Working

I've spent the last two weeks making friends with the AVL.  And when I say "making friends", I mean putting serious effort into getting to know what works, what doesn't, where things go wonky and how this lovely loom and I can find a way to work together.  It's made me think differently about warping (more planning leads to a swifter execution), about threading (it's slower - texsolv doesn't fly across the heddle bars with a little flick) and about finding a rhythm in the weaving (treadling each shed is a TWO PEDAL operation rather than one).  All of this is different from the other two looms, but the reward is that once it's set up, it's much more conducive to just weaving.  While I can't completely turn off my brain, it certainly becomes a much lower-level activity.  Almost like spinning.

The other big difference is that there's a different level of flexibility.  On the other looms, I can just start randomly trying things - treadling patterns in particular.  I can do spontaneous network twill curves (ala Bonnie Inouye) and reverse treadling orders whenever I want.  Pattern generation on a whim is easy.  With the AVL, I need to plan ahead - including reprogramming the loom - before I can make changes.  Less wear and tear on my back and knees, but definitely not as spontaneous.  There's likely another way to do this but I've not yet discovered it.  Time will tell.

All that said, am I happy with this loom?  Yes.  Absolutely.  Having the constraints of planning is good for me - and being able to execute my ideas quickly is also good.  I also appreciate the obvious effort and thought that have gone into the design and manufacture of the loom.  The engineer in me is kept happy.  I do have a few bones to pick (why, oh WHY can't I *SEE* what the dobby is picking when I'm seated at the loom?) but that'll just lead to me making modifications at some point.  It's a tool, so why not?

I also owe an answer to "what's next".  Given that the power is going out soon, I may defer answering that question until I can get a little more time with power.  This also may be an opportunity for me to sit down and get some quiet time to work out my thoughts on the subject.  There is much to do, you see, to turn the notion into a workable plan.  While I would normally do this as part of a run, my legs ache in that "marathon training" way and it takes concentration to not get lazy and trip.  So a quiet few hours spent planning wouldn't go amiss.

All righty then.  There's coffee to drink, a shower to take, and then some planning/writing to do.  Maybe I can work in a stop at IKEA and Office Depot, too.  :-)

All Righty Then

I don't even know where to begin.

My mind is in a complete whirl - partly the Margo Selby class, partly the appalling weather, partly the trip to Nova Scotia, partly the blast of weavy stimuli from the NEWS shows and my classmates.

So, I'll begin at the end.  Today, I finished weaving off the last bit of warp from the Margo Selby class, in a 2/6 random-walk twill.  I used up the rest of the Noro Sekku (cotton/wool/nylon/silk) - well, I used all but the the brilliant lime green and pale, intense pink, which dominated the warp too much.  Once I ran out of that, I used a hand-painted wool/nylon, skinny sock yarn from Woolbearers in New Jersey, simply because the colors appealed to me.  And it's done.  I forgot to photograph it before I washed it, so these are wet photos.  First, the front of the Sekku weft....

And the back....

The front of the Woolbearers weft...

And the back....

I don't like the back of either of these wefts, because the wefts overwhelm the warps.  I like the fronts much better, but neither is getting me where I want to go, which is to somehow meld and interlace the colors of warp and weft in complex ways, disguising the weave structure along the way.  I don't know how to do that just yet - double ikat in plainweave?

As for the class itself, here are reminders of what I wove.  Day 1, which was supposed to be playing with a wide variety of different wefts and weave structures:

And Day 2, which was supposed to be an elaboration on one or two ideas from Day1:

Margo did not give us instructions of what kind of warp to bring; she just said bring a loom with a warp on it and as many different kinds of yarns as we could manage. On Day 1, I really liked these changes in weft color, which were made by swapping out and alternating different colors of yarn.

I also liked the hand-manipulated, long-float structure I invented, because it was easy on an eight-shaft table loom. 

So on Day 2, I combined the two, using a Noro yarn for the skinny weft (easy color changes!) and two worsted-weight knitting yarns for the float weave.



I picked the colors of the heavy yarns to reflect what was happening in the Noro weft at that point.

I think this worked in interesting ways, with the colors and the textures talking to each other.  However, instead of continuing this thought, I went off into another weave structure Margo recommended and kept using the first two heavy yarns for most of the float weave parts.  You can see the results in the photo above of what I finished on Day 2 - not terribly successful, to my mind.  That doesn't mean it wasn't a successful exercise, of course; it was a very successful exercise because my brain is still whirling, but not surprisingly, I didn't hit upon The One Perfect Fabric right off.

So, where do I go from here?  Good question.  I need to finish off the wool band for the Turkish Coat, because that's on the Purrington floor loom.  After that, I'm free - and that's scary.  Or exhilarating.  Or both.  I suppose I'd like to get the 8-shaft Norwood floor loom up and running, but that's just doing, not creating.  I suppose what I'd like to do next is figure out how to get the colors in warp and weft to be co-dominant, and yet change in ways unrelated, at least directly, to the straight lines of the warp and weft yarns.

Did I mention my brain hurts?

Distractions

Amazingly, today is July 15th.  That means the year is well over half-gone and I've certainly not said anything here about how Second Quarter went, much less what's on the docket for Third Quarter.  On the other hand, this has been a year of both inspiration *and* production - with the promise of much more to come.

Going back to the post in March, I had these as targets for the past three months:

• Project for Jacey - DONE
• A thing with linen - NOT DONE (but I bought linen!)
• Shirt fabric - NOT DONE
• Dishtowels - Half-done (that 16 yard warp is done and finshed)

On the other hand, I did manage to get another vest finished, which I think will stand in for the linen vest.  I had a great opportunity to get even more comfortable with Fiberworks and how to play with threading/tie-up/treadling to design patterns.  I also learned good lessons about color and made some improvements to my vest sewing abilities.  The second is better than the first; I can see growth.

I also will lay a bit of blame on this beauty:

I still can't believe I have this.  And that I have a glimmer of knowledge of how to use it!  Granted, it's been sitting idle since it came home but that's currently changing.  A warp is going on thanks to Jeane loaning me her warping wheel and I expect to will finish that tomorrow.  I'm putting on a six yard warp and I'll sett it for twill on all 16 shafts.  Then the fun starts.  And re-threading will be easy if I want to do something else.

Separately, I'm also going to use the warping wheel to put a long warp on the Gilmore so that I'm ready for dishtowels there as well.  And I've already wound a third warp that can go on the Baby Wolf for a bit of crackle play.  This all goes for dishtowels for fair - and I've two more weekends of dyeing and that'll be ready as well.  Then it'll be September and another three-month window gone.

My SOAR project is also limping along; only four bags of cotton spun up since the ginned stuff is slow, but I can backfill with the four ounces I've already spun.  It really does go surprisingly fast - so once Fair is behind me I can focus and get the shirt finished.  I don't think I'll do anything extravagant since it's about the yarn and the shape.  But, that'll wait until I have yarn.

But, I've a reason for a seemingly meager set of work - a lot of thinking.  Thinking about what gets my mind working and how to turn that into a set of tasks.  That's the real work to take me until the end of the year.  Some writing, some reviewing, some discussing, some planning, and then a lot of working.  2014 is going to be an amazing year.  At least I hope so.  At a minimum, I'm going to learn a TON.

Ok, Lynn - please, please, please share more of what happened at NEWS.  The tidbits just aren't enough!