The blue-green rayon and silk scarves

It's been a while since I had the chance to post. First I was away working for two months, and when I got back it was so sunny and spring-like, all I wanted to do with my spare time was to work in the garden.



Despite having the rayon warp sitting invitingly on the loom waiting for me and all of the silk caps spun and ready, all I managed to weave in my first month home was one scarf.



I'd thought that the scarves would be in a twill. But although the white scrap cotton I used to space the warp looked great, I'd put the warp on the loom without thought for what draft I was going to use - so threads were regularly skipped on the selvedges with the twill. In addition to this, I found that a twill made the weft colour too dominant - and that wasn't what I wanted. This series of scarves was going to be more about the interplay of variegated colours and stripes rather than one single colour. So I completely undid the couple of inches of twill and started again.


Instead, I decided to use plain weave for a more balanced colour spread and a technique called clasped weft, which an Australian weaver had posted a fabulous tutorial on. As I had the stripes of blues, greens and yellow in the warp anyway, I decided to use a weft of variegated blues and yellows on the blue side, and an almost solid-colour cornflower blue on the green/yellow side. Would this be too busy in terms of colour? I was about to find out.



The answer was no. I was quite pleased with the result. And yet, despite this, I found myself unable to return to the loom much for weeks and weeks. I was just lacking insipration, and the garden was calling. I don't know whether it was the weaving in plain weave (after weaving all those metres of plain weave linen) or just the call of the weather and the garden, but little weaving was occurring! Then, one day a couple of weeks ago, I suddenly got the weaving bug. And in a single weekend wove two more scarves. The second was in varigated soft greens, and the third clasped weft again, in emerald green with blues and yellows, and the other side the same cornflower blue as the first scarf.



For the fourth scarf, I used the left-over spools of silk and made one-inch horizontal stripes to give a kind of pseudo-check effect.



Here are the four scarves, folded together. Because they were a simple weave, they were very fast to weave. I really enjoyed playing with such bold colours, and am quite pleased with the way they interact. The stripes in the warp aren't as bold as I'd imagined they would be - sometimes they stand out, sometimes the blend into the weft - even the gold thread!




A friend told me that these reminded him of the weaving he saw as a child in his native India. I'd been aiming for a summery, casual, tropical/nautical feel, so I think I'd call that a result.

The stripey rayon and silk scarf series

Colour. I wanted colour. I wanted something I could weave hand-dyed and hand-spun silk caps into. And even if I'm not going to get to weave it before going South, I wanted to have a fun project waiting for me when I got home, something I could stick my teeth into without too much fussing. And I wanted to use the new warping mill which I bought back in December.

So I came up with stripes of blue, green and yellow rayon in varying widths, with a touch of gold for an accent:




I warped this up in less than an hour on Saturday night. It's amazing how much time the warping mill can save, over using a warping board. I've made a 9m warp, which ought to be enough for four scarves. The warp is rayon flake, and sett at 16 epi should give me scarves that are just over 9 inches wide.



To make things even faster, I tied the warp on to the old one and had it all beamed in an hour or two...straight from the warping mill. I'm sure you're not supposed to do it that way, but it seems to me that if you don't have to pull the warp off and chain it, why risk the tangles?



I plan to weave into this with mottles blues and greens, and experiment and play with a few things, like clasped weave. To that end, I've spun up a few of the silk caps I dyed, and a couple of them are already on bobbins, ready to go:



...even if it will have to wait until I get back in April, I'll have the happy knowledge that there's a fun project awaiting my return!

Fluff, part 2

I finished the linen cloth on the weekend. I've wet-finished it but not pressed it yet, so I'm not sure how long it turned out in the end. I finished the entire tin of ironing spray with still a foot or so of warp to go, so I decided to continue until I had a fatal warp breakage. It didn't happen!




The sheer amount of fluff in, under and around the loom dictated a full scrub-down of the torture room. The fluff I collected more than filled the dustpan! I really am amazed that it didn't rise up and turn itself into a pet! Once the fabric was off the loom though, all the care and cleanup was worth it.



This is the yardage, folded in half and draped over a rocking chair. As always, the weave itself (prior to wet finishing) was nothing special:



but wet finshing made the difference. As always, it took it from interleaved threads to a piece of cloth. It's not unlike the cheesecloth shirts I used to wear for their coolness in the 80s. It's probably not surprising that a piece of woven yardage should look like fabric, but it's pleasing me.

It needs to be pressed now, and it's ready for cross-stitching on...even if that will have to wait until I get back from my field work. And the next project (beamed on the loom already) will be considerably more colourful.

Dyeing

The whole "having a career and being at work all day" thing means I'm very slow in turning projects over (especially as I'm at work during my most productive time of the day), but it does mean that I have time to muse about what the next project will be as I work on the current one. Typically that means that I always have dozens of projects in mind, some of which will eventually come to fruition.

With the linen cloth almost done, my mind is turning to my next project. This will be a series of four or so scarves in rayon and silk, because I want to play with multiple colours in both warp and weft. The warp will have stripes of varying width of blues and greens, with a touch of yellow and gold, and the weft will be hand-dyed and handspun silk cap, in a variety of shades. I've chosen and laid out the blue and green rayons for the warp (seven shades in all, if I recall correctly) and last weekend, in a fit of inspiration, I pulled out a pile of silk caps and the dye pots and set to.



The near colours are for other projects (or eventual sale for others to spin), but the blues and greens on the far end are destined for this project. Some of the scarves will be quite busy, strident and in-your-face with their colouring, others will be much more subtle - I'm planning to play. One of them is suggesting to me that it wants to play with clasped weft, with multicoloured blue-green-yellow silk on the blue side of the warp and just cornflower blue on the green side of the warp. It ought to be fun.

I'll vary the tie-up for each of the scarves, but they'll all be straight threaded on eight shafts, as that's how the linen is set and I want to just tie-on the warp. It's going to be a while before I have the chance to play with this. I have two months of field work coming up, and I'm leaving in just over a week. That ought to be enough time to finish the linen and warp on the new project. Which means it'll be waiting for me when I get back home.

Fluff

Apparently, no-one in the UK uses ironing aids. Not that I'm one to speak, it's taken me more than two years to notice this fact.

After a wonderful tip from a fellow weaver suggesting using ironing aids to limit the amount of fluffing the linen is doing, I went hunting for some last Friday. It took much more effort than I had thought it was going to. I finally managed to track down one product that was silicon-based. Knowing how effectively the silicon-based hair serum I use to turn the frizz on my head into something resembling hair works, I decided to try it...and it's amazingly effective. I've been spraying it on the warp threads just as they come off the back beam every time I wind on (this means I can keep weaving as it's dry by the time it gets to the heddles), with only the occasional additional spray behind the reed when required. It's reduced by hundreds the number of large fluff balls attached to warp threads and taken the clearing of fluff balls from the threads from a constant necessity to an occasional task. Even better - contrary to my expectations, I've still not had a single broken warp thread, and there are only two stretched warp threads in the back as opposed to the dozens I had before. Because of this, I must have managed to weave well over a metre of cloth over the weekend.

As you can see by the photo above though, there's still a lot of fluff accumulating below the loom! I'm sure it's all going to gather and rise up at any moment, and I'm going to find that I have a pet husky I wasn't expecting.

Onward with the linen: sampling

All those brave words I typed about taking the irregularities in the linen as evidence of the rusticality of the piece, and being able to live with the threading errors? I really ought to know myself better. After weaving 8-9 inches of the linen, I stopped to assess. And discovered that the two places where I had missed a dent in the reed when sleying both had a threading error with two threads in the same dent, right beside them. Aaah. You can see this in the picture below, marked with purple threads:



In addition to this, I wasn't happy with the balance of the loom for the plain weave. A very broad cloth of plain weave is a most unforgiving thing to weave - all errors stand out like a sore thumb. So I decided that this was the perfect time to cut off the first section and use it as a sample. In doing so, I fixed the sleying errors, rebalanced the loom and retied the warp. I'm really pleased with the way the linen yardage feels after coming off the loom. It's a nice firm fabric despite being an open weave, and will do well for cross-stitch, I think. The next step is to zig zag the ends, wash it and use it for a sample sewing piece. In the meantime I'll get on with the rest of the yardage.

Now to illustrate exactly why you shouldn't weave with a fluffy single as a warp, this is what happens behind my reed as I beat:



Don't you envy me the job of clearing that off each of the 700 threads after every few beats?

Linen cloth for cross-stitch

I lived the life of a retiree over the break, pottering around with my partner, taking lots of long country rambles, and spending a lot of time in the garden pulling out the ivy that has overgrown it during years of neglect, so I can make a garden when I get back in spring. That has meant, of course, that very little was done on the weaving front. However I did prove that it is possible to warp using a sticky single without tangles after all (using my back-to-front-to-back technique), and after readjusting the tension on the front of the loom, weaving commenced.




I've woven a bit over 6 inches so far. It's quite a change for me to go from weaving small items with complex weave structures to a large piece of plain yardage. I've not found throwing the shuttle the extra length to be a problem, in terms of width or maintaining an even tension, which is good, as I have a couple of larger project in mind for the future.

Weaving linen for cross-stitch is hardly a complex weave as it's a simple balanced, slightly open plain weave, but it is extremely useful for highlighting any errors that occur in selvedges and weaves. I've had no problem with the selveges, but the weaving itself has been slow going. I've completely gone against the advice I always give novices and I'm not only weaving with a single warp, but I'm weaving with a fluffy one. This makes weaving very slow, as I'm also weaving with a 20-dent reed. every few picks I have to stop and clear slubs of fluff that have formed on the warp, which is very good at developing patience. If I miss one, I risk stretching an individual warp thread which ruins the evenness of the tension across the threads. This has been happening quite a bit despite my care, so the back of my loom is starting to look like an odds and ends store.



Old watches, bracelets, little jars, anything that is the right weight are being employed. I really must try to buy some fisherman's lead weights, I think!

The result of this is that occasionally a thread isn't shedding properly, and a thread will be skipped, resulting in a float.



Rather than try to fix this, I've made the command decision that it will make little difference once it's sewn over anyway, and it will add to the slightly rustic, antique feel of the piece. It's great when you can explain away all errors so easily! I've found that as the warp is stretching so much, it helps to take a leaf from the book of beaming, and go to the back of the loom and tug on the warp thread every so often, to even out the tension. It's been working:



It's not the relaxing weaving I was expecting it to be because of the difficult warp, but I'm pleased that I'm able to surmount those difficulties. I really shouldn't say it because I'm expecting one at any moment, but I've not had a broken warp thread....yet!


Now is really the time that I need to be deciding what to do next, and I'm undecided. I've threaded this current project with a straight threading on all eight shafts, so if I choose the right project I can just tie the next warp on. I could do a few more scarves, or a baby's blanket for some friends who are expecting. Or I may try to take on a couple of experimental samples that have been floating around in my head....I'm thinking of playing with something like Swedish flessbergplegg.