About turn on the loom

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

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

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.

The rest of the babys blankets

Just to give you an idea of how much six metres of fabric adds up to....





Thank goodness I have the lovely new clothesline!

This is now sitting in a folded lump on my work table, because we had visitors last week. I need to cut them up and hem at least one of them this coming weekend, because next week is the deadline for handing the first of them out.



Hmm....need to figure out what to do about gift boxes.

Dyeing

This past weekend's fun, and the next project. I've been dyeing 5 km of 8/2 cotton for some teatowels for the great tea-towel exchange. I decided to dye these green and sand as a kind of sample for a scarf I'm making for a friend, and I was so happy with the way the colours worked that I decided to dye the silk for her on the spot as well.



So then I dyed a cone of 30/2 silk in three varying shades of avocado green and four silk caps as well: two in the greens, and two in two varying shades of sandy yellow/brown to spin up as a weft. I seem to only have photos of the greens, but here they are as a taster: cotton on the left, silk on the right:



Interestingly, the cotton didn't take up the dye anywhere near as much as I thought it would. I was, however, happy with the way the silk played.

My partner asked me the other day to make him a single blanket to take to Antarctica with him. He wants to put it on his bunk as they tend to overheat the base and the duvets they supply are too hot. I want to make it in a Swedish krokbragd, in varying shades of blue and cream, with flashes of red. I'm going to have to do that in double-weave to make the blanket the width it needs to be (66 inches, and I have a 40" loom). This means I'm changing my mind on the fly about the draft I use for the tea-towels, as they cleary need to become a sample for both the blanket and the scarf!

Krokbragd, here I come...

Cotton babys blankets

There's been a baby explosion at work. No, really. I'm afraid to drink the water. That's meant that I wanted to make an industrial quantity of baby's blankets, so I raided my stash and pulled out some 2/0 Conshohocken cotton and Foxfibre cotton. What I had was sage green, beige and natural - not the most babyish of colours, but I wanted the blankets to be quiet and gender-neutral, so they suited me. Warping up 9 metres of the cotton, I set the blankets to 1 metre wide in the loom and warped it up in 1" stripes of sage green, beige and natural.

I threaded these as a block-draft 3/1 twill, set at 16epi. Unfortunately I used all of the sage green cotton up on the warp, so I made the first one in a block twill with a weft of alternating 1" stripes of the beige and natural.







Cut off the loom, this measured 1m x 1.2 m. Washed, with shrinkage, it came to 90cm x 1.1m, which is a decent size for a baby. I'd planned to sew ribbon around the edges, but the ribbon I bought simply wasn't going to look any good as it was too narrow to fold and sew reliably, so I settled for folding and hemming the edges, and leaving the blanket quite plain. Then I tied up and retensioned the rest of the warp.



The first blanket I wove, I wove with just a plain white weft in a constant 3/1 twill. As I was still using the block twill draft, this gave a broken twill. I'd planned to weave the second blanket and cut it off, but then I had a brain wave: I had put enough warp on there for 3 and a bit blankets, but I really needed four because there was yet another baby on the way (I told you, I'm afraid to drink the water!). But if I wove a solid ream of fabric, and cut it up....could I squeeze four out of it?

To measure how far down the warp I've woven, I'm tying a yellow scrap of yarn each metre.
I'm almost done weaving it, and I'm up to the 5m mark. I may manage to have 6m of fabric by the time I'm done, which will mean I've managed to squeeze 5 baby blankets out of a warp I'd designed to make three blankets, with a bit of wastage and playing space. Not bad really!

One problem I did encounter around the 3.5 metre mark was a frayed thread in the warp. Conshohocken cotton is a very soft single cotton, which is held by a binder thread. In this case the cotton had frayed, leaving only the binder thread hanging on:



It would have to happen in the sage green, of course - I have only 1 metre spare of that after making the warp. Thank goodness the binder is strong! It held on long enough for me to weave past it and then it held securely. It looks like I'm not even going to have to supplement sew taht portion, as I was able to adjust the cotton so it sits properly in the warp, and the weave structure is enough for the weft to hold it in place, even with washing and wear.


I'll finish this this week or next, and then post pictures.

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.