Why you should be careful about your keywords

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...

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

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

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

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.

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

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.