Banner Mountain Textiles

Everything But the Kitchen Sink Towels

2011-12-19T19:32:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-15T19:33:00.001-08:00

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

2011-10-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

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, from the turned taquete post, I finished that shawl and it's on its way to a new owner.

Solar Natural Dyeing - Part II

2011-09-22T20:14:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

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.

The Wonder of Turned Taquete

2011-09-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

This year I started out with a resolution to learn some new things and think a bit outside my comfort zone - in all things, not just weaving. I've been weaving more than blogging, but I'm hoping that is about to change too because I've had some good adventures in trying new things.

One of the biggest hurdles for me in doing something new is that I really don't much like failures anymore. Truth is, I've never been comfortable with failures and it keeps me from taking chances. Good trait for staying alive, but not so good if you want to gain new skills.. Over the next few months, I'll share some of my experiences. Mostly, it's been good stuff to share and luckily I didn't take pictures of some of the more stressful moments in learning to warp with a paddle. But, I'll write a bit about it in a later post.

One of the first things I started out with this year was making some lap robes for local seniors in a project called Holiday Cheer. I wasn't selling much in the way of shawls - bad economy or maybe my shawls aren't as fabulous to other folks as they were to me:-) I thought that weaving for a good cause might be the ticket to trying something new. I read a bit about the sizes for lap robes, that they shouldn't have fringe if you were using them in a wheelchair and that they needed to be machine washable and dryable. I settled on using up some rather thick cotton yarn I had in two colors - red and brown. They wrapped at 20 epi. I futzed around with this draft and that, but nothing hit my fancy. I thought about doing them in network twills, but then remembered a recent article in Handwoven (March-April 2011) by Mary Berent. She used turned taquete for dish towels sett at 40 epi. I figured if I used 20 epi with my yarns, they would result in the warp face I needed for turned taquete. I didn't find the draft in Handwoven instructive enough for me to do my own design, so I went in search of other information about drafting it. I found just what I was looking for in the Complex Weavers Journal for June 2007. The long and short of it is to convert your design threading (in this case I used a network threading from a previous project) to a parallel threading. The tie up for 24 shafts was a 12/12 twill. For 8 shafts the tie up would be 4/4 twill. Add an alternating tabby or basket tie down with an interesting treadling sequence and you have turned taquete.

I wove six lap robes using a 16/2 red cotton weft that virtually disappears. They are about the size of beach towels and have a pleasing heft to them. One of the wonderful things about the threading was that it can also be used for double weave, so I wove a top and bottom layer and made a hem that tucked inside at each end.

Having had one success led me to another project on my Baby Wolf. Eight shafts with a point threading and treadling led to the draft shown below.

This project was outside my color comfort zone and was therefore appropriate for my year long study.

Painted super-wash wool that I dyed a couple of years ago along with dark blue Alpaca for the warp. The weft was 20/2 rayon in navy. The navy weft tones down the bright colors of the super-wash wool but is still not intrusive on the overall design. Hey - this is a pretty neat structure.

Selling Your Products with Sales Tax Included

2011-05-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

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

2011-04-13T09:14:00.000-07:00

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.

Leo Villareal at the Nevada Museum of Art

2011-03-12T09:00:00.000-08:00

This post has absolutely nothing to do with weaving, other than perhaps color inspiration. But, Igor and I had such a great time looking at the lights and enjoying the patterns and colors and I wanted to share. Another wonderful thing (and something completely new) was the invitation by the museum to take pictures and share on your favorite social media site! Visit the Nevada Museum of Art before the exhibit is gone - it's worthwhile.

Woven Shibori

2011-02-20T15:34:00.000-08:00

I belong to a Complex Weavers group called CADE (Computer Aided Design Exchange). Each year, members are required to write an exchange paper about some aspect of designing handwoven cloth using the computer. Weaving drafts aren't the only way to work on design, of course, but they are the primary way in which most of us go about our weaving design work. It takes a good bit of time to put together one of these papers, so a lot of us agonize for weeks or months beforehand, trying to come up with a good subject and something original to share with the group. What follows is my submission for the current year.

My first experience with loom controlled shibori was at CNCH in 2007 in a three day, hands on class with Ellen Good. I learned the basics of adding a gathering thread at intervals throughout the plain weave pieces. We dyed our cloth, pulled up our gathering threads and painted on more dye. The results were spectacular. I decided right away that I wanted to add pattern to my ground cloth in addition to the shibori designs. The principle would be the same: several picks of a structure, a pick of shibori pulling thread and repeat.

For weft gathering threads, the method I have settled on for designing drafts and liftplans is to take an existing ground cloth draft and add a space at even intervals in the treadling sequence. Working with tie up and treadling seems the easiest way for me to manipulate the drafts. Using WeavePoint software, I am able to add blank picks (or ends) at a specified interval. Depending on what my sett and expected ppi will be, I put a blank space in the treadling sequence between four to fourteen picks apart. For the shibori part of the tie up, I add additional treadles for another tie up. (If I'm designing for a dobby loom, I can add lots of treadles for an elaborate design, but if I'm weaving on a four or eight shaft loom, six treadles is about right.)

I've designed a great many drafts using this procedure and recently found something that helps me to visualize both the ground cloth and the shibori patterning. The first part of the draft shows the ground cloth with the pulling threads in a contrasting color. Then, I drop the ground cloth picks and let the shibori pattern show on black background, with the picks in color. This allows me see the emerging pattern and gives me an inkling about what the cloth will look like after dyeing. Part of the charm of woven shibori is the element of surprise and the drafts only give you a blueprint, not a guarantee!

There is always the question of how long floats should be in your gathering threads. Long floats will create deep folds in the cloth when gathered. Therefore the resist to dye will be greater in the valleys and your patterning will be clearer. If your floats are short, the resist isn't all that effective, so the cloth will have a stippled effect. Both are interesting and good, but you do need to think about how much your ground cloth will be stressed during the gathering process. Delicate ground cloths need longer floats so that you aren't picking up just one thread in your gathers.

I started out designing drafts with dyeing in mind, but found that permanent pleating could also be achieved when using polyester and, in a happy accident, soy protein fiber. This lead me to think about collapse fabrics in which warp and weft face twills are combined so that the fabric will pleat. Erica De Ruiter wrote an article in Weaver's magazine about drafting for diagonal pleats. I decided to use her draft and add supplemental wefts to pull the pleats into place, the idea being that they could also be dyed at the same time or polyester yarns could be used in the weft to make the pleating permanent.(see references). The next step beyond this was to make my own design with a curving twill line using Photoshop® and add the pleating threads to the liftplan.

Woven shibori is an adventure in design, dyeing and creating textured surface. I have just scratched the surface of what can be done with this technique and know that I will have many hours of pleasure ahead in my design work.

References
De Ruiter, Erica. “Scarves in Diagonal Pleats.” Weaver's. Fall 1997: pg. 41.
Ellis, Catharine. Woven Shibori. Colorado: Interweave Press, 2005.
Faulkner, Kay. “Loom Controlled Shibori.” Weaver's. Summer 1998: pgs. 34-35.
Faulkner, Kay. 24 Shaft Sample Exchange, Complex Weavers. November 2004.
Good, Ellen. CNCH Class Notes for Loom Controlled Shibori. May 2007.
Hamilton, Dawn. “Catharine Ellis Muerdter's Woven Shibori.” Handwoven. Nov/Dec2000: pgs. 76-78.
Harvey-Brown, Stacey. Woven Shibori for Textural Effects. United Kingdom: The Loom Room Publications, 2010.
Muerdter, Catharine Ellis. “Woven Shibori.” Shuttle Spindle & Dyepot. Winter 1999/2000: pgs.32-35
Schlein, Alice. The Liftplan Connection: Designing for Dobby Looms With Photoshop® and Photoshop Elements®. South Carolina: Alice Schlein, 2010.
Stollnitz, Janet. “Pleats ---- at Last.” Complex Weaver's Journal (Collapse, Pleat & Bump Study Group). February 2010 pg. 30.

Sharing handwoven photos via the internet

2010-12-01T08:25:00.000-08:00

amalgamated twill

Several years ago I discovered the world of online photo sharing. I started out with a smaller site that was cosy and friendly, but often had technical problems. Just about that time, Flickr opened its doors and people began migrating their photos there. After initial resistance, I opened a Flickr account and started loading my photos there too. One of the first things I noticed was that there weren't many groups dedicated to weaving. Lots and lots of knitting groups - no weaving groups. I took the plunge and opened one up and restricted the photos posted there to anything handwoven or about handweaving. Pictures of looms, weavers, handwoven cloth, handwoven baskets, etc. The group expanded slowly and now is a nice plump group of over 400. I'm assuming most of the people that belong to the group are weavers, but I expect that quite a few just like looking at the wonderful things people are creating. It's been a rather long time since I added any photos to the group, but that may change soon when I get some time to upgrade my textile photos with a brand new camera and a complete version of Photoshop! I invite you to sit back with a cup of something warm and tasty and watch a slide show at the Handwoven site. Should you feel inspired to show off your fine handwoven items, get a free Flickr account, join the Handwoven group and start posting!

BTW, my Flickr handle is Zip eye.

Alpaca Farm Tour

2010-09-30T08:54:00.000-07:00

This past weekend, Ingrid Knox and I packed up our handwovens and knits and set up a sales table at the A Star Alpaca Ranch. The ranch was one of many on the tour circuit and the day was hot, so we weren't sure of how many would arrive to see the ranch. We were lucky and sold some items on the first day, but the second day was really slow with not much traffic at all. However, Ingrid and I both finished knitting the caps we were working on and friends dropped by to chat, so it was pleasant.

My handknit caps.

Display with Ingrid's towels and Igor and my scarves

Female Alpaca getting a drink

Our next sale will be Winterfaire at the Nevada County Fair Grounds in October where we will be sharing a booth. This will be a bigger shingding, so all the stops will be pulled out - towels, scarves, shawls, knitted hats and more. Visit us there!

Alpaca "ladies" group

Ingrid's handwoven baby blankets

Wild West Fair in Reno

2010-08-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday Igor and I took a jaunt to the Wild West Fair in Reno (formerly known as the Nevada State Fair) so that I could judge handspun yarns and items made from handspun yarns. There were also a couple of needle felted items -- unfortunately no handwovens to judge this year. It was a cool day -- and I mean cool! Which actually was rather nice because Jen, my scribe and assistant for the judging, said that only a few days ago it was 105 degrees in the tent that houses the handspinning entries.

The quality of the items presented to me for judging was very high and it was particularly hard with the handspun yarns to decide which skein should get a coveted blue ribbon. It was made somewhat easier by means of a scorecard to assign points to a variety of criteria and I was in constant fear that I would give identical points to two yarns and then really have to make a choice between the two!

A big thanks to the group from Carson Sierra Spinners and Weavers who arrange this event each year and made me feel right at home. Without their support, I'm afraid the spinning events at the fair wouldn't happen.

Here is a little slide show from the photos I took. I should have taken more - which is always the case because I left out some really nice pieces that deserved to be recognized.

Summer Dyeing

2010-07-04T09:16:00.000-07:00

I have a stash of dyes and a stash of white yarn. Since I'm not usually a weaver of "white" things, my summer project will be to turn as much white into color as possible. I'm a bit out of practice because last summer was dry and I didn't want to push the limits of my well with endless rinsing, so I just didn't dye anything. This year I gathered a lot of rain water in 5 gallon buckets (with lids) and am using that to dye with and some well water too - because there was a nice normal rainfall.

Dyeing protein fibers with acid dyes is easy and doesn't use much water. The dyes (I use Lanaset and Sabraset) are usually exhausted leaving pretty much clear water at the end. On the other hand, dyeing cellulose fibers with fiber reactive dyes isn't so straight forward. To get even results on your yarn (or T shirt), you need to use salt. I hate using salt because I don't want to put it into my septic tank, and I don't like pouring much of it on the ground. So, I opt to do paint my yarns with the dye and leave them covered with plastic wrap for a couple of days so that the dye will react with the fiber in the yarn.

Several weeks ago I got out my dye notebooks and followed my usual procedure of scouring the yarn in my dyeing crock pots, soaking it in a soda ash solution and painting on the dissolved dye. My cotton skeins turned out very pale - probably not enough soda ash to make the dye react. I started looking around for another method that might be more fool proof (me being the fool)! I found these instructions from Straw Into Gold and they indicate the use of baking soda, but I substituted soda ash. The real trick here is to only mix up as much dye as you are going to use in one setting because adding the soda ash to the dye mixture will cause it to react. My solution is to have a T-Shirt handy to overdye with the leftovers - but I'll probably need to think of something else soon or get better at judging the amount of dye I'm going to use.

I have done a couple of fiber reactive sessions now and I'm pleased with the results. The skeins in the photo are bamboo (the reds) and cotton (the blues and greens). I skein them on my warping wheel and don't bother to readjust it for a standard two yards, so my skeins are three yards in diameter. This gives me the opportunity to make longer color sequences. I usually paint three or four skeins at once so that the color sequences will be the same.

One of the things that used to really bother me was how difficult it was to get the dye to stop bleeding once you got to the rinsing process. I find that there are two approaches that work well. One is to fill a bucket with hot water and let your dyed items sit in it for several hours or overnight. The other is to bring your dyed items to a simmer in a pot with a little detergent. The unreacted dye bonds with the water molecules in the presence of heat. Then when you rinse, your skein will stop bleeding dye and your finished item won't bleed either. I gleaned this tip from Synthetic Dyes for Natural Fibers by Linda Knutson, but only after having been throughly frustrated by instructions that say to rinse until the water is clear. Good advice, but it stops short of telling you how to achieve this miracle.

I've got some more dyeing schemes up my sleeve. Stay tuned for what comes next.

It's a Lace Love Affair

2010-06-12T09:12:00.000-07:00

I belong to several Complex Weavers study groups and one of my favorites is the Early Weaving Books and Manuscripts . The leader of the group is Marjie Thompson who is a powerhouse of knowledge about old weaving draft books from the past. Each year, some of us in the group participate in a sample exchange in which we use a weaving draft from a book or manuscript that is at least 100 years old. This is a mighty sample exchange, because you weave 52 samples and get back 50 and they range from 2 shafts up to 40 (I haven't seen any jacquard woven samples yet).

In a past exchange and also in another CW group called the Computer Aided Design Exchange, Laurie Autio has written extensively about lace drafts (her particular specialty). I have not done a lot of lace weaving, but having figured out that I could use almost any draft as a profile for lace, I decided to weave my EWBM samples in lace this year.

I almost always use the Handweaving net for my sample source. First off, most of the books represented there are at least 100 years old. And secondly, there are so many draft choices that there is always something interesting to try. The drafts of Christian Morath are a treasure and there are an abundance of 16 shaft tie ups that would be problematic because of long floats if you wove them thread by thread. If you use them as profile drafts they work beautifully. I found several tie ups that I liked and coverted them to a lace threading and treadling. And then, of course, I lost track of where I found the particular draft I used for my samples. This is a big no no for the sample exchange which wants to know where you got your draft. I had to explain the error of my ways on my draft sheet because by the time I realized I didn't have a source reference, the sample cloth had been woven and cut off the loom.

The good news is that I really love the woven cloth. The warp is unmercerized 16/2 cotton sett at 24 epi. The sett was a bit loose, but I wanted the lace floats to be able to move around and settle in the finishing process. The warp measured 21" in the reed and 17" after wet finishing. Wow - what a lot of shrinkage. I wove another 5 towels after my samples were completed, using several different weft colors and a different tie up for each towel. I'm hooked on lace and I'll be weaving more in the future with more interesting profiles.

Last evening I received some of the samples from this year's exchange and they are wonderful. Mine are still sitting on the dining room table, waiting for more fray check finishing. But, I'll get them in the mail soon and finish my obligation for the year. Thank goodness for all the weavers who participate in this exchange. It gives us food for thought and a wealth of ideas for future weaving projects.

Umpteen Colored Towels

2010-05-02T16:42:00.000-07:00

I have been planning my next multicolor warp since my last two worked out so well. I wound a 9 yard towel warp for the Baby Wolf loom and spiced up the stripe sequence a bit. Each warp stripe was two different colors in a similar value and I used 14 different colors. The warp was gorgeous and the thought occurred to me that maybe I should quit while I was ahead - photograph it and move on. But, I wound it on the back beam slowly with a few pesky threads that had to be combed into submission. My first tie up was the turned taquete draft seen in a previous post. I picked three to five different colors for the weft. Some of them had been used in the warp -- some not. I tried to keep to a medium value. Dee passed on this tip to me and she learned it from Michelle Whipplinger. "You can get by with many colors in the warp if you use a medium value weft - of any color". Seems unlikely, but I was determined to see if I could stretch the limits of this color thing.

I started out easy with lots of colors that were similar to the warp colors. Then, I progressed into darker value colors of green and teal. I brought out some really brash turqoise green and used it. All those tag ends of cones became depleted and my best color turned out to be a pewter gray/green. Pretty uninspiring on the cone, but it really made the reds and pinks in the warp pop.

I was having fun with the taquete weave structure, but since the threading was two blocks on an eight shaft loom, I pulled out a couple more tie ups to try.

The first tie up gives a lovely array of color and weave effects with the two toned warp. The second tie up has plain weave, a spot weave and two other four shaft structures. Lots of bang for the buck.

Not every color did work on this warp. Yellows were ucky, but perhaps a gold would have been OK. Lighter colored weft yarns weren't all that attractive either. I didn't use too many oranges, but the ones I tried worked pretty well. There were lots more possibilites, but I ran out of warp at nine towels.

Double Weave Sample

2010-04-25T19:53:00.000-07:00

I am in a small study group that is working with the book Doubleweave on Four to Eight Shafts by Ursina Arn-Grischott. This wonderful book has lots of intriguing photos of wonderful double weave cloth but you are left to figure out the drafts for individual pieces yourself. The book does go into extensive detail about tie ups, threading and treadling, so I'm not selling it short there. It is just rather frustrating to see a piece and wonder how it was done and not yet have the skills to put it into a draft.

One of our members (Dottie Smith) has done more double weave than I have and set a challenge for herself to figure out the draft for a three color sample on page 68. The different part of this sample is the log cabin design in the center. Dottie put together a detailed set of instructions that showed us each block of face and back cloth, which shafts it was using and the color sequence for the warp. Since it was all so nicely laid out for me, I volunteered to weave samples for everyone in our study group. The draft performed perfectly. I've photographed three of the samples below. What a dummy I was not to have photographed the back, which isn't so attractive color-wise. But who cares about the back -- it's the face cloth that is so neat.

Two shafts for each block of face cloth and two shafts for each block of back cloth means eight shafts needed to weave this. Kinda fun, don't you think? And Dottie is a genius for figuring it out. I have torn her draft instructions apart and have everything written out for future drafting on my own. The block thing seems fairly straight forward and I can follow a draft without any problems. The problem I seem to have is playing with colors and getting the solid color blocks where I want them.

Five Thread Twill Blocks

2010-03-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

Squeezing every bit of juice out of a warp is one of my pleasures in life. Since I seem to have a rather short attention span (blame it on TV), I can't stick with one weave structure more than a few yards without getting bored. I started thinking about what other structures I could weave with the five thread blocks and decided I would try a five thread twill. On the computer I played around with a variety of five thread twills, but the resulting cloth looked messy, so I went with tried and true 1/4 and 4/1 twill blocks. What I didn't realize and should have, is that these blocks would create a textured cloth - almost embossed in appearance. I deliberately did not press the cloth down flat so that the raised texture would be more prominent.

Satin Structures

2010-03-27T08:55:00.000-07:00

The first liftplan I used for this warp was converted from a profile draft using a regulation five thread satin tie up and it's reverse (replace the black blocks with white ones in the tie up you see here). Satin makes one side of the block warp faced and the other side weft faced so you get some nice, almost solid color blocks.

The problem with this weave structure is that it is shaft hungry. In order to weave two blocks, you must have 10 shafts. I used 20 shafts in my design. The cloth below is some of the first woven and I stayed with colors used in the warp.

It looks pretty good here, but I did a lot of warp repair during the process. You can see a very narrow line of blue in the middle of the picture. This is where I ended the last pick or so of the blue wool and started up with gold. Because of the block configuration, this left a tiny little line. Don't know if this is very cool or an unfortunate blunder!

After a couple of yards, I changed the liftplan and using the same satin structures, I made the blocks much shorter. This produced a much more striped appearance in the cloth. I suspect that it might be easier to use in clothing design. There are no real repeats in the color sequences, therefore no plaids to match. This is just a theory at this point.

This is a close up of the cloth above. I'm thinking maybe fabric for big purses or decorator pillows? I'm hoping that someone with a vision will buy the yardage. That way I won't be forced to actually set scissors to the cloth.

I promised tribulations in my last post. Because I like to see how many possibilities there are in weaving a warp, I do a lot of computer aided design work. The only thing I am locked in to with a computer driven loom, is the threading of the warp. I take the threading and manipulate it every which way to see what will weave a viable cloth. To make this explanation somewhat clearer to weavers who don't design their own drafts, I can change the treadling and the tie up configurations in my weaving program to see how the design will look before I test it on the loom. However, just because it looks good, doesn't mean that it is good. One of the major considerations is to make sure the floats in the cloth aren't too long. I found that I could make an advancing twill design work nicely with this warp. When I tested it on the loom, warp threads popped every few picks. The only reason I could come up with, was that there was less than a 1:4 ratio in the threads being lifted. They were wool and they stuck to their neighbors worse in this design. When the shed opened, they didn't necessarily part cleanly for the shuttle to pass through and a flying shuttle will decimate a fairly weak warp thread. Long story made short, an advancing twill didn't make the final cut.

To be continued!

A Difficult Warp to Weave

2010-03-24T20:49:00.000-07:00

Fast forward to a fully warped loom, threaded and sleyed and weaving underway. I started weaving with the expectation that this was going to be a difficult warp to weave. The first 12" didn't do anything to make me think otherwise, but after that I stopped breaking so many warp threads and everything settled down into a somewhat reasonable weaving rhythm. Because I was concerned that my selvedge threads might break from drawing in too much, I used the clamp temple system. These clamps hold the selvedges out, just the same as a temple would and have to be moved along as you weave just as frequently as a temple. They are, however, simpler and faster to reposition (in my opinion) along the woven cloth. I bought these several years ago and they are for fastening tarps, etc. The company seems to be out of business now, and I haven't found any more like them, so these are precious, indeed. However, if I don't lose them, they will probably last my lifetime. The part you can't see in this photo is that the clamp has a cord with a weight attached which is hung over the side of the loom. The clamp works well for delicate fabric because it doesn't have the needle like teeth of a temple and I have never had a problem with it marring the cloth.

Here is a shot of the warp without any mended warps in view. Believe me, this was not the norm. Usually there were a couple of T-headed pins in view.

Since I didn't have much of a plan about where I was headed, I started by collecting some of the same yarns I had used in my warp. I wound a pirn (bobbin) full of each color and wove until the pirn ran out, then started a new color. Sometimes I started up with a new color just after or before the end of a block, leaving small color stripes. I was a bit nervous about this in the beginning, but then forgot about control issues and just let things happen.

Next post -- more cloth, more colors and a few trials and tribulations.

Twelve Yard Sampler

2010-03-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

Last November (was it really that long ago) I had the realization that I was relying on old skills too much in my weaving endeavors. Time to introduce color to my work, try something entirely different and go out on a limb. I had woven some turned taquete towels (see a previous post) that were full of color and thought that I would do something similar except that I would use fine wools. The fine wool idea came from the fact that I have lots of partial cones picked up a weaver's sales over the years. I thought that if I were to pick colors with similar values and alternate them in warp stripes, it would add to the complexity of the finished cloth. In my haste to get this warp on the loom, I hadn't done much in the way of calculations about the specifics of weave structure and had merrily wound on several inch bouts of wool at 30 epi. thinking that I could always figure the pattern out later. Woops! My intended structure of turned taquete was going to use increments of four threads and 30 doesn't divide equally by four. This could have been worked out easily on a plain colored warp, but with the stripes things needed to be exact. My direction turned to five thread structures. Easy, I would do five thread satins and five thread twills. I continued to wind warp and got lost in the forest of colors, fogetting how many different kinds of wool yarns I had used. Some were very fine and I was starting to get a bit uneasy about how this would weave.

This picture isn't quite large enough to show that each of the color stripes is actually two colors of wool. The yellow and bright green stripes stand out too much, but afterall, this is a sampler.

Next post I'll share some of the trials and tribulations of weaving off 12 yards of experimental warp.

Handwoven's Not Just for Socks Contest

2010-03-11T19:17:00.000-08:00

A few months ago, Handwoven magazine announced the details of a new contest for weavers. The idea was to use sock yarn (the label had to indicate that it was sock yarn) in a woven project. Sounded intriguing to me and off I went to my local yarn store. I found a great magenta/moss superwash wool with long color repeats. The brand is Ty-Dy Socks and each ball contained approximately 436 yards. I thought that two balls would be just fine for a scarf. (more about that later). I brought the yarn home and agonized about what would be a cool scarf. Orignally I thought that I would use another yarn for the weft, but the contest details said that the primary yarn should be the sock yarn. I remembered some great scarves that one of my online friends (J. Shubert Designs) had woven using stripes of wool that would shrink leaving the body of the scarf all ruffles and this seemed to be just the ticket for this yarn. Maybe I would use sock yarn in both warp and weft; my calculations showed that I ~~would~~ should have enough yarn.

I put together a draft using a six shaft crepe from Oelsner and added some plain weave stripes for the shrinking wool. Directions for similar scarves from past Handwoven magazines, suggested that the warp be long because after the shrinking took place, a lot of length would be lost. So I followed that advice and made my warp about 3.3 yards long, sett at 12 epi and 13" wide. Warp on loom and weaving away, I soon realized that I wasn't going to have enough yarn. Back to the yarn store and all of the rest of this color was gone. But, they assured me that they could get some through the magic of the internet. About a week later, I had my third ball (this was getting expensive) and finished up the weaving in short order. Off the loom the scarf measured 11.5" x 92"

I had made sure that my shrinking wool really did shrink by knitting up a small swatch and felting it, so I secured my fringe without twisting it and off to the sink to start the fulling process. Well, let me tell you, I spent a good amount of time trying to get those long stripes to felt. Finally, I thought the job had been done. I let the scarf dry in the dryer for a short while and laid it out to get completely dry. It was very disappointing because instead of ruffles, the scarf looked lanky with not a lot of shrinkage. Back in the hot water, but this time I didn't felt by rubbing the scarf with my hands. I just got it totally wet, squeezed out the excess moisture and threw it in the dryer for about 20 minutes. This did the trick -- in fact the finished scarf is 10" x 58" plus the fringe.

I photographed it, and sent in my entry. Only then did I see that Tien Chiu had made a shawl using the same technique for the contest. My Complex Weaver's Journal arrived full of similar projects! Yikes. Differential shrinkage must have been in the wind and we all caught it at the same time. And, no -- I didn't win:-(

Aid for Haitians

2010-01-20T10:47:00.000-08:00

Everyone who watches the tube this past week will understand the heartbreak of watching Haitians trying to survive the disastrous earthquake that has destroyed their country. Igor and I realize that probably the only thing we can do is to donate money to an agency that can help these people get the food, water and medical attention they so desperately need. We have decided to donate the proceeds from the sale of the Dream Web scarf/shawl (above) and the Purple Wave shawl below to the American Red Cross when they are sold through Shawls Unlimited.

Dream Web is woven in leno lace by Igor with some special novelty yarns he found at our local yarn store. Purple wave is a summer and winter weave using purple rayon and a great variegated purple chenille that is almost gone from my stash (darn!). It also has a great elastic quality that hugs the wearer's body.

I'll update this post once the shawls have been sold.

Update - Dream Web sold and the money was donated to the Red Cross. Purple Wave is still in my stash of stuff to sell. One of these days it will find a home!

The Whole Nine Yards

2009-11-23T10:09:00.000-08:00

These three shawls were on my loom for a very long time but were finally finished the later part of October and I'm just getting around to putting this blog post together. Nothing but procrastination here! The shawl in the photo above is called Morocco Sands and I was really excited that it turned out well because I took a leap of faith when I chose the weft color. The warp for all three shawls was a rayon boucle in a dull rose and a 16/2 bright coral ring spun rayon. I had a chartreuse boucle on my shelves that appeared to be just about the same value as the combined warp color, so I went for it. Irridescence was achieved and I was so pleased that I got it right!

This shawl is called Glen Eagle and is one of my one shuttle plaid designs. Actually, the plaid is in the weave structure which is a networked twill threading and treadling. The tie up was 3/1 and 1/3 twill blocks. The twill blocks are shattered in the weave structure and fade in and out on the shawl.

This last shawl is called Esperanza for "hope" in the cure for breast cancer. I'm donating the entire amount of my sale proceeds to Susan G. Komen for the cure.

North Columbia Schoolhouse Craft Sale

2009-11-11T10:56:00.000-08:00

Holiday Craft Faire at the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center
Dec. 5th & 6th from 10am to 4pm
Fine handmade goods and warming foods
17894 Tyler Foote Rd., Nevada City (on the San Juan Ridge)
530 265-2826

I don't get out as much as I would like to the local craft faires during the holiday season. However, I do try to participate in this lovely "back to the real meaning of handmade" craft fair that takes place every season. So, God willing and the creek don't rise, I'll be selling caps, towels and scarves. For every $50 you spend in my booth, you get a handwoven bookmark.

Turned Taquete on 8 Shafts

2009-10-23T20:43:00.000-07:00

I wish I could remember or find the original source of this turned taquete draft so that I could give credit where credit is due. I had it tucked away in my weaving files and had been looking at it for a while thinking that it might be something fun to try. Also in the back of my mind has been using up small amounts of 8/2 and 10/2 cottons and this draft really fills the ticket in that respect.

What a joy it was to watch the complex squares change and morph into four towels and a couple of smaller pieces of yardage.

The real secret to the color symphony, seems to be value. I look at all the colors I want to use in my warp through a quilting tool called a ruby beholder and then combined two colors that were close in value for every stripe.

The next time you are looking to use up some of those pesky cones with not much yarn on them, try this draft. I have plans for a series of wool shawls using the same draft and have all the cones stacked out and ready to wind the warp. I do hope they will be as successful as the towels are.

It's Payback Time

2009-08-31T10:11:00.000-07:00

I have been going to the gym for a workout several times a week in the past few months. One of the things that helps keep me from getting bored is listening to recorded books. The most recent book I listened to was Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. It was one of those books that I had been intending to read for a long while, so when I saw that I could check it out of the library in recorded form, I jumped at the chance.

As I pedaled and listened, it gave me reason to think about my own life and what I could do to give back something to the world and its peoples. For over a year I have been giving small loans to Kiva and now I started thinking that perhaps I could give more and make more of a difference. What if I took the profits from my weaving business and made loans with that money? Once a loan is paid off, the money goes back into my Kiva account and can be reused to make another loan. The whole idea seemed to be a good fit for me.

So I have resolved for the year 2009, I will donate 100% of the profits from my business to Kiva loans. The gesture isn't nearly as large as the one that Greg Mortenson is making, but it's a start.

Rayon Chenille "Skinny" Scarves

2009-08-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

Variegated rayon chenille scarves -- two of em! I never do plain weave -- well almost never. But I decided that I had so much stash of chenille that I really had to do something with it. So, I consulted with Su Butler on Weavolution's Rayon Chenille Forum and she suggested 18epi. The warp was 6 yards in length and I had just about 1 foot of waste for the two scarves. Not bad. They are narrow and long. Weavolution lets me put down the details of projects - so here are the nitty gritties.

My biggest problem was the twisted fringe. I ordered Su's CD which is due out sometime this month (Understanding Rayon Chenille) and there are supposed to be detailed instructions on doing the fringe and an alternative which doesn't leave any little naked beards at the ends of the knots. For these scarves I decorated the fringe with beads which probably took more time than weaving them. Every time I had to rethread the beading needle, it took forever to find that tiny little hole.

So, the goal is to make quality chenille scarves with twisted fringe finishes that will hold up to washing and drying. I certainly have enough chenille to do a full scale study on the subject.

Time to Organize

2009-06-12T20:12:00.000-07:00

I have accumulated an amazing amount of weaving information over my 15+ years of throwing a shuttle. Truefully, it isn't all that well organized as I found out today when I went on a search for the details of a piece of handspun tweed cloth I wove 5 years or so ago. I spent the better part of an hour looking in this binder and that and never came up with the pertinent details. Some of the details I can recreate -- the draft and possibly the number of ends, sett and length of the warp. But there are specifics that I can't remember and it is frustrating because I know I have them stored away -- somewhere!

I've been thinking about this dilemma for a while and have a plan. I have lots of binders full of woven samples from having participated in sample exchanges with Complex Weaver study groups for many years. Also there are lots of design papers written by members of the Computer Aided Design Group. So today I started on a big reorganization binge. Lace weaves were the first binder I tackled and now I've got my samples, my lace weave design papers and my own notes all in one binder. That was easy. Twills will have to go into multiple binders and are a bit more complicated.

All of these wonderful references are the most irreplaceable things I own (with the exception of family photos). It's satisfying to put them in good order.

Shawls Unlimited

2009-06-07T09:38:00.001-07:00

I'm testing the technology waters with this little video which represents some of the shawls I have at Shawls Unlimited. Not a lot of bells and whistles yet, but new stuff always intrigues me.

Designing Interesting Warps for Public Weaving

2009-05-21T20:15:00.000-07:00

I belong to a great Complex Weavers study group called the Computer Aided Design Exchange. Each year we are required to write a paper on some aspect of weaving design using our weaving or other computer software. Beyond those simple rules, the subject matter is entirely up to us. Everyone who belongs or has belonged to this group, will attest to the value of seeing other people's design work and finding out how it was achieved. Sometimes ideas are still being formed when a paper is written and the entire process will play out over a year or two while the designer experiments and refines their drafts

This past March, I needed to write up my own yearly contribution to the group and I had some ideas percolating in the back of my head that I had wanted to put into written form for a long time.

I have believed for some time that weavers are an endangered species; there just aren't that many young ones! One of the ways that we can entice new people to take up weaving, is by doing public weaving demonstrations. There is nothing like seeing the creation of a piece of cloth to astound and inspire. But, I also believe that we weavers, often take an easy road when we warp those demonstration looms. When the opportunity came about several years ago to warp a loom for guild members to weave off the during the county fair, I decided to design a warp that had complexity in the threading, that would be suitable for many different tie ups and would be interesting with a straight draw or point treadling.

It really wasn't as difficult as I had imagined. Straight draw threading along both sides gave the piece a border. I added an advancing threading and repeated it several times, then I put in some point threading. Once I had gotten to the middle of the warp , I mirrored the whole thing. What you see above is a very shortened version of the entire threading.

I used Ralph Griswold's weaving document site to download lots of great 8 shaft tie ups, but the Handweaving net is now available and today I would probably use it as my source. I wanted tie ups that had floats no longer than three threads and preferably only two threads. I plugged potential tie ups into my threading draft one by one and saw how they looked with a straight draw or point treadling. After each try I checked the length of the floats in the draw down. The very best designs were those whose floats were only 3 or 4 threads. I printed out drafts and drawdowns for about 20 designs that would work with the threading. (There were actually many more than that -- I just printed the best ones).

The loom was warped with 13 yards of yellow 8/2 cotton. When fair time rolled around, our volunteer weavers brought their own wefts or used some donated ones to weave a towel. Each person picked a design they liked and one or the other of us who didn't mind crawling under the loom, changed the tie up for the desired pattern. During the fair we wove off almost the entire warp to large audiences. The straight or point treadling was easy for weavers to keep track of and we provided someone to talk to the public to relieve the weaver of unnecessary chit chat while they wove.

Once the fair had ended, I took the loom home and a couple of us wove off the rest of the warp using more complicated treadling sequences (which had also been checked for suitablity with weaving software). At the next guild meeting, everyone who wove a towel had a wonderful piece of show and tell. Each towel was different -- even those that had used the same pattern because the weft colors were different.

Questions from our audiences ranged from basic to advanced and more than one person had an "aha" moment when they saw how pattern was being created by different shafts being raised and seeing how multiple shafts were tied to treadles. Did we inspire anyone to run out and buy a loom? We will probably never know. But I think we did plant seeds that may, in time, grow into weavers!

2009-05-13T17:29:00.001-07:00

Cat that swallowed the canary look -- eh! This is the threading job -- 900 ends that I stretched out forever. But all went well -- no threading errors and the warp wove smoothly and relatively quickly. I did use a clamp temple system that I meant to photograph, but maybe next time I'll remember to take my camera to the studio.

This was actually the second shawl from the warp. I wanted a lace like look on the threading which was primarily intended for the green and gold shawl that follows. I guess it will have to be called mock lace, because there really aren't any lacy bits in the fabric -- just a very subtle pattern that changes in the light. The weft on this shawl was a cream color tencel.

Here is another shot of the full shawl. It is pretty, but doesn't photograph easily.

This was the baby I was after when I did the design. It is almost too graphic, but I'm satisfied with it. The interesting thing is that because of the twill weave structure, this shawl had a shrinkage rate of 20% in width -- or about 4" more than the mock lace shawl did. Warp and weft are ring spun rayon.

It's quite long - and very luxurious. Hope it doesn't make a potential buyer dizzy! Both shawls are for sale through Shawls Unlimited - click on Unique Handwovens. Rachel has named them "Aztec Tribute" and "Zamora Hills".

Now I've got three empty looms. I have plans for a silk shawl on one of the Baby Wolf looms and maybe another shawl warp on the AVL. This next AVL warp will be 9 yards, for three shawls. It makes for three generous length pieces. 6 yards makes one shawl a bit truncated for my taste.

One Warp Down and One to Go

2009-04-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

Well, am I ever going to get this blogging thing together? I posted this yesterday and tried to edit the spacing a bit this morning and lost the whole darn post. Here goes again. Above is a picture of a warp gone south. The tail end of the napkin and sample exchange warp went very wrong and you can see the results with all of the weights hanging off the back of the loom. Luckily, I had finished everything that was necessary and it wasn't too much of a pain to weave slowly and carefully the last few inches of warp.

This is a shot of the backside of the cloth. I like it better than the right side -- the structure obscures the stripes a bit, making the whole thing a bit more subtle.

This is the right side of the cloth. The weft colors from left to right were black, fuchsia, clay and steel blue. Each of them brought out the color striping differently -- well duh!

This is another shot of the back side of the cloth. I used one space dyed thread for several stripes and it undulates nicely through the cloth.

Now that this warp is off the loom, I have been working in my studio downstairs and have finished threading the 900 ends for a shawl warp. It needs to be sleyed and then I'll see how my wonderful design really looks. I am always apprehensive before I start to weave something that I want to turn out particularly well. Usually my best pieces are unanticipated successes.

Apologies to Valerie who posted a nice comment on my blog that got deleted. Deleting her comment was not a way to make new friends!

Early Weaving Manuscript Samples & Napkin Warp

2009-03-24T14:48:00.000-07:00

Every year I participate in a sample exchange through Complex Weavers. The idea is to use a draft from a weaving manuscript no more recent than the early 20th Century. This year a new manuscript was added to the Handweaving net, so I picked this draft to weave. Not wanting to waste an entire warp on samples, I'll weave my napkins for our discussion group exchange on the same warp.

I'm always looking for creative ways to use up small amounts of yarn without my warp looking like garbage. The beauty of this draft is that it is striped using two different weave structures. I used a red brown for the main 6 shaft stripe and then fished out 7 more cones of contrasting colors for the narrower two shaft stripes. Winding was made more difficult because the sett is 24 epi and the color repeat is 10 ends. The warp is all wound, but not yet beamed so I'll see how well I did with the color sequence once I get to the threading.

Bumberet Beginnings

2009-03-20T09:40:00.001-07:00

I used up a lot of odds and ends on this shawl. I had a couple of alpaca/wool skeins that I had painted for my LYS, but the owner didn't like the duller finish of the alpaca/wool vs. pure wool, so it has been in my stash for several years. Then, I had several cones of textured silk in red, purple and orange -- and some handspun alpaca -- etc, etc. You get the idea! I used a technique that is new to me of using a rigid heddle paddle mounted on a pole. I fed through five different threads at once and rotated my odds and ends of alpaca and wool to make various stripes, all the while using my warping wheel to wind the warp and put it on the sectional warp beam of the AVL.

I like the bumberet draft that I used on this shawl and have used on several dish towels from recent warps. It is only a four shaft draft, but has lots of bang for the buck. I've posted the draft for bumberet and its cousin ducape on the Not 2 Square Weavers blog, for weavers that might like to give it a try.

The shawl was delivered to Shawlsunlimited and has been sold, so you won't find it listed there any longer.