Everything But the Kitchen Sink Towels

Did you check out the halvdrall runner in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue of Handwoven?  I've been eyeing the structure for several years after I received a sample in a Complex Weavers exchange several years ago. After I read the article in Handwoven, I decided to try it out, but with a twist or two.  I have lots of little balls of yarn left over from bobbins (I save everything) and cones of yarn with just a bit on them.  I collected oranges, browns, pinks and a few lavenders for warp yarns and set to work to wind a multi - multi color warp.  It took a bit of planning because the halvdrall threading blocks vary between 9 and 10 threads, so I did a whole thread by thread drawdown and expanded the four shaft draft to eight so that I wouldn't have to reload heddles on the first four shafts of my Baby Wolf.

Once I had gotten the warp on the loom and started weaving, I decided that some of my variegated yarns would be terrific thicker wefts - with so many colors in the warp it made them busier and better (IMHO).  I also pulled out my box of little balls of cotton yarn and started using them up, ball by ball.  The weave structure uses a tabby weft in a finer grist followed by a pattern weft with heavier yarns and I found I could use most medium value colors because there were so many colors already present in the warp.

One thing  I found after I had threaded my loom was that I needed a straight draw threading at the beginning and the end of the warp so that the pattern wefts looked good at the selvedges and also so that I could do plain weave hems.

While throwing everything into these towels possible, I ran across a very good cookie recipe with the same name - not halvdrall, but Everything But the Kitchen Sink Cookies from Cookiepedia.  Try them, I think you will find they are as tasty as the towels are colorful.

Here is a P.S. to the post.  A weaving friend asked Madelyn van der Hoogt what the meaning of halvdrall was.  Here is her answer

I'm going to tell you this off the top of my head, but I’m pretty sure it captures the gist. Shaft movement in Swedish counterbalance looms is operated by pulleys called drall pulleys (should be two dots on that a). In some weaves, such as damask and turned twill, all of the shafts in the pulleys operate against each other (I’m not saying this right. Maybe it’s better to say that each block has its own separate shafts, so when you change from one block to the next, you change the operation of both groups of shafts on the pulleys). These are drall weaves. In halb drall weaves, the pattern shafts for each block are different, but the tie-down shafts are the same for both blocks. This affects the way the pulley system works; only “half” change their operation from block to block, hence halb drall.

So, turned twill is a drall weave. Summer and winter is a halb drall weave.
Madelyn

Sprucing Up My Inventory

This is a hat I called "Barbara" on Etsy and elsewhere.  It was spun from Merino wool that I handpainted and then Navajo plied to keep the colors clear.  It was pretty, but a bit pastel and although it was labor intensive, didn't appeal to anyone enough to buy this past season. (I have more than one of these - pretty, but well, I don't need another hat.)  So some of my losers have gone in for an overdye - some have been unraveled to make another attempt at wonderful and some have undergone several transitions to see if they could muster just a bit more customer appeal.  

"Barbara" got an overdye of pale yellow and a knitted flower embellishment using some singles wool that I had just a bit of. BTW,  I found the flower pattern and many more in 100 Flowers to Knit & Crochet by Lesley Stanfield. I like the new colors and am pleased as punch with the little top knot.   

Using Up the Fancy Yarns

This shawl was the culmination of  several dyeing projects and a knitting project.  Quite a few years ago, my mother bought a kntting kit for a beautiful sweater.  She was an excellent knitter, but because age was starting to catch up to her memory , she couldn't remember the pattern and finally turned it over to me to finish.  There were balls of a beautiful felted yarn left over and some of those colors were the magenta, dull lavender and darkish purple you see in the woven shawl.  I had some alpaca/wool that I dyed purple and some fine lace weight yarn that I had painted for my local yarn store and finally ended up buying myself.  The owner couldn't sell it and wanted an overdye job, but I couldn't bear to color over my lovely  purple paint job. 

The warp was done with three ends of the lace weight and one end of the heavier sweater yarn in five big stripes.  I didn't have enough of the lace weight yarn or the sweater yarn for the weft, so I dyed more alpaca/wool and some fine Merino wool.  Once I started weaving, I realized I would need more of the Merino and since I never dye to specifications, I went for an entirely different lavender - and then another magenta.  Weave, dye, weave, dye.  After all those improvisations, the shawl turned out pretty nice after all!

The draft was taken from Handweaving.net and when I originally downloaded it, it was a six shaft draft.  I converted it to eight shafts and when I went back to retrieve the draft for this post, I see that it is 8 shaft there now as well.  (Draft 41906).  The fancy yarns float on the surface of one side and are just caught up in little dots on the other side, making it a two sided fabric.

And, I finished the tied weave shawl (alpaca and painted Merino) and it's on its way to a new owner.

Solar Natural Dyeing - Part II

red sandlewood, alkanet root, cochineal, cochineal, osage orange and dodder.

Igor had a project on the loom in colors similar to these.  He thought about making a shawl in the same colors and same pattern, so I thought it might be a fun thing to see if I could replicate the colors in his scarves.  My colors are more subdued and I didn't manage to get purple, but I liked the way they all go together.  The yarn is baby alpaca and silk from Henry's Attic.
After a false start with the red sandlewood powder, I found that the dye needed to be extracted with alcohol before I used it in the dye pot.  The alkanet root was the same procedure.  Cochineal bugs were ground and boiled to extract their dye (very potent stuff).  Osage orange wood had been run through my chipper and sat in a water filled plastic bucket for weeks and weeks in the sun until the liquid was almost black.  The dodder was a whim.  I had heard that it could be used in natural dyeing, but had never tried it.  I found some growing on local bindweed plants and collected a bunch.  I extracted the dye in the same solar method as I had with the osage orange.  Looked like plenty of color before I dyed with it, but it was pretty weak.  I think you would need to collect a lot to get more color and I suspect that other species that are oranger in color might work better as well.



Fustic, Osage Orange, Wolf Lichen

Here are some skeins of  dyed handspun.  The fustic was from an extract, but dyed solar.  The osage orange is on stretch Merino, sun dyed and the last wolf lichen skein was dyed after I boiled the lichen for several hours.  I really like the fustic skein color right now, but wouldn't it make a wonderful green with an indigo overdye?

Everything here was mordanted with alum, except the wolf lichen skein.  Many lichens are substantive (plant material acts as a mordant).

Solar Natural Dyeing Part 1 - Madder

There's lots that is wonderful about living in the country.  But there are a few things that aren't great.  One is living with well water.  My well has lots of iron in it and tends to be a bit murky when it is being fed with winter snow melt.  That's not great for dyeing  - natural or synthetic.  So I collect water when it rains in buckets and melt snow water when it snows.  Then in the summer, I have a source of fairly pure water for my dyeing experiments.

For quite a few years now, I have tried to harness the power of the sun to heat my mordant pots and extract some dyes.  I bought some great clear 5 and 2 1/2 gallon buckets with clear lids from a restaurant supply place.  They were sort of expensive, as I remember, but I have been using them quite a while now and since they were good quality plastic, they are holding up well.  With lids on tight, the liquids in the buckets get pretty hot on a warm summer's day.  Too hot to hold your hand in the liquid.

This summer I had plans for lots of natural dyeing to get rid of some of the large stash of plant material I have stored.  Plus, I had harvested my madder plants that had been growing for 7 years last fall.  I chopped  up roots and put them in a crock pot to heat and reheat in the early spring.  At first, the yarn was a brownish red.  I cranked up the heat a bit and got more color.  Then, I took out the roots and chopped them a little finer - more color.  Finally as skeins got to be cherry red, the pot ran out of steam and lapsed into a soft peach.  I might have gotten more color, but I was tired of the process and called it quits. 



Handspun wool dyed with madder roots.

I have more madder in my dye supplies and will have another go at dyeing handspun later this fall or winter.  But, I must say dyeing with plants I had nurtured for several years was pretty cool.

Selling Your Products with Sales Tax Included

When I first started selling handwovens at craft fairs, I was irritated about having to pull out my calculator to figure the sales tax for each purchase and then having to make coin change for each sale. Someone gave me a tip that I have followed ever since to makes my transactions clear and simple and everyone, including the customer and state, happy. I include the state sales tax in the marked price. (I also make this price a round dollar figure, so there is no need for any coin change.) For example, a $20 towel can now be an impulse buy. The customer sees it, likes it and happens to have the $20 in their billfold. The question, of course, is how do I figure and report the taxes to the state.

To use this method, all you need is a calculator. You won’t even need to do this chore until you report your sales tax and need to send to the state (unless you are curious). Say you have just tallied up your sales for Winterfaire and find that you have collected $550. Divide $550 by 1.08375, and you will find out how much you can keep. In this case, $507.50. Subtract $507.50 from $550 to get the sales tax you will need to send to the state.

Total Sales ¸ Sales Tax factor = Net without Sales tax  $550 ¸ 1.08375 = $507.50
Total Sales - Net without Sales tax = Sales Tax to report to CA  $550 - $507.50 = $42.50

Where did I get the 1.08375 divisor? Well, I originally figured this out algebraically, but all you really need to know to make this work is your tax rate percentage. In our case, the tax rate for Grass Valley is 8.375%. Convert that to a decimal - .08375 and add 1. Should you be selling at another venue with a different tax rate, substitute the decimal form of the percentage and add 1.

If all of this seems daunting, there is also a web site that will do the calculation for you. All you need is the amount of your total receipts and your tax rate in decimal form. Use the De-calculate Sales Tax boxes.

If this method interests you, I suggest that you play around with doing the calculations and decide how much extra you will want to add to your prices. Then, put up a little sign in your shop that all prices include sales tax.

Thanks to Ingrid Knox who helped me edit this piece when I wrote it up for another group

Weaving on the Big Wave

Several months ago I purchased a "Big Wave" inkle loom from Gilmore looms.  I had an ulterior motive  (other than just wanting a new piece of weaving equipment).  The Big Wave weaves wide pieces - well, wide by inkle standards.  Judy at Gilmore looms showed me several pieces she had woven on the loom that were about 8" wide and I envisioned purses and hats, maybe table runners.  The new Gilmore inkles come with an optional leg that folds out so you can rest the loom in your lap while you weave - think demonstration loom that doesn't require the truck to transport it!  OK - that's two motives! 

I got my loom in time for the annual open house that the Sacramento Guild hosts every February.  I had done my prerequisite two samples before time to demonstrate, and had a four yard warp on the loom for the public to watch the process over two days - and I had another warp wound to use in case I ran out of weaving stuff before the open house was over.  (I forgot to mention that these inkles are like conventional looms  - think front and back beams, two shafts and texsolve heddles).  I did run out of warp, put on a new warp successfully without resorting to public tantrums and got it threaded, tied on and started weaving.

Originally, I had only purchased the loom with 200 heddles.  What was I thinking!  I needed to weave those 8 inch wide pieces.  I e-mailed Judy and told her that I needed more heddles - I'm thinking maybe another 300?  She told me she had 600 total on her Big Wave - so that's what I went for.  Let me tell you, 600 heddles fit on that loom snugly; would there be enough room to thread?  I wound four warp chains using leftovers on bobbins, smallish little cones of this and that, some red silk that bleeds, almost every odd and end I had of perle cotton, silk, tencel etc.  Two yards long.  Winding on the warp was slow;  that many threads, condensed in a smallish area don't travel easily through the cross.  Then I sat down to thread the six hundred ends.  I opted to thread from the middle of the loom out - probably could have threaded just as easily from one side or another.  It turned out that I had wound a few too many threads, so several were dropped from one side (not the two end threads so I wouldn't lose my tension at the end of the warp).  I also used a trick of  threading one thread of the next stripe before the last thread of the previous stripe to get little ripples in the design.

With this many threads, I didn't think I could actually tie them on to the front beam, so I tied knots in the warp ends and laced it.

Weaving was actually pretty trouble free, in spite of the fact that I had used a variety of weights of yarn and  for the weft I used some neutral colored silk that matched the two outside selvedges.  I really enjoy that I can rest the loom on my lap and weave.  The only inconvenience is having the phone ring and trying to relocate the loom carefully in order to get up to answer it.

I thought that I might make a purse out of the yardage, but after it was off the loom, I couldn't think about cutting it up.  Maybe a table runner?  I pressed it firmly with an iron because it ripples slightly due to the variety of yarns used.  It is also interesting to see that the multitude of colors I used in the warp, pretty much harmonize with each other.  Fun project and next time I really do have to try making a purse from my efforts.