A seasonal migration of sorts

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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!