It's February - What Did You Expect?

Outside...



Therefore, inside...

 

Forward and Back

Starting with the Back first ... Here's what I said I'd do in this first quarter:

These are my goals for the first three months of 2013:

1. Weave the wedding present table runner.  This includes a separate sample of warp rep, just so I understand the weave structure.
2. Two already-planned projects: A)  the Icelandic/alpaca twill shawl (like the one I made for Jesh, but a different twill or twills), and B)  the rest of the red cotton/silk yardage I sampled for earlier in 2012.
3. 4 exploratory warps.  These are just to play, to sample, to learn.  They can be short and narrow, or long and wide, cotton or wool, one color or hand-painted, whatever.  I'd like to explore weave structures that push the yarn out of straight lines, within the flat plane of the fabric - honeycomb weaves, in particular.
4. Finish painting and furnishing the second bedroom into a fiber room.
5. Start a proper sample notebook (with copies for all of you) and fill it with samples of all the warps, if possible.

 Now, not all of that had to be completed in January, obviously, but I think I made fair-to-middling progress last month.

The table runner:  Well, I have a warp and wefts ready to weave a sample, but I got frustrated trying to thread it, so I went on to something else.  I need to get back to this to two ways - order a 15-dent reed and try again, perhaps with a simpler sample warp, to understand how to weave warp rep.

The Icelandic/alpaca twill shawl:  DONE.






















This wove up with no hassles whatsoever (which is unusual for me!).  A couple of twill drafts from Davison smooshed up against each other, hemstitching, twisted fringe - DONE.  However, I'm not altogether satisfied with this; it's shedding a lot when I wear it.  I need to full this somewhat more, probably via the washing machine.

The red cotton/silk yardage:  No progress.

Four exploratory warps:  I was very happy with the wool honeycomb warp.  I loved playing with lots of color and I loved getting to change the colors and yarns often; I need to remember to plan more projects with lots of colors and lots of opportunities for changing things partway through a warp.

The fiber room:  The walls and ceiling are all prepped and primed.

The sample notebook:  I made up a template for recording all the details of the samples and I filled it out for the honeycomb samples.

All in all, that's not bad progress for January.

In February, I plan to:

• Weave off a certain Secret Warp that involves a lot of black/gray/white, with some color.  The black/gray/white part is done and I'm moving into the color section.  This will count as an exploratory warp, although there may not be formal samples in your sample notebook from it.
• Order the 15-dent reed and try warp rep again, even before the reed comes.
• Finish painting the fiber room (well, having it painted, techinically).
• Wind the warp for the red cotton/silk yardage.  I'd like to get this on the loom before March, but I doubt it will happen.

I've been trying to keep track of what keeps me from realizing my weaving goals; here are a few I've discovered:

• It can be too chilly in my current weaving room, which is a converted garage.  There's heat and insulation in there, but when we have a really bad cold snap, I'm not inspired to weave in there.  The future fiber room will take care of that issue, but in the meantime, I've figured out a way to wind warps in the living room and I've dug out my long underwear from the days when New England was really cold all winter.
• I can spend too long trying to get a stalled project to work (see the warp rep struggles), when what I need to do is back off and go at it in other ways (get the proper reed, for one, or choose something other than warp rep for the wedding present, for another).
• I commit to too many knitting and spinning goals at the same time as I'm trying to get a lot of weaving done.
• I could try to be more realistic about what I can really get done in a moth.  (Me?  Realistic?  Ha!)

 I suppose I better get back to weaving now!

A little behind

So. It's the first week of February and time to see where I am against the list from last month. Here's what I said I'd do back in December:

• Make and update the pattern for my "Test Vest"
• Come up with a design for a primarily wool fabric for my vest. Planned structure is twill, but I can vary yarn diameters, etc, to make it more interesting.
• Weave a selvedge rug for the studio (and possibly another for elsewhere)

Going in reverse order, the selvedge rug is done. I can't make another until I order more selvedges but I do want to make another one. Now that we've lived with it in the house for the past few weeks, we both really like the feel of it under our feet. And, the floors in the studio are absolutely bare, so it needs doing.

Second item was to figure out the fabric for my vest. I'd had my mind wrapped around twill - and I think I'll still give that one a go (Either Urquhart or an 8-shaft herringbone) but I am now also quite intrigued by the Honeycomb variant that I found in the Feb '57 Shuttle Craft.

There's a great discussion about how to vary two colors in the weft against a single color in the warp - and I should be able to pull that off with what I have. I'll be using 2/28 wool (Mill Ends from WEBS), and I've four colors in all, so I should be able to make something work from that. I've also a cone of 2/34, all white, and LOTS! so that I can wind off and dye something if it really comes down to it. So, two structures for sampling - the Honeycomb variant and the Twill. Done.

Last was to make and alter the vest. Absolutely no progress on that front and that's a bit of a worry since I need to plan fabric and make sure I've enough yarn. At a minimum, I've all the pieces drawn so I can get a quick estimate of how long for the two fronts. Realistically, that's a 10 minute job, so I'm not too fussed about that either. If I can get the vest sewn this month, I'll feel better about the whole thing.

Now, the other side of this is what'd I'd originally planned to do this month. That list looks like this:

• Sample setts as well as finishing methods for the vest fabric. Try at least *two* different warps.
• Dye yarn and sample for a krokbragd rug for the studio

The first one is fine. That's two warps of 2 yards each. Neither has complex threading and they're both straight-forward to weave. I think I'll shoot for two different setts for each one and resleying takes no time at all since I'll have multiple ends per dent. The only hitch might be the number of threads per dent and whether or not I end up with reed marks in the finished fabrics. But hey - that's what sampling is for, right?

Second is the Krokbragd. This is quite likely to fall off into March. I've got a lot on this month and this is purely a "fun" project. I've some knitting I want to finish, accounting and taxes, yadda, yadda. I give this a 50/50 chance of getting anywhere. More realistic is another round of dishtowels on the Gilmore.

So Lynn - how'd you do?