A is dark red. Weave a few lines of this, remembering that each line equals three picks. In this case I think I wove about 30 picks of red, to get a centimetre or so of red. Then choose a second colour, colour B: in this case, purple. The second part of the pattern (three warp thread covered in red, one in purple) is achieved by throwing the shuttles A-B-A as you treadle 1-2-3. The next sequence (three warp threads covered in purple, one in red) is A-B-B. To incorporate the third colour, orange, throw A-C-B. Then B-C-B, and so on. You rapidly get a feel for which order the colours should go in.

When working with multiple shuttles, it helps to have a logical order in your throwing and placing of them. I put the shuttles beside me on the stool, with the last thrown further away from me and the next to be thrown closest to me. This ensures that the selvedge stays as neat as possible, with all of the threads neatly wrapped around each other. It also reduces the chance for picking up the wrong shuttle in the wrong sequence.

You can see in the image above that there has been a bit of draw-in on the selvedge. This was due to sloppiness on my part: the outside bouts of warp seemed to have not quite as much tension as the inner bouts, and I wove this in a hurry without using a temple. It didn't matter so much as the selvedges would be hidden in seams anyway. For the floor rug, where the selvedge will be visible, I'll use a temple.

What I've shown you here is krokbragd in its most simple form. The next step would be to reverse the pattern, to make stars:

There are many other variations and patterns possible with this fun technique. Yarninmypocket has been playing with krokbragd on a rigid heddle loom (quite a skill!), and has been making motifs in a sampler. You can see them here.

To finish the tote, I sewed the two selvedges together, making a mitred corner in the speckled blue section for a square base, turned over and blanket-stitched the top, and added a handle. Simple!

More of the rabbit

2009-11-10T09:41:00.001Z

Because he's so lovely. He was definitely a lapful of rabbit!

The owner spends hours every Saturday grooming them, and clips them every three months. She uses the brushings as well as the cut fleece.

The spinning challenge bags

2009-11-09T08:46:00.005Z

Our spinning group meets every second month, and has an annual spinning challenge. As I joined the group towards the end of last year, this is the first one in which I've taken part. At the beginning of the year, we were given merino rovings in four colours: cyan, magenta, yellow and white. The challenge was to blend the colours, spin them into yarn and make a bag. I started playing with it in April but didn't seriously get into the blending until June, here and here. I don't seem to have ever got around to blogging the spun yarns, so I must get around to doing that. I plan to write a post about krokbragd soon. Today though, I want to show you the wonderful variety that is the result of the challenge:

Most of the ladies in the spinning group are knitters, so naturally knitted bags predominated, although there were some woven bags, mostly on rigid heddles (I think mine was the only multi-shaft-woven bag), some Tunisian crochet, and some wonderfully felted productions as well. I'd love to show all the bags, but here are some highlights (apologies for the slightly blurry photo, these were all taken with my camphone).

This lovely piece was made in domino knit, and then fulled almost to felting to produce what the creator described as "the fibre equivalent of a potters 'vessel'" (ie beautiful to look at but with no apparent use). It was a good 2.5 feet tall, and stunning to see.

The creator of this wonderful knitted little piece said she'd had trouble with getting an even blending on hand carders so decided to make it work for her. I love it, it just makes me smile. The seagull latch was made for her by a friend.

Another piece was a wonderful tapestry turned into a evening-sized bag, which told a wonderful story of a landscape...and then there was yarninmypocket's *glorious* colour gamp messenger bag. The dullness of my camera phone takes the flourescence out of the images and gives an idea of how intricate the colour interactions are in the flesh. I'm especially blown away by the way she's managed to get the stripes to line up along the piece - this is one continuous piece, sewn to make the bag.

And here's my effort. It was the largest bag there and raised a lot of interest because most of the ladies hadn't seen this weave before. I made the blue tweed the base, sewed mitres into the corners and decided not to line it. Because I wasn't lining it I blanket-wove the top hem, adding handles made from the leftover piece of fabric from the blanket of delight, which gives it another touch of specialness to me. This is a very wide and shallow tote, which makes it the right size and length to fit a niddy-noddy (you can just see the tip of a niddy noddy poking out of the top right of the bag), lazy kate, several bobbins, fleece, lunch and perhaps a cone or two in. Yes, it's a spinning tote.

Just to cap off the day, one of the ladies brought one of her anogra rabbits along, spoke about how she raises and cares for them, and brought several items she'd made from angora along. I seem not to have got photos of the beautifully soft spun and knitted items, because I was distracted by the happy fluffy being groomed. Especially with its special little upside-down face.

Waaaaaant!!!!!!! (can't have. no time.)

The ears. The ears!!!!

Life

2009-11-02T15:38:00.002Z

It's what gets in the way when you plan to do other things. It's been a busy time and work, social life, illness and working on 'the farm' have all kept me well and truly off the loom. My sweetie left me again this past weekend for his season south, and as there's still some time to go before I leave in the new year, I'll have some weaving time again. So this weekend I wove the fabric for the bag for my spinning group challenge, due this coming Saturday. Have a picture!

And notes for self

2009-09-04T16:12:00.006+01:00

Projects in the queue:

Now that the weather's turning cold and you're finishing these scarves, dye that wool and start weaving the blanket for the bed.
~~Make a trial tote bag to test technique before committing handspun from spinning challenge (big enough to be a shower bag for work!)~~ (ran out of time for this one)
~~Make tote bag from spinning challenge handspun....before the deadline~~
Make chenille-and-cotton handtowel to match the rest of your bathroom

THEN can you go on with all the projects your brain is trying to make you do!!!

A jumble of pleats, part 2

2009-09-04T13:14:00.005+01:00

(Do forgive the draping over the ironing board, it was easy!)
The image above shows the four scarves currently off the loom. The left-hand one is the 'plain' pleated scarf, and the very right-hand one is the reversed-treadle pleated scarf. Of the two scarves in the middle, the left-hand one is the third scarf, and the right-hand one the fourth. These have both been made by reversing the treadling for the pleats.

The tie-up and treadling for pleats is a simple four-shaft straight draw, but with a twist. In the case of these scarves, the black can be considered block A and the beige block B. Block A are threaded 1-2-3-4 on shafts 1-4, and block B are threaded 5-6-7-8 on shafts 5-8. For these scarves each stripe was eight threads wide so I'd do one repeat of the threading, as in the draft below.

In this fabric, the treadling is straight and the structure is controlled entirely by the different threadings between the blocks, so the pleats occur between different sections of warp. Block A, on shafts 1-4, becomes a weft-dominant fabric and block B, on shafts 5-8, becomes a warp-dominant fabric. Obviously the reverse will be the case on the other side of the fabric. It's the natural inclination of the fabric to bulge into the weft-dominant parts that creates the pleats. presuming you have suitable yarns (ideally, the weft should be about half the grist of the warp), and you have a suitable (twillish) sett, it's not necessary to use overtwisted yarns in the weft to achieve this effect. These scarves prove that, as they've woven using rayon flake and the most passive reeled silk thread you're ever seen.

If you want to take that a step further, surely that would be to change the way the pleats work along the length of the fabric as well? So, with 8 treadles, the following draft allows that:

In this case, part of the fabric is treadled as before and part of the fabric is treadled on treadles 1-8, treadled as threaded. It becomes very easy to see which parts of the fabric are warp-dominant and which are weft-dominant, and how that changes along the block (is this starting to look like block theory yet Meg?). Black areas in this draft are weft-dominant, and white areas are war-dominant.

Of course, you don't have to echo the repeats. You can choose to make them as long and/or as short as you wish, which is what I did with the next two scarves. For the third scarf, I did an even 20 repeats of the treadles for each block. The end result was a striped effect, which gavea very pleasing twist where the interchange between the blocks occurred.

The weft, in this case, was an alternating three-shuttle arrangement of peach, beige and pale grey, which gave a very soft and complex colour. You can see the striped effect this has given the scarf in the top image.

But what happens if the blocks are an even size? Just how small do the blocks have to be before you stop getting the pleated effect? That's what I wanted to find out with the fourth scarf:

In this case, because weft is finer than the warp and so the ppi is smaller than the wpi, I treadled a steady six repeats of each block before changing on to the next. The weft in this case was a slightly thicker and rougher (compared to the 60/2 silk) handspun silk cap, dyed black - probably about a 30/1, 20/1. The amswer to the above questions was that you have to have blocks that are definitely longer than wide, in order to develope defined pleating in a fabric. But what you get instead...

Is the most delightful movement in the scarf. There's a definite bobbling between the blocks, as (on this side of the scarf) the mostly-beige blocks try to spring forward and the mostly-black blocks try to move back. In addition, the scarf does still try to crinkle into more-or-less vertical pleats as it's worn, giving a lovely drape and feel to it. And although it looks like a checked scarf, remember the weft is a single colour. The relative colours have all been achieved using weave structure, which really sets the mind to thinking about what could be done with exploring this structure with a number of colours of similar value. This may well be my favourite of the scarves so far.

There's still enough warp on the scarf for one more scarf in this series, once I've finished the blue-and-green clasped-weft scarf. The last one, to complete the series, will be woven with long stretches of one pleat, broken by short stretches of the alternate pleat, to see what that brings up.

A jumble of pleats, part 1

2009-09-04T09:55:00.004+01:00

With four of the five pleated scarves woven and my taking a break before weaving the fifth, it seemed a good time to blog the results of the experiments I've done on this warp. You can see from the image above, I've achieved some very different effects from the brown-and-beige striped warp I've had on the loom lately!

Because the pleats are designed to bend with the changing colours of the stripes, one side will appear all black with the beige in the bend of the pleat, and the other side will appear predominatly beige as the pleat beings the beige to the front and draws the black into the pleat. You can see both sides of the scarf in the image below.
The first scarf woven was straight 3/1, 1/3 pleats as I'd woven on the other warps. The ends were woven with a soft beige-grey 60/2 silk weft, and the main body of the scarf with a black 70/2 silk weft. You can see the margin of the two wefts in the image above.

When you stretch the pleats out, the effect is quite lovely.

The second scard was woven much the same as the first, but with a pale grey 60/2 silk weft and a reversing of the treadles. Instead of a constant repeat of 1-2-3-4 treadles, I'd treadle 1-2-3-4 six times, then treadle 4-3-2-1 six times. The effect was a lovely reversing twill pattern on both sides, but no difference to the structure of the pleats themselves, aside from a slight tendency to waviness that may have more to do with where they folded over the clothesline while drying.

Conclusion (a fairly obvious one): reversing the twill, while giving lovely patterns to look at in the fabric structure within the pleats, doesn't intrinsically alter the 3/1, 1/3 structure of the pleats, so won't alter the overall collapse pattern of the fabric.

But the patterns are, nonetheless, lovely, and open the way for ideas of pleated fabrics that are composed of a more complex twill structure. Something to think about and explore another day.

The obvious next step was to retie the loom and look at reversing the pleats themselves. More on that in the next post.

Clasped weft and colour design

2009-09-01T09:13:00.005+01:00

This clasped weft is for a scarf I've been commissioned to do. The person who's asked for this liked the subtle interplay of blues and greens in another scarf I'd made, and I decided to take the concept one step further. I wound a warp rayon flake, graduating from navy blue through marine blue, sage green, grass green, light leaf green to yellow, with a small flash of golded thread at the yellow end of the spectrum. To mix things up a bit, there's an interleaving of the colours at the blue ends of the spectrum but not at the green-yellow end of the spectrum. For the weft, I dyed and spun silk cap in a cornflower blue and a variegation of soft blues and greens with a touch of yellow, in similar colours and hues to the warp. The variegation goes on the darker side of the scarf, the solid blue on the yellow wide of the scarf. I spin the silk cap very finely, as clasped weft results in a doubled weft.

I won't go into details of how to do clasped weft because Kaz Madigan at Curious Weaver does it much better than I could here. Logistically, I get around the concept of having a weft coming from either side of the loom by having one of the wefts still on a spinning wheel bobbin, and sit the lazy kate on the stash shelf beside the loom. Because the silk thread is so fine, it becomes very important to remember not to walk around that side of the loom! The structure is simply plain weave, so I depress a treadle, pass the shuttle from the right to the left of the shed, pass the shuttle under and back over the secondary silk thread (thus capturing the thread), and use the blue weft to draw both (now linked) wefts back into the shed. Then I can simply chose where to put the intersection of the two colours. This is where the fun comes in.

I try to let the varigations dictate where the intersection will be, but also work to keep the movement of the clasping looking random (a much less random act than you might imagine). Because I work in geology, this means that as I'm doing this, I think in terms of glacial or sea level advance and retreat - or in the case of this scarf, waves on a mossy shoreline. Nature rarely has straight lines. The edge is always wavy with little fingers of water moving forwards and some sections receding faster than others, and this effect looks more natural than a straight line.

With colours so similar in colour and value to parts of the warp, you can really have fun with the effects you make. Running green parts of the weft into the green section of the warp as in the image above can decrease the contrast between warp and weft and create areas of greater subtlety between warp and weft, but increase the contrast between the two wefts.

A different effect again can be achieved be creating a greater contrast in the darker areas of the warp: in this case, taking the yellow green right across to the left of the scarf, and allowing a contrast of yellow-and-navy with the cornflower blue of the left-hand weft:

I've taken these photos very close-up and from directly above to increase the contrast and make the effect as obvious as I can. From a distance and at an angle, the overall effect is much more subtle, and changes with changing angle. Running a part of the weft right across a similar colour can mean that the pattern fades in and out of focus in a very interesting manner, as you can see with both green and blue sections in the image below.

In addition to playing with the colours, the slight slubbiness of the woven silk cap gives this scarf quite a bit more texture than normal plain weave. This scarf is a great deal of fun to weave. I'm really looking forward to getting it off the loom to see how it looks as a whole but I'll miss the colours when it's done!

Still playing with 3/1 twills....

2009-08-28T14:40:00.002+01:00

...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!

Not quite stasis

2009-08-20T11:50:00.004+01:00

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.

Bradford no more!

2009-07-09T10:14:00.003+01:00

I received a letter from Bradford College last night, in response to my rapid on-line application. The application has been referred to the international office, and they were requesting further information in order to assess my fees status.

Oops. It's all too easy to forget that I'm not a native here. I do not wish to go through the process and expense of international studentship. So colleges and formal education - whatever my incination may be - are out the window for a few years yet.

As I mulled this over in my head, I realised that formal education may not be the most appropriate thing for me anyway. I already have an inordinate amount of degrees, and what I really want to do is think more about design, rather than be trained to fit an industry I don't particularly want to work in anyway. Which takes me back to options like workshops with the like of Janet Phillips, or the Master Weaver's qualification through the Ontario Spinners and Weavers Guild.

Still thinking...

More crinkles

2009-07-01T09:09:00.003+01:00

The pleating goes on. This is one I finished between the blue pleated scarf and the black-and-beige series currently on the loom, but I've struggled to get a decent photo.

This scarf is another expedition in warping with handspun. I spun this yarn years ago, from Henna-dyed tussah silk roving. Then, because I'd just moved to the UK and had no way to weave, I used it to try my hand at lace knitting. This is one of the few things I've knit, because I'm not really a knitter. I discovered, however, that lace knitting really needs a slightly firm yarn. This was a lovely scarf, but completely floppy because the yarn was so soft. The lace was completely lost. And as I wear a lot of red, I've always wanted my own handwoven red scarf. So I frogged it out and resolved to turn it into a woven piece. But there wasn't quite enough of the yarn to make a full warp. Which is what led me to the whole 'reversible pleat' idea.

What to put with it? 60/2 silk, doubled on each warp thread, to make stripes set slightly less thickly than the handspun silk, and to give a difference in drape between the stripes. And the weft? Well, I have some yellow and variegated red-orange-yellow silk cap (visible here): the next logical step was to dye and spin some in bright tangerine orange, to match the warp. Yellow at each end, a bit of orange, red in the centre.

The end result was this:

Which I'm pleased with. This isn't as soft and floppy as the rayon and silk scarves, but it has a lovely firm hand and a decent cling to the neck. I can choose whether it sits to be mainly orange or mainly red. I think it's pretty, and it will go with a very wide swathe of my wardrobe!

But most importantly, this scarf is highly personal to me. There's a bit of silk in there that I haven't dyed and spun: but not much.

Carding a rainbow

2009-06-29T11:31:00.003+01:00

I've been so busy I've not had a chance to go near the weaving loom for at least a week. I think it's starting to sulk, and do feel guilty for neglecting it.

I did, at the expense of weaving time, spend a good bit of my weekend carding, and also cheating slightly. The point of this is a challenge to blend primary colours into colours for a project, but the colours supplied were the bright sherbet colours in my previous post, with white roving to make them paler, but nothing to make them darker. I don't really do sherbet pastels, so the application of a little dark garnet, dark blue and black dye to strategic pieces of the roving made me much happier. I have dark red, red/pink/orange, red/orange, yellow, green, mid blue, dark blue and purple.

Now for the next bit: to spin it all up.

Carding a rainbow

2009-06-24T08:36:00.002+01:00

With a few spare hours to myself last night, I busied myself with this:

These aren't complete, but they're the beginnings of some colour experiments. I'd done the initial trials with hand carders and wasn't happy with the result. Having only used the drum carder to process raw fleeces rather than blending before, I've concluded that the drum carder really does make blending easier, faster and more effective.

I won't be continuing with this tonight, as I'll spend the evening travelling up to a hotel in preparation for a seminar up north tomorrow. So instead, I'll take my trusty Little Gem wheel, and this:

It looks grey in the photo, but this is coal black-dyed silk cap.

What else do you do with an evening alone in a hotel, other than spin?

No decisions on the further training ideas as yet. The ideas are still spinning in my head. I want to do something because I'm always keen to have a qualification in my interests, but I've not yet fopund something that's a firm fit.

The Bradford HNC

2009-06-18T12:59:00.000+01:00

So for several years now, I've been prevaricating about maybe possibly applying for the Bradford HNC in weaving. It's seemed a sensible way to go about making myself think more about design in what I do. But the nature of my job, and (as always) the thought of spending all that money have prevented me from doing so.

But this post from Jane has convinced me that maybe I need to apply and commence this year, before it disappears completely from its present format. So, despite the fact that I'll be overseas for three months over the winter, I've just made an on-the-spot 'panic' application.

Can anyone give me any reasons why this would be a bad idea?

EDIT: talking further with Jane informs me that the current crop of students are the last to attend the course in the existing format anyway. But the idea is in the head...

Reversible pleated scarves

2009-06-01T13:51:00.000+01:00

When not on holiday (or wishing my holidays hadn't come to an end), I've still been having fun with pleats. After the last round, I decided to see whether I could make areversible pleated scarf, in two colours.

By making each 3/1, 1/3 twill block an alternating shade of light and dark blue, I created a scarf that is dominated by the light blue warp and the weft on one side, and the dak blue warp and the weft on the other side. Of course there's nothing new under the sun - I wove this a while ago now, and was sure I'd come up with something unusual and interesting, only to have the latest issue of Handwoven arrive the next day with an article about two-tone pleated scarves!

This scarf was made using rayon for the warp and various bits of blue silks (some commercial, some variegated hand-dyed and spun silk cap). I wasn't sure the rayon would pleat up as well as wool because it's so slippery, but it rolled up a treat when washed.

I did this to test the idea, before committing my precious handspun silk to the same treatment. I did, and am really pleased with the result, of which more later. In the meantime, the drape on the rayon is so lovely and I'm enjoying this exploration so much, this weekend I've warped up a long warp of black and beige rayon, to make a more scarves:

Green silk crammed and spaced scarf

2009-05-16T08:01:00.000+01:00

This is my entry to the 2009 SSVE. (This is a post-dated post, I'm actually on holiday in Australia at the moment!)

This is a scarf made from a space-dyed 30/2 silk warp, dyed in three shades of green - an avocado green, an yellower variant of that, and a blue variant of that. The warp was threaded using a crammed-and-spaced approach. This gave an overall sett of 30 epi, with the most dense parts set at 60 epi, all the way down to 10 dpi at the most widely set portions. The weft is handspun silk cap, dyed before spinning to the same colours as the warp. The fringe was simply twisted, to give a slight variation in the spacing of the fringe.

Here's a close-up of the weave structure:

The design was woven using a reversing twill, to give diamonds. In the less crammed spaces, these form an eye pattern.

On the 30th of March, I gave this scarf as a gift to a collleague who had resigned from work. She was absolutely delighted with it, and immediately put it on.

I spotted it artistically folded on her desk this morning, keeping her company. :)

Why you should be careful about your keywords

2009-04-01T09:54:00.000+01:00

I just took a look at my blog statistics, and noticed that someone found my blog using a google search yesterday. Nothing unusual in that, but the term they used to search was "torture room". My recent post came up on the second page. They clicked through. They didn't stay for long. I don't think what they saw was what they were expecting!

What they were looking for was an flash-scripted computer game. Apparently you're able to torture people in computer games now. I find that deeply disturbing.

Never let it be said we don't take things to extremes...

2009-03-31T16:25:00.000+01:00

I know many people observed Earth Hour on Saturday night. We kind of took things to extremes in an attempt to outdo everyone else.

We lost our mains power on Saturday afternoon and proceeded to spend the next 48 hours without electricity, impressing the neighbours with the sheer number of very large vans and trucks that could be squeezed into and parked on the side of our narrow one-way lane (four big vans, a flat-bed truck and a digger at the peak), and with the sheer size of the hole that kept growing in the footpath and laneway outside our house. It turns out the cable had been damaged some years back when cables were laid, and had chosen that moment to give up the ghost.

We also became increasingly amused at the level of distress people experience when confronted with people who can happily live without electricity for a couple of days. They're really not sure what to do, or think. The poor electric board man came back no less than four times to make sure we hadn't come to our senses and decided that we did want a generator after all.

But we were fine. We camp a lot, we're equipped to live off the grid. We'd pulled out the petrol stove and the paraffin lamps, and were living our lives as normal, just a bit less brightly in the evenings. And opening the fridge a lot less, of course. I did, however, have a very long hot shower when the power came back on yesterday afternoon!

I blame Mr. G. myself, because the last email he sent me before getting on the plane discussed buying an old cottage without power for a weekender. In that, he made the comment that the two of us living off the grid was meant to be. We've laughed ourselves silly all weekend. What a welcome home!

Homecoming

2009-03-27T09:23:00.000Z

My sweetie gets home tomorrow. He's been away for almost six months - five months, two weeks and six days to be precise - and he's been coming home for almost a week. It's a long journey, involving five days at sea, a 19-hour flight and two three-hour bus trips.

The next two months will be a time of celebration, rest and relaxation, involving lots of long weekends, and two separate holidays (one in Wales, the other in Australia). We're not putting in a single 5-day working week during the months of April and May. The celebration won't end at the end of that time, but we will put in a little more effort into making an appearance at work!

I confidently predict a significant slow-down in spinning, weaving and blogging over the summer. :)

On colour again

2009-03-25T08:58:00.000Z

It's an oft-asked question: what do you do with dyeing disasters? The mark of a good cook is how well the bounce back from a kitchen disaster: could the same be true of a weaver?

I hasten to add that this is not my dyeing disaster. Some may argue it's not a disaster at all, but it's a bit busier than I'd normally take a project. This is one of a number of skeins I bought cheaply off ebay from someone who'd tried weaving, found it wasn't for them, and later sold on the stash they'd bought in the first flush of enthusiasm. I've bought some good bargains that way. This skein was worth taking on because it came with a number of other silk skeins which had not been dyed. The base silk is a lovely soft grey, and it's been splodged with rose pink, green and blue.

My usual approach to design is completely instinctual. I do some conscious design, but more normally yarns and drafts are left lying around in close proximity to each other, and finally they group themselves and present themselves to me as a fait accompli. I keep thinking that I ought to approach design in a more conscious manner and occasionally I do, but the instinctual approach seems to be what my brain desires after a day spent doing hard, conscious science. My weaving is, after all, not my day job. For now.

The usual answer to a dyeing disaster is to dye some more. But as I've looked at this over time, I've come to think, can it be made to work? Can the silk be used as it is, making the various colours look attractive sitting beside each other rather than a dog's breakfast? And the answer may be that it is. The trick is to use the multi-coloured stuff as an accent rather than a whole warp, and interchange it with complementary colours. Perhaps use it as the centre of a scarf, with a thin stripe of rose pink and a selvedge of the same grey as the base colour. It could work, if it were woven with a lovely complexish twill patterned draft.

The blue and yellow silk caps are floating around with it to see how they like the idea of becoming a weft with these colours. The blue is saying no, the pale yellow yes - and the pale yellow is also liking the golden yellow silk skein above it. The yellow, a lovely soft colour, is a few silk caps I threw into the exhaust bath of the lovely tangerine dyeing.

There's enough of the syed silk skein there for 2-3 scarves, so there's room for experimentation. This is 1-2 projects down the list, so watch this space.

Photos from the studio

2009-03-24T08:28:00.001Z

I love poring over photos of other people's studios, so I thought I'd share.

I had some friends around to a party back in January, and one of them had a particularly fine wide-angle camera lens. So here is the most comprehensive shot I've seen of the (very cluttered at that time but at least you know it's being used) torture room. On the loom is one of the fine pink silk scarves, and hanging over the back of it is the hand-painted warp I've just been finishing off.

There's lots of weaving paraphernalia scattered about. The bookcase beside the door, in the left of the image, is actually full of books. This also houses my home-made sectional beaming yarn guide apparatus; the scraps of decking wood and eyelets. I sit cones on the floor to beam on the warp. The one on the far wall houses my weaving stash, all laid out on display to inspire. The cones are (very) loosely organised by fibre type and grist. There's a small worktable in the far corner - actually a Victorian hall table - which houses yarns laid out to inspire for the next project, a big pile of paperwork, my swift and bobbin winder, or a huge mess, depending on the day.

The loom has the sectional back beam of course: the second back beam is still on the floor. I've decided that in complete contrast to strap-on design with which it was made, I need to drill and bolt the second back beam to the loom. That's a two-person job, so I've been waiting for the second person to come home.

The baskets on the top of the bookcases contain more stash - large amounts of yarn for the next blanket project, scraps of tapestry yarn that I inherited and may use one day, and lots and lots of fleeces for spinning. The drum carder is just out of view (although you can see its handle in the extreme left foreground), but my Little Gem spinning wheel and spinning chair are on the far side of the loom. The skein winder on the windowsill is a French antique which I really must renovate one day. You can also see on the windowsill the slate, on which I chalk up projects into the queue as inspiration strikes. I chalk them up literally, using chalk I collected from a field about 5 miles from my house. The window is east-facing and faces the lane, so it's the perfect place to weave in the morning, watching the world go by. I get all sorts go past my house - families on a walk, people on bikes, people on horseback, cars of course, the odd tractor and occasionally a horse-drawn dray.

Why "The Torture Room"? Well, my friends long ago nicknamed the Glimakra "The Medieval torture device" because...well, that's what it looks like. Not "The rack", because that would be too prosaic. The red couch in the right foreground is a futon that doubles as a spare bed, and friends love to tease visitors who have never been to my house before that they have to sleep in the torture room with the Medieval torture device. Some poor unsuspecting souls have nervously entered my house not ~quite~ sure what they've let themselves in for.

When asked why I went for a Glimakra, I often tell people I'm overcompensating. I'm 5'1" tall, and in high school I was 4'10". My father, who has long loved to tease me about my height, promised me a rack for my 15th birthday, and it never appeared...

I'd love to have a manymany-shafted compu-dobby one day, but until I find the space, the old girl works well for me.

That would be a no, then.

2009-03-23T08:34:00.001Z

This weekend, I wove off the last of the handpainted merino warp. I'd tied this on to the too-soft merino warp, and as I wonve my way towards it, I got to thinking about the sample I'd cut off it. It showed that the sett of the sample had been a bit too tight, and I wondered whether the breakage in the warp had been due to rubbing. I'd not worried about it too much because the back of the handpainted warp had been meant to be for samples: but I got all enthusiastic and decided it would make a short scarf if I worked at it.

As the too-soft merino warp came off the back beam however, I got my answer:

Ignoring the two stripes of extra red warp at either side, every red thread in the warp there represents a broken warp thread. This didn't affect the scarf I was weaving because every break happened past the not of the hand-painted warp (yellow, in this picture):

So each time this happened, I'd tie yet another red cotton warp on, and weight it all down. I got the knots to the back of the heddles, and then lost my bottle. Any further and it would have been too difficult to track down and fix breaks. So then I thought about what to do next. What I really wanted to do was make another pleated scarf - but obviously I couldn't tie it directly on to the green merino warp. Yet it seemed a shame to thread and sley again if I didn't have to. So I decided to make a short dummy warp of cotton and tie that on, as padding between that and the next warp. In addition, for the next few warps, it would be really handy to see at a glance which sections are 3/1 twill, and which 1/3. So rather than just cut this scarf off, I started cutting off just 8 threads at a time, tying on the dummy cotton warp in alternating sections of red and tan - one for each threading block. (Ignore the messy threads in the middle of the warp, that's where I've tied back on the broken warp threads and pulled the excess through the reed).

The plan is to quickly tie that on and beam it so the weak warp isn't exposed, and then make the next warp.

Of course, at that stage I decided that I really needed to go out and enjoy the beautiful spring day we had, so I wandered off to dig a potato bed. That's as far as the weaving got for the weekend!

The magic colour-changing warp

2009-03-19T08:46:00.000Z

Last weekend, in addition to getting stuck into the garden, I tied on a blue warp to what was left of the hand-painted warp and wove it off as a sample for the next intended project. When I'd woven the blue warp I realised that there was enough of the hand-painted warp still on the loom to make a shortish scarf, so decided to weave that up as well. That may have been a mistake, given it's tied to the too-weak merino at the other end, but we'll see.

It gives a cool effect if you take a photo at the right time though.

The weft for the hand-painted warp is the green silk cap in my previous post.

Lime green and tangerine

2009-03-18T08:36:00.000Z

(With extra points to anyone who gets the song reference)

There's a post on colour that's been kicking around in my head, waiting for the right moment to get out. This probably isn't it. But colour has been a big part of my musings lately.

We all have favourite colours. We tend to stick to those colours and those combinations that are pleasing to our eyes and our differing tastes. Sometimes that can work us into a bit of a rut. The mossy lime green silk cap above is another example of the continuing series of greens that I've been playing with for the lat six months or so: and I've been weaving it into yet another green/brown/yellow handpainted warp. The tangerine is as well, because the scarf it will turn into will be red, yellow and orange: fun, but predictable.

But sometimes you're lucky enough that something prompts you out of it.

That happened to me a week or two ago. While spinning the tangerine silk cap (not looking anything like it's wonderful glorious brightness in the image above) at Rampton spinners recently, the wonderful scarf in Meg's avatar leapt into my mind. Suddenly I started to see the bright orange silk cap woven with a complex weave - possibly a block-drafted crackle - into a deep royal purple silk warp. The effect would be shimmering. I mentioned this to Meg, and she said that the only reason she had the gold cotton in the avatar was because she'd been sent it by error, and yet it had become one of her favourite cottons. She'd been taken out of her comfort zone and it had worked. I call that serendipity.

Since then, I've been looking at colour completely differently. My brain is brimming with ideas, at various stages of maturity. The orange and purple, which is still germinating in my head. Pale lemon yellow weft into soft grey splodged with rose pink and blue (a dog's breakfast of dyeing someone else did on a silk skein which I've later inherited - I'll take a photo one day). Stripey pleats, making a fabric with two different sides. Soft yellow pleats into dark navy blue, to up the contrast. And maybe trying to do something like watercolours, which change hue with changing perspective.

Sometimes all it takes is the smallest prompt.

Also, apologies for any typos. I think I've caught most of them, but I'm typing with a bandaged index finger due to a minor olive-oil-tin-and-sharp-knife gardening accident last weekend, and the extra bulk catches keys.

Awarded

2009-03-18T08:20:00.000Z

Peg has been kind enough to tag me for the Kreativ Blogger award.

Accepting this award means following some rules:

copy the Kreativ Blogger award to your blog
put a link to the person from whom you received the award
nominate 8 other blogs and
link to them
then leave a message on the blogs you nominated

I'm always reluctant to select people for these things, but here goes (in no particular order):

Cally
Tien
Meg
Dot
Sonya
Lynette
Gwen

...and anyone else who feels so inclined...

Moving right along...

2009-03-12T08:05:00.000Z

It's amazing what a difference a bit of backstitching makes. Not to mention foresight. I decided that rather than go on and do another section of this piece with different colours; it made sense to backstitch the pear tree while I still have all the thread for it ~~spearing the gumnut babies~~...er, still on the needles in the pincushion, so I can stitch any missed stiches while I spot them. There are remarkably few of those, I'm pleased to say. Leaves to the left of the peacock's head have been backstitched, those above and to the right have not. The difference in definition is clear. It's going slowly at the moment though, as I seem to have done something to strain my hands.

Some people love backstitching, some hate it - just like dressing a loom. Me, I like the process of defining clarity from murk. Gilding the lily, as it were.

Somewhere, there a couple of gumnut babies with a mighty headache.

Rediscovering the pleasure of weaving and spinning.

2009-03-09T08:28:00.000Z

No photos today, but I wanted to say, what a pleasure it is to weave a warp that doesn't break with every pick. After months of weaving into difficult, weak warps I've rediscovered the joy of weaving. Of having things work as they should, and most particularly being able to develop a weaving rhythym and finish a scarf without a broken warp thread!

I pulled the olive green pleated scarf off the loom yesterday. I don't have photos yet, as I haven't finished it yet - I'd thought to do so last night, but spent the evening chatting online with my sweetie instead (we often do on a Sunday evening as it's a quiet time for both of us, and it's his birthday today). There are two more pleated scarves germinating in the pipeline, extending the idea further.

I've managed to meet the deadline I'd imposed on myself of finishing sewing the pear tree on the peacock tapestry by this past weekend. I also spent a very pleasant Saturday at Rampton Spinners with Ota, spinning the brightest tangering silk cap you've ever seen. It was like a cloud of sunshine. You couldn't help but smile looking at it- it was making us both very happy people!

Moving on with pleats, part 2: sample, sample, sample

2009-03-05T07:58:00.001Z

I'm slowly learning that it's always a good idea to sample. I this case, I wanted to decide what the best weft would be to use with the handpainted merino warp I planned to turn into a pleaty scarf, establish whether I'd managed to give myself loose pleats with the set I'd chosen, and see how much draw-in there would be. From just under 9 inches in the reed, the finished sample was an average of 5.5 inches wide - about 40% shrinkage.

From top to bottom:
- pale green 60/2 silk
- emerald green 120/2 silk
- soft grey-green 30/2 merino (the same cone as the previous too-soft warp)
- pale green handspun silk cap
- yellow overtwisted handspun silk cap
- olive green handspun silk cap
- a few picks of beige rayon flake thread used as a spacer because it's nice and slippery

There was little difference in the draw-in between the very fine silks and the handspun silk cap (which has more of a 30/2 grist).

The fine silks gave an incredibly soft hand to the fabric, but did give a weft-dominated fabric: not what you're after when you have gone to the effort of hand-painting a warp. The merino, being a closer grist to the warp than the other yarns, pleated less strongly than the silks. It's a nice effect and would give a nice result, but it's not what I'm after here - and the colour is all wrong. Cold contrasted with the warm colours of the warp. The pale green silk cap is too bright. The yellow overtwisted silk cap gave more draw-in and in intriguing result, but again was not what I wanted for this project - besides, I only have a small amount of that left over from one of the crammed-and-spaced silk scarves, and this sample has given me an idea for how to use it up.

The olive-green silk cap, which is what I was using for weft for the previous pleating efforts, is the winner. It's a little variegated, which I've decided to use to my advantage. I've used some of the darker silk to make a defined stripe, about six inches in from the end.

And the changing shades of the handpainted warp have the effect of increasing and decreasing the contrast between the pleats, and the variegations of the warp and weft drift in and out of similar colour tones:

This, too, has fired my mind and given me ideas for the next scarf, which will have more complex colour interactions again. It seems despite myself, my brain is giving me the increased layers of colour I was aspiring to last year.

Moving on with pleats, part 1: tying on a new warp

2009-03-04T08:33:00.000Z

For the first time ever, I've cut a warp off the loom without making something of it. The olive pleats in this post were looking absolutely lovely - but the beautifully soft 30/2 merino I was using for the warp was far too soft to support any tension as a warp. It was stretching with every pick, and I was averaging a broken warp thread with every pick taken. It made for even slower weaving than the weak 60/2 silk warp and wasn't going to ever turn into a fabric that could be used. So with six inches or so woven, I called the result a sample and cut it off. I finished it, but appear not to have a photo of it. Set at 30 epi, the result is rolling pleats, but a slightly stiffer fabric than one would want to wear.

Not to waste the time I'd spent threading, I chose to tie on a warp I painted some time ago, intending to use for a pleated scarf. The warp is hand-painted NZ artisan lace-weight merino, a bit thicker than the merino I'd been using. I'd used this yarn before, for the multi-coloured scarf so knew it would stand up to life on the loom. It's a bit thicker than the merino in the previous warp, so I resleyed at 24 epi.

The new warp had about 30 more ends than the previous one, so I wound up a short dummy warp in red cotton for each side, to add the extra ends:

Having wound the warp prior to painting on my warping mill, I had a cross tied into each end. I put the threading cross through lease sticks, and tied these to the breast beam of the loom.

You can see my beloved trusty steed in the background. She lives in the studio with me and gives me immense pleasure on the 9-mile commute to and from work.

Tying each thread to the previous warp, I beamed the warp on. You can see in the image above how stretchy the previous olive green warp was: when I tied on, all the warp threads had been cut to the same length. By the time the knots had been eased through the reed and heddles, the wool warp was overall more stretched than the cotton, and some sections of it had stretched more than others. This has had the advantage of giving an attractive chevroning along the warp but may cause problems with tension once I get to the end of the warp. That won't be a problem for the scarf this will turn into, because there's enough length in the warp for the tail end to be samples. I can experiment.

I use the 'water jug' method of tensioning when beaming a warp this way: I tie the warp into a loose overhand knot, and hang over it a half-litre jug of water to weight it. I only beam a few inches at a time, stopping to shake and twang the warp threads into place for the next bit to pass through the reed - never combing my fingers through the warp. That just causes knots.

One the warp was beamed, I lashed the warp on. I always lash my warps on, I find it so much easier to get the warp to tension. I wind the lashing cord on a plastic bobbin, lash the warp on at a relatively easy, loose-to-medium tension, and then run my hands over the lashing cord to even the tension out. I continue to do this, increasing the tension one or two clicks of the ratchet at a time, running my hands over the lashing cord several times with each increase of tension. I find this gives me an even tension across the warp every time with no problems. If I'm not impatient, I'll often try to finish a day with a tensioned warp so I can let it rest overnight and settle before starting weaving in the morning. It means I spend many Friday nights tying up treadles!

More on the weaving tomorrow...

More of the peacock cross-stich

2009-03-03T08:51:00.000Z

By popular demand (or, because Meg asked so very nicely!).

This proved quite difficult to photograph, because of the medium tones of the colours. I've uploaded the full, 10Mp images - so if you're on a slow connection, beware of clicking on the thumbnails for a closer look!

Obviously because I'm still sewing, the fabric is a bit crumpled where I've been holding it. Again, this is very very big: I'm sewing this at 10 stitches to the inch. It's coming along. I expect to have the pear tree finished this week, there's only a bit to go to the left of the peacock's head. The rest of the background will take another week or so, and then there's a lovely intricate border, complete with embroidered diamonds and gold beads to do.

A close-up of the peacock itself:

No back-stitching yet. Back-stitching will outline the detail of the work and make outlines much easier to see. I may start on some of that this evening.

Related posts:
Making linen cloth (contains a link to an image of the completed work)
Linen cloth for cross-stitch
Fluff
Where I was with this a fortnight ago

A bit crinkly

2009-02-20T09:34:00.000Z

I've started making samples to play with pleats. Pleats are easiest made with alternating stripes of 1/3 and 3/1 twill, and a fairly close set. Many people recommend also using an overtwisted yarn in the weft, but that's not necessary. For this set of samples I wanted to see whether I could create soft pleats rather than a strongly pleated fabric. I warped up a 2/30 merino yarn, with occasionall ends of the olive-coloured silk cap and merino handspun used in the "moss on oak" scarf. I dyed the merino an oaky green to complement the handspun. I sleyed it quite tightly for 2/30, at 30 epi - but not set as tightly as I would for tighter pleats.

To be honest, I don't think this draft does the odd shot of handspun favours but I'm going to play some more and see how it goes. I'm thinking that a more balanced weave suits contrasting threads better. I'm very pleased with the level of soft pleating however, and want to play more with this. You can also see clearly in the photo above the difference different weft materials have on the pleating effect - the beige at the bottom is commercial rayon yarn, a slightly thicker grist than the warp. The green weft at the top is dyed hand-spun silk cap, a slightly finer grist than the weft, but not the half-thickness of the weft often recommended for strong pleats.

There's been a lot of shrinkage in the wet finishing. The scarf went from 7.5 inches wide in the reed to 5.5 inches wet-finished.

So much for having a nice easy weave with this project, again! I'm finding that the 2/30 at this set is very sticky, and I'm having to clear the shed with my hand before each and every pick.

But lest you think I've been lazy....

2009-02-16T09:06:00.000Z

...because I've not been sewing up and finishing woven items lately, this what's been absorbing my evenings instead.

This is the crossstitch sewn into the 20 epi handwoven linen, and it's coming along. It's a very complex piece but it's been the perfect evening companion for someone whose brain spent a couple of months fogged with colds and winter bugs. It's been taking the place of weaving and spinning. It requires concentration rather than thought. And it's huge - I'm sewing this at two spaces per stitch (it makes half-stitches easier), so it's sewn at 10 stitches/inch. In this photo, it's draped across the back of a full-sized rocking chair.

The big question is, can I finish it in the next six weeks?

A sea of pink

2009-02-16T08:56:00.000Z

I don't even like pink.

I finished weaving the pink undulating twill a couple of weeks ago. I got two scarves from this warp in the end; the one in the back is the first, woven in alternating picks of handspun silk cap and 60/2 silk, the front one with just the 60/2 silk weft. Neither of them have been wet-finished yet, there's still the mending to do. Wet finishing ought to even out the selvedges as well. It's a real pity you can't reach through the computer to feel them because the difference in grist between the fabrics is marked. The half-handspun scarf is a much more substantial piece, solid in feel and promising to warm. The 60/2 fabric inthe front is much thinner and finer, like tissue paper as opposed to fine vellum.

Undulating away

2009-01-29T08:45:00.000Z

Who knows what causes a difficult warp to behave. Whether the weaver comes to grip with the combination of tension and beating a warp requires, or whether eventually they get tired of proken threads and swap them out, sometimes persistance pays off.

This warp is the one of random ends of old 60/2 silk that I've been working on for a while. It's given me a lot of trouble with broken warp threads, and also with twists in sets of warp threads from the way I beamed the warp (the idea of winding sets of six threads on a cone and treating them as a single thread for sectional warping clearly needs refining). The fist scarf I wove on this warp had a lot of broken threads which will require mending when I finish it. Even the start of this scarf gave me a lot of trouble with broken warp threads in the first couple of inches - until I realised that all of the breakages were happening in my new substitute ends. I was replacing good silk thread with weak!

I'd really begun wondering whether persisting with this warp was worth it, or whether I should just bite the bullet and cut it off - but the realisation that it was the substitute ends causing the problem now and replacing them all fixed the problem (that was not the case with the first scarf, as it was the weaker beamed ends that were breaking). It's been a long, slow process, done in between work, a couple of very social weekends and yet another cold. Having swapped out all the weak ends, I've now woven several feet of this scarf without any problems. The design is a treadle-controlled undulating twill of my own design, woven on a straight threading.

I had, once I'd finished this warp, planned to tie on another 60/2 silk warp to it to do another series, this time in blues and greens. But there are so many substitute threads hanging from the back of the loom now, that trying to replace those on the beam would be more of a headache than it's worth. So now it's off to the drawing board to see which of many incipient projects I'm going to do next instead - I suspect it's going to be playing with more handspun.

Open studios, again

2009-01-12T12:00:00.001Z

The seminar for joining this year's Open Studios scheme was yesterday. I didn't go.

I was all set to go, even cancelling a much-looked-forward-to day of spinning the day before, because I was still getting over a cold and needed to have one day of resting and taking it easy. But late on Saturday night, I stopped and reconsidered.

I have a habit of taking too many things on. My philosophy on life has always been "bite off more than you can chew, and then chew like buggery". It's worked for me, and I've acheived a lot of things in relatively short time spans. Taken to the extreme, it had me finishing a Ph.D., working in a research fellowship, undertaking an explosives handling course (then useful for my work), and learning a foreign language, all at the same time. I barely slept for two years and didn't sleep (literally, I only slept every third day, the other two I'd have a 10-minute nap) for the last six months of finishing the Ph.D. Since then, I've had to be more careful about how much I take on. When I do take on too much, my body just collapses in a heap - and towards the end of last year I started working too hard again!

Mr G. and I have already agreed that 2009 is the year of R&R and doing less, yet there's still a lot on. There's a lot of travel planned for this year, once he gets back. There's also, probably, the purchase of a house if the right one presents itself and the resultant renovations/restoration. The veggie garden. Cycling. I've already joined a committee to liase between my village and the local councils. I'm joining the local medical First Responders (first aid). My place of work undergoes a major restructure this year, and that and the project I've been heading will increase my responsibilities. Committing to Open Studios, and all the volunteering that involves, just seems one commitment too far. So it's put off until next year, which gives me more of a chance to move more of my portfolio from my brain to actual cloth.

As it turns out, when I tried to start the van this morning to go to work, a problem it's been having intermittently has turned into something that makes it undesirable to drive, so I wouldn't have been able to drive to the seminar anyway: clearly, it's not meant to be this year!

UNproductive

2009-01-05T15:30:00.000Z

With 10 days or so to myself over the Christmas break, I'd thought I'd get somewhere around half a dozen or so items woven, if I concentrated on weaving. I was so looking forward to it. Instead I picked up my third bug for December (I've now been constantly sick sonce November the 27th), and accomplished precisely one. One woven item, just off the loom this past weekend and not yet finished.

OK, so a treadle-controlled undulating twill woven with two shuttles in 60/2 silk with regular stops for broken ends isn't going to be a fast weave, but that's slow by anyone's standards. Anyway, here's a preview:

The warp is the random assortment of pinks, purples and peaches in my previous post and the weft is alternating picks of purple solid-dyed 60/2 and a random-dyed, spun silk cap in shades of pinks and purples:

Weaving into the old 60/2 was quite a challenge, as it turned out. Because there was such a random assortment of ends, it turned out that not all of the silks were the same weight, and some there different ages than others. Some of the very old, and probably acid-dyed, silks are quite rotten and broke very very easily. Swapping them out for other ends would have proven difficult if not impossible, because they were usually the feature ends, such as the dark purples you see on the right of the scarf above. They occur in a defined pattern which isn't substitutable, so I just had to be patient and replace ends when they broke. There will be a lot of sewing to get them even in this pattern. Fortunately each one will only be a few picks, because I was very vigilant.

The end result is a softly sheening scarf, with highlights shining out from the warp. I'm looking forward to wet finishing this one and seeing how it turns out, but that will have to wait for a couple of weeks.

It's perhaps appropriate, considering I coughed and spluttered all the way through the weaving of this scarf, that it's intended for the mother of the twins who gave me this latest cold!

This weekend I will be mostly...

2008-12-19T09:11:00.000Z

...figuring out which weft will go into this next warp...and then doing something about it:

As part of the windfall I received from the wonderful weaver's stash, there were a lot of short ends of dyed 60/2 silk, obviously left over from various projects. They were in a veritable rainbow of mostly soft pastelly colours. Weighed, I found there were between 1g and 14 grams on each of the cones.

The shortest cone (0.5g) was 8.5 m. So I thought that they would be great, combined and blended into a multicolour warp. For this first experiment I chose the peach, pink and softer purples above, with the odd strand of darker purple, blue and one of hot pink for emphasis. The result was the warp you see above.

I beamed this at 60 epi, so I've now gone from 8epi to 16epi to 60epi with the sectional beam. I was starting to make plans to wind 60 short lengths of silk onto 60 cones for every one of 10 inch-wide sections when I realised that meant I'd spend all day winding 600 cones, and then winding them on to the beam 60 at a time. Crazy. It was also a recipe for tangles and madness. But I thought, if you can make multiple passes of a warp with a paddle when winding a warp, why shouldn't that work for sectional beaming as well? So when winding the cones for the warp, I wound 10 cones for each section, with 6 threads at a time on each, and I wound enough for 3 sections at a time onto each cone. That cut down the work involved considerably, and also allowed for gradual changes in colour as one colour of silk ran out and was replaced by another. A good way to use up various complentary ends of projects. Next time I use this approach, I may not wind the three ends of each set side-by-side. I'll spread them out, making the spread of colour more random.

There's 6.8 m of warp on the loom, which gives me enough for three scarves.

Next, as this is a seat-of-the-pants project - what threading, and which wefts? I'm going to thread this in a straight threading this afternoon, and the first scarf will be a two-shuttle undulating twill, in the mauve 60/2 skein of silk sitting on the centre of the warp, and the handspun, variegated silk cap, which is in pinks and mauves. I'll probably do a second in a twill pattern with a pale grey 60/2 silk weft, and the third in perhaps a series of paler pinks - we'll see.

If this is a success, I intend repeating the experiment with the pastel blue and green random ends. I also intend pulling out the knitting machine I bought but haven't really found the time to play with, and learn how to use it while making a simple v-neck top in faux mohair.

-------
For some reason, the internet connection at home does not allow me to log in, which means I'm unable to make posts from home. As I've earned some time off, I finish work at lunchtime today and don't even think about work again for a fortnight. That means no posts from me until next year. I'll have almost two full weeks at home to play with my hobbies, barring a few days in Brussels with some family for Xmas (I'm joining an Australian in Brussels for a Danish Christmas, as you do) and a day in London with a friend to see an Annie Leibowitz exhibition. Best of the season, and warm wishes to all.

Daring to weave with handspun

2008-12-18T13:09:00.000Z

I made some lovely hand-spun and dyed silk cap and merino yarn, years ago. I thought it was pretty, but could never decide what to do with it. I knitted some of it into a babys beanie for a friend, but the rest sat there, waiting for inspiration. I wanted to weave with it, but didn't dare try to use it for a warp and didn't want to make a project using it in the weft.

Over the last few months, the idea of using this in the warp has been germinating. I've seen several examples where people have used handspun in the warp, so I decided to risk it. After all, if I can weave with delicate threads like 10/1 linen, surely plied handspun can't be too much more delicate?

The other thing that's been inspiring me is a discussion Meg initiated on layers. It's been playing in the back of my head. I'm endlessly fascinated by the different ways that cloth can interact, and have been mentally toying more and more with the idea of upping the level of complexity in my weaving.

And so, onto the loom went a warp of the silk and merino handspun. Olive green merino plied with itself on the borders, the same merino plied with the space-dyed silk cap inthe centre.

I didn't really want a twill, and I wanted to play down the barber-stripe effect from the plying, so for the weft, I chose more space-dyed and spun silk cap, in slightly different but complementary colours in similar hue. For the record, I chose the brown-and-green silk cap in the second photo in this post.

The project was starting to call itself "Moss on oak", so I created a draft which suggested the rough texture of bark.

I threaded the heddles in a crackle threading, but wove a twill tie-up and treadling. The end result is a mostly almost-plain-weave fabric, with thin lines of undulating twill which roughen the texture to the eye but soften it to the feel.

I beat lightly to allow the wexture of the facric to be slightly open on the loom, although this was much less evident after fulling. I surprised myself by having only one warp breakage during the weaving, on a particularly thing piece of merino. The slightly slubby nature of the handspun silk, along with the twill lines, is even more suggestive of the northern side of a tree trunk:

The fabric itself is soft and fine yet plush; light yet very warm. The piece is complex enough to find something new every time you look at it. Overall, I think this is the best scarf I've made yet. However as it contains the first silk cap I ever spun, I think it has to become mine!

More dishtowels

2008-12-18T10:20:00.001Z

While making the warp for the 'Autumn leaves' dishtowel for the festive towel exchange, I naturally beamed enough warp for five towels. These were woven qutie quickly, but it was only a couple of evenings ago that I got around to hemming them.

After making one towel in honeycomb for the FTE, I wove a second towel in honeycomb and then started casting around for other ways I could use a honeycomb threading to make different, interesting towels. Lo, I found an article in the Best of Handweavers' "Fabrics that go bump", showing three different towels on a honeycomb threading. So I tried them out. These are the results:

From top to bottom, star pattern woven in check, honeycomb woven in mostly brown with green and cream stripes at each end, and two towels in a 'circle' structure, woven in sage green. I enjoyed playing with these structures, and particularly like the circle-structure towels. I suspect I'll give one as a gift and keep the other for myself.

Interestingly, I've found a similar experience to that of Connie Rose. For all that I've had fun making these interesting structures, the thing that pleased me the mose about these towels was the hem of plain weave at each end of the star towels. It was so much crisper and more delicate than the more textured structures. I kept coming back to fondle it.

There truly is something inherently satisfying about plain weave, well executed.

They're here!

2008-12-10T09:00:00.000Z

I may be the first person lucky enough to have received towels from the Festive towel exchange. These are Huck lace towels made by Sonja of Insanity Looms in a lovely mercerised cotton, and are called "Chantilly Cream" and "Devonshire Cream". Sonja was even kind enough to provide a swatch of the cotton in case I wanted to embroider the centre of one.

Thank you so much Sonja, these are exquisite and they're going to be treasured. I can picture them lining a tea tray, or a basket of freshly baked breads.

Two blankets, one warp

2008-12-08T12:46:00.000Z

These are the baby blankets made from the thick cotton warp I used, the first time I properly sectionally beamed. The two were woven on the same warp with the same threading, but with different tie-ups and treadlings. To give you a sense of scale, they're hanging over a rocking chair and the blocks are not quite 2" square.

The first was woven in a 5-end huck lace, to give a very large, slightly open, lacy structure, but yet one which remains stable. Here's a close-up of the weave structure.

The second blanket was woven on the same huck lace threading, but with a twill tie-up and straight treadling, giving a block twill structure - just for something different!

I'd had to sample twice, so I was running out of warp for this one before I thought it had reached a decent size - hence the insistence on getting every last possible centimetre out of the warp! Pre-washing, this one is about 1m x 80-ish cm, the huck blanket is a more reasonable 1m x 1.3 m.

Because these were woven at 8epi in 2/2 cotton, they're substantial, chunky blankets. I didn't enjoy working at 8epi at first, because I'm so used to finer thread. I wish I could say that these were fast weaves, but getting the weft in the right place for the slevedges took great care and attention, so I had to concentrate with every pick. I'm pleased with the outcome though. After trying to decide how to finish these, I settled for machine-stitching the loose ends and blanket stitching the hems, because the fabric will be too thick to fold. The huck blanket is done this
way and I'll do the twill blanket tonight. Then it's measuring and wet finishing, and they're done!

Goodies

2008-12-08T09:20:00.001Z

I spent the entirety of last week in bed sleeping off a virus, but managed to drag myself out of bed on Saturday to go to the last meeting of the year for the local spinner's group with Ota. One thing I've really missed since moving here is the camaraderie and inspiration of the spinning group I had in Sydney (waves at Celia), so I'm really enjoying the few hours in a village hall with like-minded people. I think they even forgive me for being a weaver and not a knitter.

I managed to spin quite a bit more of the red-brown alpaca I've been spinning for some time (it's almost done now). But the main appeal this past weekend was to see some scarves the group had been been making for some time: each person got some blue-faced leicester wool and spun it, then it was given to someone else to dye, and then to someone else to make into a scarf. The person who spun the wool then got the scarf back. It was truly fascinating to see how the people solved the various problems of dyeing and making a finished garment from something they hadn't designed from scratch, and there were some truly beautiful garments there.

In addition to this delight, P&M Woolcraft had come along to the meeting, bringing a large part of their shop with them. I'd feared that I'd indulge in retail therapy and I did, although largely I restricted myself to items I went along knowing I wanted to buy. I really had to restrain myself when it came to purchasing fibre: I rarely buy top, and when I do it tends to be white so I can dye it the colours I want. I know that blended and pre-dyed top is something I'd enjoy spinning but probably wouldn't find a use for, and yet I really had to stop myself from buying the colours!!! All the pretty colours! My eyes kept following them across the room.

Here, however, is the swag:

Clockwise, from lower left: two more Majacraft bobbins for my Little Gem, because although I already have 4 (o0r 6?), you can never have too many if you spin lots of silk cap. It's sticky enough that it's best stored on the bobbin until ready to use. A cold-water, fibre-reactive dye kit for dyeing cotton, because I've only ever used acid dyes and wanted to try FR, a Glimakra boat shuttle to try because I've wanted a larger boat shuttle for some time, 15 cm quills for the new shuttle and 13 cm quills for my Dryad boat shuttles, 100g of blue-faced Leicester top to try spinning because although I've woven with it and love it I've not spinned it, 50 g of blue, turquoise and burgundy top to satisfy the colour fetish, 100g of bamboo because sometimes it's fun to play, a back-issue of Handowoven which illustrates how to drape a jacket on a dummy form (I want to think about making my own clothing from handwovens), and in the middle, a tiny bit of baby camel and silk top.

The camel and silk top was the most expensive part of my purchase, as I bought half a kilo of it. But it's crying out to be a drapey tunic top, and it's so stunningly soft, luxurious and delicate in colour it had to be had:

I can barely wait to start playing with it.

Nearing the end

2008-12-01T09:24:00.000Z

You can see in this photo the three sections where the guide yarn jumped off the yarn counter and I gave the beam an extra turn of warp, just to be safe. I'm very fortunate to have made the right decision about whether to give another turn or not, all three times! Better a foot of loom waste on an end or two than to lose a foot of warp...

I finally took those knots all the way to the back of the heddles - there was no physical way I was going to be able to get even so much as another shot out of that warp. But what I did get, from a 4ish-metre warp, was two samples and two baby's blankets, one in a 5-end huck, the other slightly smaller and in a block twill. One of these days I'll have the right light to actually take photos of them.

You can see the next project(s) lining up on the rather-messy work table. I cut this blanket off on Saturday and my loom is currently naked - a highly unusual state of affairs.

Beaming a sectional warp....properly this time.

2008-11-25T08:13:00.001Z

I've just had a lovely three-day weekend in front of the loom. 11-hour days and a pulled shoulder muscle had taken their toll, and by Thursday of last week my body demanded to not spend time working in front of a computer. No problem. I work on a flexi-time system, and I'm about four days up at the moment, so I took Friday off. Shoulder hates sitting at a computer, but shoulder loves weaving - go figure.

Friday was spent weaving off the last of the dishcloth warp, and then in the afternoon I set myself to beaming on a warp using the sectional beam and the tension box, for the first time. As luck would have it, my next project was a baby blanket I've been commissioned to make by a friend whose sister is due to deliver a little boy in February. The cotton I ordered for it is quite chunky - 12 wpi, the most coarse yarn I've ever woven with.

The first challenge was to get the yarn into a form that I could wind off. I've taken the challenge of beaming sectionally without a spool rack, directly from cones. First the yarn had to be split onto the right number of cones cones. I needed 8epi therefore 8 cones for each section, and I had ordered four cones of each of the two colours for the blanket. Using the cone winder attachment I've developed after seeing Curiousweaver's approach and the yarn counter on the tension box, I wound the correct amount of yarn onto cones. In this case, for each of 17 sections, I needed 4 metres of yarn = 68 metres on each cone. Add 5% for differing tensions. Knowing from experimentation that 8 rotations on the yarn counter on the Glimakra tension box equals a metre, I wound on 560 counts or yarn onto four cones. They weren't pretty because of a few teething errors with the cone winding attachment, but they worked.

I have found that a problem with doing papier-mache with PVA glue in winter is that it takes forever to dry. I made the attachment weeks and weeks ago and the centre is still mushy and a bit glue-like. In addition to that, the PVA has done a poor job of sticking to the plastic sticky tape around the central quill. To fix that, I'm going to try a judicious application of a different glue - something faster-curing and harder, like super glue.

The next step was to rig up something that would allow the yarn to come directly up from the cones. I'm lucky in that I have a large bookcase behind where I sit on the loom bench. I achieved an in-situ cone rack for the grand sum of 88p, with a piece of scrap decking timber, a few small eyelet hooks, and a couple of books to weight the wood down and balance it from the front of the bookcase.

No problems there whatsoever. The cones unwound as they should, none of the yarns tangled, and all went smoothly. I'd call this approach a success and a keeper. I can add more pieces of wood and eyelets along the bookcase as required for finer threads.

Running the yarns through the centre of the loom, I threaded the tension box. I put yarns through the first reed widely spaced to keep them seperate, over under and over the round dowel tension rods, and into the second reed, at 10 epi. I beamed at 10epi despite wanting a set of 8 epi, because 10 epi gave me an even spread in the sections.

I spent ages trying to figure out how to space the threads. The draft for this project was a 5-end huck lace, giving blocks 2 inches wide, with 15 threads per block. It's easy enough to sley because the yarn wanted to sley at 8epi anyway, so each block would be slightly less than 2 inches. But how to divide 15 thread between two sections when beaming? I mulled over this in the back of my head for days before I realised that I didn't have to beam at 8 ends per section in every section. I could alternate sections of 8 ends with sections of 7 ends, to give 15 ends per block. So this is what I did, beaming all of the 8eps blue sections, then all the 7 eps blue sections, and repeating for the yellow. My only defense here is that the long days I've been working lately involve making sure that lots of numbers are in the right place and fitting a pattern, and I clearly need to turn that part of my brain off when I get home!

As each section was wound on to the right length, I'd cut the warp yarns and tape them flat into place. When the time came to thread the heddles, I hung a pair of lease sticks from the castle (one would have been enough but they were tied together), wound the warp beam on a little and then, one by one, untaped the yarn packages from the warp beam, pulled them forward and taped them onto the lease sticks, so that they were reachable from the front of the loom. I didn't make a cross as the tape kept the ends in order. In the photo below, you can see some packets of yarn threaded on the right, and the next packets still taped to the lease sticks on the left. You can also see a dining chair in the background of this photo. To thread the heddles, I remove the beater and breast beam, and sit on a low chair in the loom.

And from the front of the loom, you can see how easy it is to select each end from the tape as threading continues:

Admittedly this is the coarsest yarn I've ever worked with, so threading and sleying were faster than they normally are, but I had the whole warp beamed, threaded, sleyed and laced on at the correct tension in a single evening - perhaps 4-5 hour's work. It used to take me a day and a half.

I'm so pleased I bought the sectional warp beam!

As a final photo, a half-hearted attempt at snow at my house on Sunday. Nothing like Cally's!

Open studios reprised

2008-11-20T08:21:00.001Z

I've been putting a lot more thought into the Open Studios question, and I've decided to go for it.

There's a seminar to attend in January and I can join then. I'll almost certainly do so, and I'll go for opening for two weekends this coming July. I've been speaking to a couple of local painters I know, who have participated for many years. They say that if you're in a village rather than in town (as I am), visitor numbers are much smaller and don't necessarily translate into sales. Cambridge is a slightly unique place as it is dominated by the bike. Many academics (the main target audience of Open Studios) in Cambridge live in town and don't own vehicles. You don't need one in Cambridge. I fully understand this, as I've been one of them - I haven't owned a car in the three years I've lived here. That does, however, mean that the 9 miles to my house is a long way to cycle.

The people I've spoken to say that the main advantage of Open Studios is the networking and the increased exposure to other exhibition opportunities, and that has to be a bonus.

Weaving plans last weekend experienced another setback, as other jobs presented themselves. It wasn't a total loss, as it meant that my loft got 300mm of insulation (a huge yay as it's predicted to turn cold and snow this weekend), and my storm gutters were cleaned of the moss and many willow leaves they contained. I did manage to weave 2.5 dishtowels (the nuclear family of dishtowels), and will finish that warp tonight or tomorrow. Then it's on to another baby blanket before I can go back to playing with silk.

One advantage of the baby blanket is that I can play with warping the sectional beam using the tension box with not-fine threads.

The almost-instant pincushion

2008-11-14T11:16:00.000Z

The past year has been very busy for me. In fact, I refer to the just-passed summer as "The summer that work ate". That's remained true of late. Mostly because, on top of having been very busy finishing a finite-term project I'm leading at work, I appear to have had my entire year's worth of social life in the last two weeks - something on every day and night. That's meant that my loom and I have been nothing more than nodding acquaintances in that time.

So, in the absence of any real accomplishment in the last couple of weeks, I thought I'd put up pictures of a little pincushion I threw together a few weeks ago. One of the things that didn't make it out from Australia was my old pincushion, which had been made from the first cross-stitch I'd ever made. So I thought I'd take the same approach. I have a lot of cross-stitch finished items that I've never done anything with, so I took one of those and married it to some of the fabric left-over from the green and beige baby blanket run.

Turned right-side out and stuffed, it's rough, but it's a pincushion. Pins go in and stay in it, what more does it need to be?

For those who don't recognise the significance, the two little cuties are Gumnut babies, of May Gibbs fame. May Gibbs, deciding in the 1930s that most fairy tales had a very European bias, chose to write some based on the Australian bush. All Aussie children know and love the gumnut babies. I smile every time I see them.

Just to completely round out the entirely-hand-made qualifications of this piece, the stuffing is off-cuts from my partner's blanket - another reason to make me smile when using it.

This weekend the loom and I will be back on speaking terms, if it forgives me for the neglect! I plan to finish weaving off the rest of the dishcloths on the warp currently on it, and then may have time to get another warp on. Whether that's for one of five different scarves fermenting in my head or for another baby's blanket I've been commissioned to make depends on whether the cotton for the blanket arrives in time.

Some assembly required: attaching a sectional warp beam to the Glimakra Ideal

2008-11-05T08:41:00.000Z

After getting the collapse scarves off the loom, I could work on upgrading the warp beams. There was nothing wrong with the existing warp beams, but I lusted after both a sectional warp beam and a second back beam, and I was able to indulge myself. It had taken some researching and effort to find a supplier, but I discovered that it is possible to obtain both for a 100cm Glimakra Ideal. I'd gone as far as contacting Glimakra directly to deal with them, but at literally the last minute Fibrecrafts UK came in with a quote cheaper than ordering directly from Glimakra - the difference in paying UK VAT and Swedish VAT.

The sectional warp beam kit consists of a number of pre-drilled wooden planks, and a whole lot of metal dividers to seperate the warp. That, together with a few screws, is it. It doesn't look like a lot for the money you pay, but I had made the decision that I like what Glimakra stand for, and that it was worth paying the money to support them and to keep my loom standard.

The dividers are simply thin metal rods, bent so that they're slightly longer on one side than the other:

These are placed into the slots on the beams long end first then short end sqeezed into the other side, and hammered in. I did this with a scrap of wood and a wooden mallet, to reduce the impact on the dividers. I laid the wood over the dividers already in, to keep them all about the same length. Resist the temptation to only hammer them in a little, you're going to have to hammer them in about 1/3 of their length for them to clear the back beam. I also did this on the carpet of the living room, to reduce the impact on the wooden floors of my studio.

The first few in, an awful lot more to go:

Here's the four wooden dividers, screwed to the warp beam. Normally, if you just buy a sectional warp beam kit, you'd be screwing this to your existing back beam. In my case, I'd also bought a second back beam kit and because the existing back beam is perfectly functional with a cloth apron and I wanted to keep that intact, I chose to screw the sectional warp kit to the new back beam. You can buy sectional warp beams with 1" or 2" divisions. I work a lot with fine threads and wanted increased design opportunities, so I opted to go for 1" divisions.

You'll note in the image above that there are some dividers missing at the right side of the beam. There was a miscount when the dividers were supplied, and I found myself short by 6. I contacted Glimakra and the lovely people there were most apologetic, and had the extra dividers in my mailbox within a few days. The other thing to note in the image above is the holes in the warp beam for the cloth apron. Because the beam is octagonal, there is a right way and a wrong way to attach the sectional planks, if you wish to retain use of those drill holes. The right way is offset from the as you see above. There are no holes drilled in the warp beam for attaching the sectional planks. You could drill them, but because the screws are self-tapping, I found this unneccesary.

Next came disassembly of the loom. Most people won't have to pull it apart too much to get the warp beam out (in fact in theory it's possible to attach the sectional warp planks to the back beam while it's still on the loom), but because I wanted to remove the existing warp beam and replace it with the new one, I had to disassemble the ratchet side of the loom. After removing the old back beam, I could insert the new sectional beam.

All that was then left to do was to replace the back breast beam, handle and chocks. You can certainly see in this picture where the pawl for the ratchet normally sits!

Finally, it was necessary to sit behind the loom and gently rotate the sectional warp beam, marking any dividers that were too tall to clear the back breast beam, and hammer them down to a suitable height. I had been very conservative with my hammering at the earlier stage, wanting to maximise the amount of depth I could roll a warp, which meant that I spent a log time hammering at this stage to get all of the dividers even and to the correct depth.

And it's as simple as that! The honeycomb dishcloths was the first warp I've put on the sectional warp beam, although I did that by hand rather than using the tension box. I found that the back breast beam was slightly too wide for the tension box, so I wound each 1" bout of warp individually on my warping mill and ran each one onto the beam, tensioning by hand over the castle as I went. It worked.

Another time, I'll post about using the tension box and also attaching the second back beam to the loom. Fitting the second back beam to the Ideal is not as simple as the sectional warp beam, because I've discovered that there isn't quite enough real estate for it to bolt on as designed - and there also isn't enough real estate for the second back breast beam and the tension box to all fit on at once either. There will be some retrofitting to be done.

Join the festive towel exchange

2008-10-29T11:15:00.001Z

Meg has done a stirling job of organising another virtual exhibition, this one combined with a towel exchange. It's just opened, and it's not too late to join in!

The exhibition is opened here.

Have a look at the lovely towels here.

And if you'd like to join in, the details are here!

Collapse scarves

2008-10-29T09:18:00.001Z

After working on teatowel fabric, the babys blankets and C's blanket for so many months, I wanted to get back to my main interest, fine weaving. I'd dyed some 30/2 silk and silk caps way back here and it had been sitting on an old French reel in the window of my studio for months, taunting me to do something with it. The 30/2 silk, I had space-dyed in three shades of green: an avocado green, a yellow variant of it, and a blue variant of it. At the same time I dyed two silk caps in two shades of sandy yellow-brown, and two more in the same greens as the warp.

I had enough silk for 4 m of warp 14 inches wide at 30epi. I wound up a warp, and bearing in mind that I've had a problem of my warps being narrower on the beam than in the reed, I spread this out in the raddle at 20epi and beamed it on at that rate. Oddly, that gave me a wap spread perfectly on the beam for 30epi. I have no idea why, but it works.

I wanted to try a crammed-and-spaced approach, as described in Sharon Alderman's book, to get a softly waving, almost pleated structure. This is something that works best in 'grabby' fabrics like wool, but I wanted to try it in silk. I had just enough warp for two scarves but no scope for sampling, so the first scarf was going to be the sample - a brave approach when you have so much expensive silk on the loom!

Crammed and spaced is where the warp is not sleyed in the reed evenly, but at a different rate across the warp. There are no hard and fast rules about how to do this, but it's a good idea to have the overall sett roughly eqivalent to a twill sett. In this case, with a recommended overall sett of 30epi (3 ends per dent in a 10-dent reed), I chose a rate that would take me from double sett to nothing at all. I'd threaded the heddles in changing twill arrangements, in blocks of 32 ends each, so I wanted each change of sett to add up to 32 threads. So after doing some calculations I centered the sett around the pattern, and from the centre sleyed 6-5-5-4-3-3-2-2-1-1, with one empty dent between each block. Note that there's only one set of 6 ends per dent because the next block starts with 6epd immediately next to it, and only one dent with 4 epd, to make up the numbers. I did a little bit of jiggery-pokery with the numbers at each side to make sure the last dent was set at 3epd, and laid a doubled floating selvedge beside that.

After so long working in all that heavy cotton and wool, I'd forgotten hownice it is to work with silk. So luxurious, with such a nice hand feel. Below is the warp, sleyed in the reed, laced on and with a header for spacing. You can see the changing rate of sleying.

I wove the first scarf in the spun yellow silk cap, spun until it was overtwisted. This yielded a slightly harsher-feeling fabric than the silk warp on its own. The collapse when it first came off the loom was somewhat alarming and unnatractive, but after a wash and press I've ended up with an interesting, slightly undulating fabric with a lovely contrast between the green, warp-dominated areas and the slightly wonky yellow weft-dominated areas.

For the second scarf I'd thought to use the same overtwisted yellow silk, but I wove a header of green, spun but not overtwisted, silk cap - the same green as the warp - intending that to be just the end of the scarf, with the body of the scarf in the yellow. I hadn't expected the green to have much drama at all, but I was completely unprepared for just how gorgeous a structure the broken twill gave the almost-monochrome (remember there's some slight variegation in both the warp and weft). I immediately unwove the small area of yellow I'd put in, and wove the whole scarf in the green.

Here, hanging over the doorway, is the washed and pressed but not finished yellow and silk scarf, and the unwashed green scarf. From 14" in the reed, the green scarf is 14" off the loom, and the green and yellow is a little under 10" wide after shrinkage.

The feel of the scarves is quite different, solely due to the overspinning of the yellow silk cap, although admittedly the green scarf still has to be washed. The green scarf is significantly softer than the green and yellow (in fact I'm completely unable to resist fondling the green every time I walk past it), but is a flat fabric. The yellow is still soft, although with a the rougher feel of raw silk, but has the most interesting drape to it in the spare warp parts. This is really encouraged me, and I'm planning to explore this technique more, with a wool or cashmere warp and an overspun silk weft.

Finally, a close-up of the green scarf, showing the interest of the weave structure. The slight gaps in the wide warp-dominant areas are due to slippage while winding on around the breast beam, and disappear during washing.

The festive towel exchange

2008-10-29T08:24:00.001Z

These are my entries for the festive towel exchange. Mine are more neutral than festive, but there you go.

The first is the "Chocolate makes everything better" towel.

This is woven in 8/2 cotton, in brown and beige stripes, from a draft of my own design. It's a thick, sturdy, thirsty towel, designed for drying up the festive meal dishes.

A close-up of the weave structure:

The second towel is called "Autumn leaves". This is a honeycomb dishcloth, woven in stripes of rose-brown, soft olive green and pale beige organic Foxfibre 10/2 cotton. The dominant colour of the towel is the brown, with the green and olive as highlights. The photo below shows the natural colours; the next two are a little yellow because they were taken in artificial light.

This was my first foray into honeycomb. I've been wanting to use the finer Foxfibres in my stash for some time now, and honeycomb seemed the obvious choice. I enjoyed the exploration - I've been developing an interestin 3-D weaving lately!

How to use an autodenter

2008-10-27T09:39:00.000Z

With my recent spending splurge, I had the opportunity to pick up an autodenter at a discount. I've always been curious about how these worked, so I decided to try it. Wow. What an ingenious piece of equipment. Truly a labour-saving device. The point of an autodenter is that you never need take the denter out of the reed, meaning it becomes much, much harder to miss a dent when sleying the reed. I learned a few things in teaching myself how to use this, so I thought I'd share the tips.

In this example, I'm sleying a 10-dent reed, 2 ends per dent, with 10/2 cotton which is in a straight threading. In addition to this, I always sley in both directions from the centre of the reed. This is for two reasons - the shafts on my loom have threads in the centre which stop the hedlles from moving past them so I have to thread that way, and it also saves me from having to figure out where in the reed to start.

I've found it's best to have the reed as far forward from the heddles as you can get it. You're less likely to get yourself in a tangle if you give yourself plenty of space to work. In addition, I've found that it's best to work with the autodenter in the top half of the reed, while keeping the threads at the bottom of the reed for the same reason.

You can see in the above photo that the autodenter is bent at the top. The autodenter will be composed of a (probably wooden) handle, and three pieces of metal - two are pressed together like a pair of closed tweezers, and they hold the third piece extending beyond them. If you look closely, you'll see that the two lower pieces of metal are slightly curved to one side where they hold the long piece.

Insert the autodenter into the first dent, with the metal flap at the top pointing away from the direction in which you are sleying - in this example, I'm sleying from right to left so the flap is pointing right. If you're still not sure you have the correct orientation, take a look at the lower pieces of metal - the little curve should be in the direction you plan to move, because it's these that will pick up the dents. You can see this clearly in some of the lower photos (particularly the one with my hand in it) if you click to enlarge them.

Untie one group of ends at a time, and carefully seperate them out, laying them on top of the heddles in groups in order that they are to be sleyed through the reed. In this case, I had groups of 8 ends, which were divided into four groups of two ends each:

Select the threads you want to pull through that dent, and wp them around the hook.

Pull the hook part of the autodenter back through the reed. The 'tooth' of the autodenter should pick up the steel seperator, so that the steel of the reed runs through between the right-hand (in this case) and the main hook part of the autodenter. As the reed passes the place where the pain hook part is held, you'll hear a click. You can see, in the photo below, the metal pieces seperating to allow the dent to pass through. (Apologies for the fuzziness of the photo, it's hard to do this one-handed and take photos at the same time).

By this stage, the hook should have come through the reed, bringing the thread with it. The metal flap at the top prevents the autodenter from coming all the way through, unless you twist it to allow it to do so.

With the hand not holding the autodenter, take the thread from the hook and lay it at the bottom of the dent, below the autodenter.

Now slide the autodenter forward. The left-hand tooth should engage the metal divider this time, so that it slides between the left-hand tooth and the central hook piece of the autodenter. You shouldn't need to put too much pressure on it to accomplish this, but you may have to wiggle the autodenter slightly to ensure the dent divider goes through. Then you're in the next dent and can grab the thread as before.

If the autodenter bends like in the image below, you're putting too much pressure on it:

If you put a lot of lateral pressure on the autodenter, you risk opening the lower two metal pieces, and allowing the long, central hook to be pulled out. If this happens, just use a thin metal instrument like a reed hook to prise the lower metal pieces apart and reinsert the central piece.

If, for any reason, you have to stop sleying the reed while using the autodenter, it's simple to balance the autodenter in the top of the dent, as in the top image. If you have to remove the autodenter and start sleying at a later stage, insert he autodenter in the same dent as the previous set of threads, because pulling the autodenter backwards is what moves you on. Double-check that the threads are in the correct dents before moving on.

Open studios: worth it?

2008-10-22T09:36:00.000+01:00

So I've been thinking.

I've been toying with the idea of joining the Cambridge Open Studios scheme for a while, and I wonder whether this is the year. I feel I have my studio set up to a stage where it's a possibility, without looking an amateur. There's also the chance another local weaver (who I've not yet met, but who my neighbour across the road assures me is keen to meet me) may join me.

Open studios are held on the weekends of July each year, and there's quite a bit of money involved...by the time I join and pay to for a listing in the advert, I'd be paying £170 as well as committing myself to volunteer time. I don't know whether I could recoup that money in sales. But on the other hand, it's mostly about volunteering and meeting other artists in the area, which would make it worthwhile. I do work in a bit of a vacuum aside from the interactions on my weaving blog.

If I were to do it, would I want to commit myself to being tied to the house and having strangers traipsing through my house for four weekends in a row, or would it be better to only do one or two weekends to give myself a taster? Would I be limiting myself by only doing a weekend or two? As most of the people who have open studios are painters, would that be an advantage or disadvantage to me?

I don't have to commit myself until mid-January, which coincides with a seminar which would probably answer some of those questions. There's also a man here at work who paints and has held open studios for a number of years, so I may talk to him, although he's very busy at present. I don't know what the answer is, but it's worth mulling the idea if I want to take my weaving from expensive hobby to something slightly more serious.

I'd appreciate opinions.

Cone winding accessory development

2008-10-20T09:19:00.001+01:00

How strange: google would not let me log in all weekend at home, but it has no problem with the work computer.

Anyway, while awaiting delivery of my sectional beam I've been putting some thought into how to go about winding the bouts for the warp. I didn't particularly want to take the bobbin/rack approach that it normally used because it means yet more stuff, and seems a lot of work. But I have a lot of left-over cones from yarns I've used and recycling them appeals to me. What's more, I have a large bookcase against the wall behind where I sit to weave on the loom, and I've started to picture a set-up whereby I place cones on the floor in front of the bookcase, and run the yarn up to eyelets attached to blocks of wood, which I'll have protruding from the bookcase, weighted down by the books. Unconventional I'll grant you, but it might just work.

That left the problem of how to wind the cones. You can buy cone winders, but they're large, commercial pieces of equipment and they're expensive. Experiments proves that ball winders don't work because they're not tall enough - even the larger size. That left me looking at my bobbin winder, if I could find some way to get the bobbin winder to hold the cones. I already use a last of a sort in the form of a cardboard quill thickened slightly with packing tape, to hold on pirns as I wind them. But what to use? I thought of buying a large cork, the type used for large demi-johns in wine making, but they were too small.

Then curiousweaver posted here about a wooden last a friend had made, which enables her to wind cones on her electric bobbin winder. By sheer coincidence, I'd picked up an electric bobbin winder very cheaply the day before on Ebay, thinking that something similar could be achieved. I don't have access to a lathe until we can get space somewhere for a workshop, so I cast about for alternatives. It had to be light-weight but strong. And then it hit me. Papier-mache is light-weight and strong, especially if it's contained in a plastic cone. So I gathered my materials:

A plastic cone, a large bottle of PVA glue, a bit of packing tape, some shredded paper and a cardboard quill. The cardboard quill is probably optional, but including it gives me the option ti use either the electric bobbin winder or my hand-operated bobbin winder. This particular quill is the one I have been using to place pirns onto to use on the bobbin winder - you can see the packing tape I've used to pack it out a bit.

The first thing I did was to wind the quill with more packing tape, making sure to seal one end, to protect it from the wetness of the glue.

Then I put the PVA in a bowl, watered it down slightly, and wet some strips of newspaper with the glue.

I used these to line the plastic cone. This is difficult to do, because the wet floppy paper wants to stick to everything, but I found by folding them in half and rolling them slightly, it could be made to work.

Then I wet the shredded paper in the glue, packed the cone half-way with it, inserted the quill, and packed the rest of the cone with the paper-glue mixture. There were a few cellulose beads in there for good measure, simply because I had a lot of packing material all in one box from my recent deliveries. Once the cone was full, I made sure the quill was straight in the cone (not that it looks it in the next photo) and set it in a cardboard tube to sit up and dry.

It spent ages dripping glue out of the holes, so if I make another one I'll go with my initial impulse, which was to wrap the cone with masking tape prior to filling. I chose not to this time because I wanted to be able to wipe off any drips while they were still wet.

So how does it work? I'm afraid I have no idea yet - I made this 36 hours or so ago and it's still curing. This would probably be best made in layers, allowing each to dry, but this is a protype. I'll let you know.

So many posibilities

2008-10-16T08:56:00.001+01:00

My recent spending splurge came home to roost last night. I spent three hours running around, collecting eight parcels from couriers (it would have been two hours, but I had to go back to one courier because one of the boxes they gave me wasn't mine).

There now sit in my house, half-unpacked, the sectional warp beam kit, tensioning box and second back beam from Glimakra, a second-hand electric bobbin winder which I picked up cheaply on Ebay and hope to try winding cones with; and a knitting machine, ribber and table, which I intend experimenting with - I live in jeans and knit tops, and at £60 a pop in the shops for a nice plain knit top I've been considering making my own for a while now. I confidently expect delivery of a drum carder in the near future as well.

My goodness. Where to start.....? Finishing my busy working week is probably a good place.

The blanket: done, and already on its way

2008-10-13T09:17:00.000+01:00

I finished the blanket on time, last week. Fulling it took two washes. Because the warp thread was oiled (probably intended for machine knitting), I washed it once with soap in 40C water. Little change. The second time, I did my normal wash at 40C using the Eco Balls I normally use instead of soap. The added agitation of the Eco Balls did the trick, and the blanket fulled nicely. The image above shows the blanket itself with some left-over fabric from assembling the panels, which is unwashed.

This photo is a close-up of the unwashed fabric on the top, and the washed blanket below. You can see, if you click on the larger photo, that the pattern has become more muted and integral to the fabric of the blanket. It's less obvious in the areas with pale weft, and more obvious in the areas with darker weft. The contrast pleases me. The reverse side (visible below) is equally attractive. I think, with a satin border, the blanket could be reversable.

I sewed the joining seams of the panels by hand, but when it came to the hems, I sewed them with my sewing machine, using an "invisible" hem stitch. It gives a visible stitch on the wrong side, but if done carefully, can't be seen on the right side. The photo above shows the two types of seams; the joining seam done by hand and the machine stitched hem. I'm pleased with the way fulling and shrinking has improved the flatness of the joining seam. The hems, because they were sewn with cotton thread, didn't shrink quite as much as the rest of the blanket, but I'm still undecided whether I'd sew before or after fulling with the next one.

In the end, the blanket came out to be not quite a double-sized blanket. It's a bit wider than a normal single, but only just covers my tiny double bed. Unfortunately in the rush to be prepared for C's departure, I didn't remember to measure it after washing!

There are a few things I'd change if making a blanket next time, although those things may be the things that give this the charm of a hand-made item: I'd try to get the variegations more evenly spread throughout the blanket if I were making a variegated blanket again, and I'd reconsider how I went about hemming it (although I think that the hemming was a success). I've enjoyed doing this, and I'm certainly happy enough that I'm considering making a four-panel blanket in beige and chocolate brown, to go on the bed. Possibly even in a braided weave again.

And here it is, packed and in C's bag ready to go. This photo is actually a work of fiction, because after I took this he brought his skis home and we decided that it was the perfect thing to wrap around his skis for the trip down. The blanket and skis are now in Punta Arenas, awaiting the first plane for parts further south. I won't see it, or C, for the next six months. But I have a lot of projects to keep me busy during that time!

Dilemma

2008-09-30T09:21:00.001+01:00

(Please excuse the crappy image quality, I took this with my camera phone just as I was about to leave for work.)

I sewed the first of the two seams together last night. On the right is the third panel of fabric, just sitting on the blanket, on the left is the seam I sewed, which hasnot yet been pressed. It took me hours to sew 2.5 m of "invisible" seam by hand (I'll never make the seam truly invisible in a fabric as highly patterned as this). I was very careful to ensure that the patterns of the braided twill matched up across the seam, even in places where the beat wasn't precisely even. I finished right on bedtime, so decided to leave it until tomorrow to do the next one. And then I had a flap.

My partner has a 30 kg luggage allowance for the flight into the base, and this blanket is going to weigh several kilos. It was much too late in the year to ship it down, and the ship won't get in for a full six weeks after he gets there anyway. The blanket has to be large enough to wrap around a full-sized, 6'1" male and not fall off the side of a single bunk. Conversely, it's going over a single bunk and has to be carried down - so I don't want it too large.

The first two panels together just covered the top of my small, antique double bed. Was that the place to stop, considering I haven't washed this yet so shrinkage has to be considered? I slept on it.

With a fresh mind this morning, I pulled out the tape measure. Each panel, 33" in the reed, has come down to 30" wide off the loom. I cut them to 2.6 m (110") long, considering the sheer height of said recipient. A typical single blanket measures 66 x 90" and a double 80 x 90". Three panels, sewn together and hemmed, will measure 90 x 100ish", before washing, with an estimated 10% shrinkage based on the samples.

So I'll be sewing that second seam tonight.

The good news? 8.5 m of fabric, and not one dropped or broken thread, missed warp or other error. Despite the tangles getting this warp on the loom, the tension remained even through the whole weaving. Also, I'm also very pleased with the way the variegations in colour have been carrying across the seams.

2008-09-29T09:27:00.001+01:00

I finished the fabric for the blanket yesterday, and solved a mystery.

When I bought my loom, it came with a couple of wooden blocks to fit a beam on. The then current owner wasn't sure what they were for, although later I found some holes in the loom for the blocks. They were to allow the cloth beam to be moved forward. I wasn't sure why someone would want to do that, unless they were weaving something really bulky. Yesterday, with 9 metres of blanket fabric on the loom, I noticed this:

The fabic is actually pushing the lower lamms out of the way. Mystery solved. If I decide to make another blanket, or particularly when I get around to making the long-planned hall runner project, moving the cloth beam forward would be a desirable thing. Clearly Glimakra Ideals were not designed with lots of bulky cloth on the cloth beam in mind.

I'm so pleased I got a move on with the blanket the other weekend, because late last week my partner was told that he was going to have to go in a month early. He leaves in less than two weeks, for six months south. I'm determined that this blanket is going with him, and that finishing it won't cut into our time together. So I wove and wove and finished all of the fabric this weekend, and made a bit of a start on the joining last night. That really means I only have another couple of evenings to do the finishing.

Tonight: sewing the panels of the blanket together. Hopefully the hems tomorrow.

A windfall, and a tribute

2008-09-25T10:26:00.000+01:00

These two boxes arrived in the mail a day or two ago, and I spent a half-hour or so last night unpacking and sorting them. There is 10kg of yarn there (foot-long metal ruler for scale). I won them as a job lot on Ebay, for what was a criminally small amount of money considering the contents - there's a great deal of 60/2 and 140/2 silk in there, and the one cone of orange 60/2 silk on top repays almost half of what I paid on its own.

It's clear from the rest of the listings that this was a man who was clearing out a lady's (I'm going to presume his mother's) weaving room, because for whatever reason she was unable to use it any longer. I asked no questions of course, that would be unduly familiar. But the contents of the box....there are some real treasures in there. There's a good kilo or so of natural-coloured 60/2 silk, half a kilo of 140/2 silk, a lot of tail ends of dyed silk left over from projects which will undoubtedly make an interesting rainbow project at some time. A bit of tussah silk, silk noil, 60/2 cotton, mohair, wool boucle...the list goes on. There's quite a bit of monofilament which suggests the lady did shibori, and it may or may not be the dissolving variety. Various other adventurous yarns. I was so inspired just by unpacking all of this, imagining what she would have done with it, and impressed by the sheer variety of projects they suggested and obvious skill she possessed.

So, Mrs Ashley, wherever you are: you were clearly an accomplished weaver of superior talent. I'm inspired by your skill, and truly appreciate the treasure I've inherited from you.

Coming along...

2008-09-24T14:50:00.000+01:00

Five metres done, and a weekend to myself coming up so I ought to possibly even finish the weaving this weekend. I'm reluectant to say so with so much to go, but it's all gone remarkably smoothly so far - especially considering that the warp is somewhat sticky. I'm pleased with the way it's turning out so far - the colours make it look quite antique.

No chance I'm going to get any more done this week though - the old "busy job" phenomenon.

There's nothing like finality, part 2.

2008-09-15T09:26:00.000+01:00

I finally got around to hanging an art piece that's been ready to go on my wall for months. This started life as a sample scarf, using an overshot draft to weave hand-dyed and hand-spun silk cap into 60/2 silk. I'd wanted to see what difference 60/2 silk would make compared to the 20nm-ish rayon I'd been using (I know it sounds a travesty to weave silk cap into rayon, but I have a lot of it and it gives such a lovely hand). The answer was that while one silk cap was more than enough for a scarf woven into the rayon, the increased number of ppi allowed by the 60/2 silk meant that this "scarf", at 1.2m long (if I recall correctly), was just a little too short to be a proper scarf. You could wear it as a scarf, but being much shorter than my preferred 1.8m it wasn't going to feel right. It was still a lovely piece however, so I decided that it ought to be the first piece I've made, to go on my wall. So I sewed it around a dowel and it's stayed dangling from the mantle of the fireplace for ages, because the hacksaw is hidden somewhere in a very full tool shed that I didn't organise. Far too full for me to want to rummage through, looking for one.

It was a stunningly beautiful autumn day yesterday so I spent the day working in the garden. Because he had the saw out, my partner offered to cut the dowel for the scarf. So when I came inside, I found this lovely little scroll sitting on the loom:

From there, hanging it was as simple as tying some invisible sewing thread around the dowel and draping it over the doorbell chime so the scarf appears to be hanging in mid-air. No need for even so much as a nail. This is now hanging on the patch of wall that faces the front door. It's now going to be the first thing that greets anyone who enters the house.

Job done. Now it just needs a really good press...but that's a job for another time.

Blanket making

2008-09-11T13:01:00.000+01:00

My partner has asked me to make him a blanket for his field season. That is what the wool dyeing in my previous post is for.

The warp for this blanket is a creamy-beige wool of unknown provenance, which I picked up on Ebay. I've made a 9m warp, 33 inches wide, sleyed at 16epi. For the weft, I've dyed a whole pile of sport-weight bluefaced leicester wool, to a soft coral-brick-red colour with a few slightly darker patches. I'd originally planned to make this blanket using krokbragd, but my partner saw and fell in love with a braided twill draft. Braided twill is something I've long wanted to use to make something, so I was keen to play!

Obviously a job this big is something you want to sample. So I spent last weekend finishing the threading and sleying, tensioned the warp, and started weaving a sample.

Braided twill is such a pretty draft. It looks much more complex than it is - but it's a lovely, robust weave structure for a blanket.

In sampling, I found a threading error. It's rare for me to make a threading error. I'm quite careful in threading, pulling only enough heddles and ends for each block of the threading plan. In this case, I'd put one end on shaft three when it ought to have been on shaft two. As this was just a sample, I decided to continue weaving and correct the error when I cut the sample off. In the meantime, to mark it I tied a scrap of wool around the offending warp thread.

Once the sample was cut off, I cut it into three equally-sized pieces. I kept one off the loom for control (the bottom piece of cloth, with the yellow header attached in the below photo), handwashed one (the topmost piece of cloth), and tossed the third into the washing machine at 40C with the rest of my laundry (that's the one in the centre of the image, with the beige face to the camera). I estimate that there was roughly 5% shrinkage on the hadnwashed sample, and about 10% shrinkage on the machine washed sample. The wool fulled nicely and felted only slightly, which is a result - the blanket can be machine washed! That's very important when you're on base. The last thing you want to do is to hand-wash a heavy woolen blanket.

You can see that there's a treadling error in there that I also deliberately ignored, as this was just for the sample. The treadling for this draft is nice and rhythmic. 1-odd number-2-even number-1-odd number, with the odd numbers and even numbers going from 3 up to 9 and back to 4. It makes for a good rhythm, so long as you remember where you are!

I've not done much on this during the week this week, as it's been a very busy week (both daytime and evening social obligations) work-wise as everyone passes through on their way into the field season. But that's OK, I have 5-6 weeks in which to make this blanket. So I decided to work on the next project on Sunday and Monday evenings instead. The next project will be a cople of silk scarves and I want to try to make the first a collapse structure, so I've been overspinning some dyed silk cap I'd already spun. I accomplish this by setting my spinning wheel to the appropriate tension, having the spun silk cap to hand on a lazy kate, and simlpy letting the yarn take a right-angle around my finger to control the rate of take-up and twist. Otherwise my feet are doing the rest of the work: if the spinning wheel is set up to the correct tension, the yarn will be pulled off the bobbin at the correct rate to add spin. Very little thought is required, beyond periodically checking to ensure the correct amount of overtwist is being added.

All of which makes it the ideal occupation to do while sitting on the couch in front of BBC's The Planets, sipping a glass of red wine! It can be a relaxing hobby....

Dying

2008-09-10T12:58:00.001+01:00

I had fun dying three kilos of Blue-faced Leicester wool a few weeks ago:

I was even given a fabulous old laundry copper to do it in! (It's just a pity I was unkempt from having spent all day in the garden while the photos were being taken!) The colours made me very happy as they swirled around in the pot:

The general idea was to end up with a slightly faded, orangey, salmony brick-red colour, with the occasional darker spot. I think I managed that.

These are destined to become the blanket for my partner. This blanket has evolved somewhat from the original idea of Krokbragd, as he saw and fell in love with a braided twill draft. I've wound warp on (that's the beige wool warp in the previous post), sampled it and am now roughly two feet into the blanket fabric. I'll post about that another time.

2008-09-09T09:58:00.000+01:00

Sometimes the most unusual household objects come in handy when weaving. What you see here is an Aboriginal artwork, a carved and decorated branch in the shape of a goanna. I brought him with me when I moved and he lives in my studio. My most recent draft (a braided twill) is very heavy on using shafts one and two, so I had to move some heddles around. The little goanna's wooden legs made him the best thing ever to take the weight off the shafts while the moving operation was underway!

There's nothing like finality to make one's day.

2008-08-28T09:50:00.000+01:00

I finally got around to finishing off the babys blankets last night.

Considering they've been sitting around in the torture room for long enough for me to warp up and weave an entire 4m warp of tea towels and associated samples and to start warping up the blanket (of which more another time), it's scandalous that I couldn't find the leisure to cut up and sew the fabric. There's nothing like a dealine however. Another colleague has her last day of work tomorrow before going on maternity leave, so last night and the night before I cut apart and hemmed all four blankets (making five in total that I got from the warp). I brought them in to work this morning, and I've already managed to give two of them away. The recipients are delighted.

Here are three of them, stacked in my office.

After much internal debate, I chose to give these a simple plain hem. I'd considered trying to edge these with ribbon, or trying an invisible hem on them, but the intention is for these to be robust working items, and I wanted them to be as simple and sturdy as possible. There's no way these are coming apart. I'm pleased with them, especially as they've turned out so soft: and they'll only get softer with time.

They come with their own special care instructions.

I have a giant willow tree in my backyard!

Ooh, expensive!

2008-08-26T15:27:00.000+01:00

I've done it. I've just contacted Glimakra in Sweden, and asked them to ship me a sectional warp beam, tension box and a second back beam.

The scary thing is, because I bought my loom second-hand, I'll be spending more on those three items combined than I paid for the loom in the first place! It's so going to be worth it though. I spent the weekend trying to beam a sticky wool blanket warp, with the normal wooly snarls - despite using best warping practice. I debated whether the money would be better put towards a second loom (I do lust after a dobby), but I do intend keeping the Glimakra and I may as well have it so that I can play with some of the more complex weaves I want to play with, such as ikat and varying weave structures across a warp.

I can't wait to play with these new toys. I consider this my winter treat.

About turn on the loom

2008-08-16T11:02:00.000+01:00

So I'm a sucker for punishment. Even with a bad back, I couldn't resist crawling under the loom and tieing up the new project. I wanted to get going on it because I was excited about the draft I wanted to try. So I tied-up slowly, with lots of rests - but I ended up doing it not once, but twice.

Once I had the pedals tied, I started with a sample. And I hated it.

I was already out of my comfort zone with these colours, because I don't really do pastels, and this was just coarse. Garish. Ugly, in a really bad '50s way. So I tried some other colours. In the image above, from bottom to top: scrap cotton in grey, the sandy yellow 8/2 cotton I'd thought to sue for the warp, brown 8/2, and a natural 10/2 cottolin. The cottolin was better than the others, but I still wasn't happy. Worse, the fabric was going to be totally impractical for a tea-towel. Clearly this needed a draft which gave a more even balance between the warp and weft. And with a sore upper back, I really did not want to completely rethread the loom. So off to the computer.

I still don't own any drafting software, although I've been trying several with an eye to purchase (I'm leaning towards Fibreworks at the moment, but I'd appreciate recommendations). So I downloaded the demo of Pixeloom, put the threading in and started to think about alternate tie-ups and treadlings. The solution I came up with was a twist on a tie-up for "Betsy Ross towels", from a 1918 weaving book given to me by a friend, who'd inherited it from her grandmother. As this was a 4-shaft draft, I'd have to spend minimal time under the loom, re-tieing. Then I played with treadlings until I found a pleasing draft.

Next problem: what to use for the weft now? Why not try the sandy yellow again? So I did.

What a difference! From clunky and ugly with colours not working together to light, lacy and pleasing. The two colours go together really well. As the green is dyed with three different, close shades, and the yellow is dyed with two slightly different shades, the slight variegations in colour are pleasing to the eye. This is going to turn into something that's a light teatowel rather than a robust dishcloth, but I'm so pleased with the effect, I think I'm going to tie the green silk on to the loom as soon as I've done this and make the green-and-yellow scarf with this draft.

Alternate activities

2008-08-16T10:47:00.000+01:00

So much for the idea of a long weekend's weaving. I'd planned to take Friday off and weave all weekend: but I took a chill in my upper back early in the week. As someone who's had a lot of injuries to the neck and shoulders, a chill in that spot can be quite bad. So I took Thursday off sick (feeling a total fraud because I'm perfectly healthy, just stiff) and lay down a lot. Couldn't use the computer, couldn't garden, couldn't weave because I was at the tie-up stage. So I read. A lot. Fortunately, I had a book delivery that morning with a couple of novels and the Interweave Compendium of Finishes, and the latest issue of Handwoven arrived in the mail that morning as well. I also took the time to reacquaint myself and read properly Anne Heche's exqisite book The Art of the Loom, and read in more detail Janet Phillip's Designing Woven Fabrics, which continues to tantalise and tempt me, despite the fact that I've not had the chance to try anything out of it yet. This was all made much more pleasant by the fact that the weather was nice, and the discovery that lying in a deck chair in the back yard was a comfortable as lying in bed. At least, once I got the deck chair out of the garden shed - we're buried under bikes at the moment (we cycle. A lot.), and it was behind one.

However there's only so much one can read in one go, and not being able to work with my hands was driving me nuts. But did you know you can knit while half-reclined? I almost never knit. I'm not very good at it, and it's something I don't enoy as much as spinning and weaving. But I wanted to make something for young Benjamin, the recipient of the very first of the babys blankets, who chose to make his way into the world on Tuesday afternoon. And so:

This is made of handspun white 22-micron merino, and a navy blue merino-flax blend, plied with a thin strand of spun silk cap (the white flecks in the blue). I spun the blue yarn years ago (Celia, this is the roving you and I shared!), and this was the last of it, after I had already made two beanies from it.

I made an adult-size beanie, because this is a 2k, 2p rib, which pulls in a lot. I figured I may as well make something Ben can grow into and keep, rather than a tiny baby thing - especially as he's already a big boy. This is actually round, by the way - it's only square at the top because at the moment it's keeping the back of my spinning chair warm!

And then I went on to spend way too much time tieing up the loom because I'm a sucker for punishment, but that's another post...

Warping up

2008-08-13T10:01:00.001+01:00

I beamed the next project last weekend. This is the green cotton for the teatowels for the teatowel exchange. The yellow cotton on the swift in the background is what I plan to use for the weft.

I did everything wrong while beaming this warp. I beamed it back-to-front, but did it while half asleep and not paying attention. And I didn't seal the threads into the raddle. So the threads went all over the place, I had to figure out where they ought to be and move packets of thread at random in order to get the warp spread at roughly the right location and width on the beam. What I really should have done was give up and rewind the warp, but I chose to persist and see what the outcome was.

What I did right was to proceed calmly and with confidence. None of the stress and worry that I used to have when beaming a warp. And I remembered a lot of things that I have learned from Peggy Osterkamp's book: I weighted the warp in two bouts in the front of the loom, beamed slowly, and shook and bounced the warp to clear that tangles my rough handling at the raddling atage had caused. And the warp went on relatively smoothly. I threaded the heddles up, sleyed the reed and laced the warp packets on. You can see in the above image just how un-smoothly the warp went on, by seeing how uneven the ends of the packets are.

I've not tightened this yet, the threads are still sitting there loosely. I'll tighten the tension tonight and if it all looks OK, I'll weave off a sample as an experiment to see how well I can deal with a poor warp. I'm approaching this with interest and excitment, rather than the tension and half-dread I used to have when approaching a difficult warp (even one of my own making!).

This experience has, however, crystallised a desire I've had for some time. I've always wanted a sectional back beam, and two days ago I put in an enquiry about ordering one.

As an added bonus picture, here's a photo of the cotton on the loom, with the silk on top. The silk was dyed with the same set of dyes as the cotton, and the difference in colour take-up is fascinating. The yellow silk cap will be woven to be a weft into the green silk's warp, to make two scarves.