Later That Same Weekend

Five pairs of samples - done.  Here are on-the-loom photos of two more of them:






On top, a worsted-weight blue-violet singles as the pattern weft; on the bottom, the same red-violet (what I've been calling purple) Shetland as the pattern weft. I realized I didn't take a photo of one of the samples while it was on the loom, so here it is just off the loom:



Here, the pattern weft is three ends of the Shetland held together, two purple and one red. You can begin to see how the pattern weft is curving up and down, now that the warp-wise tension is off.

I've handwashed, vigorously, these samples and they're drying. Probably Tuesday night I'll be back with a report on what they are like after washing.

Back Away from the Wall

I learned something this week.  I learned that my stubbornness isn't always helpful, for one thing.

So, the back story:  You will remember that one of my goals this quarter was to weave a warp rep table runner for my friend Sue as a wedding present.  Since I've never woven warp rep before, I figured I better try out that weave structure first in a sample or two.  I gathered up some mill end 16/2 cotton and some 8/4 cotton rug warp that was given to me and set out to weave a sample.

First Lesson:  16/2 cotton (the warp) is skinny yarn.  Thus, it would be nice if I could wind two or four ends at a single time.  No problem; I can wind an extra ball from the cone.  Well, yes, indeed I could wind an extra ball, but when I went to wind the warp from the cone and the ball, the ball regurgitated its innards, which tangled with the end coming off the outside and - well, it's a good thing that was cheap yarn.

I turned to my favorite tool: cardboard sectional warping bobbins.  Quickly, one was wound up and ensconced on the kate, and I started to wind the warp again.

No dice.  The tension coming off the kate was much more than that coming off the cone.  So, I decided to embrace the one-end-at-a-time zen of warp-winding (and I envied Diane her Chris-built cone-winder).

All was well till I realized - oh, about the time I was starting to sley the reed - I had only wound one side of the warp from the draft I was using.  A night of pouting ensued.

Second Lesson:  Then I realized this was only a sample - did it really matter how wide the sample was, when all I wanted was to understand the structure and ten inches wide should do that?  Well, no, so I started sleying.

Except that sleying 4-5-4-5, doubled ends, in an 8-dent reed, while negotiating color changes that did not match up with the dents, was more than my brain can handle.  (By the way, 10 inches wide x 90 epi = 900 ends.  Lots, in other words.)

Third Lesson:  Buy the 15-dent reed when the very knowledgeable manager at Vavstuga strongly suggests it.  Also...

Fourth Lesson:  Rather than winding each color in a separate bout, make the color changes while winding the warp for warp rep.

Well, as you can imagine, several nights of pouting were involved.  I want to make that wedding present, damn it, because it's been six months already.  I want this warp rep stuff to work.  I want to be smart enough to figure this all out and force it to work.

Fifth Lesson:  Pouting gets you (me) nowhere.  (OK, I admit I knit one sleeve for Mork and spun an Enchanted Knoll batt while pouting, but no weaving happened.)

Sixth Lesson:  Try a different direction.  That is, back away from the wall I'm banging my head against and start moving, somewhere, somehow (and come back to the warp rep later, with the right reed and an easier color design).

Which brings us to this:




Not warp rep.  Not at all.  This is Play.  This is eight inches wide, old Macausland Shetland wool sett at 12 epi, starting to be woven off in a single honeycomb structure.  The ground weft is the purple Macausland; the pattern weft is some old nameless peachy, worsted-weight 3-ply wool.

Wanna see more?  I do.



As you can see, the different warp stripes are different widths; those correspond (mostly) to the widths of the honeycomb blocks.  I tried out different heights of the blocks, as well.

Here's a shot of the back; you can see the long weft floats.



This is a three-yard-long warp - I figure I'll make several pairs of samples with different wefts and such.  One of each pair will be for me, and one will get sent to one of you (hey, Sarahw, are you still out there?). 

Here's the beginning of the second pattern weft, a black/pumpkin/ochre knobbly cotton from somewhere in my distant past.  That stretch of plainweave before the black pattern weft is the end of the previous sample and the beginning of this one.



And a bigger photo of that sample:



I'm enjoying weaving this a great deal, because I'm very involved, pick by pick, as I weave it and because the sample has lots of complexity to it.  I'm looking forward to seeing what these samples do when I wash them.  I suspect they 'll draw up a lot, because of the warp floats on the front and the weft floats on the back, and become very textural.  I don't know exactly what these fabrics could be used for, in a practical sense, but I can see using thinner yarn, perhaps that 16/2 cotton, and smaller blocks, in both directions, to come up with scarf or shawl fabrics, maybe even a simple top. In wool, if the cloth were fulled enough, it might make a cozy blanket or throw.  Some weavers use honeycomb to weave fabric for bags; I'm not a bag person, so that doesn't interest me that much.

I have several more ground and pattern wefts to try out; I'll be back later this coming week with more photos.

Over(shot) the Moon

I should have seen this coming. After all the moaning and grumbling about sampling, it should have been perfectly obvious that I'd be charmed by this little whimsy. I present my new BFF (Best Fabric Forever) - overshot.

Look at those adorable little diamonds. Go ahead, I'll wait. Actually, let's look a little bit closer.

Aren't those little tweedy bits amazing? And they give just a hint of depth and interest to the color. Yeah, that's my "Dead Weaver Stash" coming through again. No idea what it is other than some kind of wool single with tweedy bits. Best of all, I'd not planned on using this yarn for anything other than a sample on this warp. But once I wove off that first motif, I was hooked.

Don't worry though, I had done a whole bunch of sampling with the 8/2 Mill End Wool that I'd originally planned on for this sample. It's a totally different animal.

In real life, the pattern is much less distinct. The wool bloomed much more than I expected and I don't think there's nearly enough contrast between the warp and pattern weft for the overall effect to come through. There's a sample for both of you - I was at least smart enough to ensure I had plenty. And I'll include a snippet of the yarns as well.

See? Super fuzzy. Super, DUPER fuzzy. Again, I should have (and kinda did) expected more bloom from this yarn than the tweed single - the single is quite round and "hard". I'd almost think it'd been fulled as part of processing. I don't think it's sized, but I can have another look at the unwashed samples.

The other yarn I sampled was a 5/2 Mercerized cotton. The finished fabric has an amazing sheen (mercerized) and the hand is quite nice but, again, the color is all wrong. I'm not at all fussed about it though - again, it was meant to be a sample. Getting a picture was difficult because of the reflection off of the cotton, but here goes.

Now, here's the really, REALLY cool part. This fabric is stretchy. I mean, REALLY stretchy. It's positively elastic! And that was completely out of the blue. Who knew? Is that predictable? It's gotta be the wool doing it's thing, but still. Crazy. This is like handwoven spandex.

And now I want to do more. Maybe a wool/silk combination. And something with a less (ahem) exciting motif that would lend itself to a jacket. That might just mean super fine threads, and I can get behind that, but there's absolutely more work to be done here. Not sure if this is vest-worthy, but there's absolutely more overshot in my future. You two should try this.

Ready, Steady, GO!

Goals for this next three months:

January:

1. Make and update the pattern for my "Test Vest"

2. 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.

3. Weave a selvedge rug for the studio (and possibly another for elsewhere)

February

1. Sample setts as well as finishing methods for the vest fabric. Try at least *two* different warps.

2. Dye yarn and sample for a krokbragd rug for the studio

March

1. Dye and weave the krokbragd rug for the studio. Possibly a second for elsewhere.

2. Weave the fabric and sew my first vest. Figure out what I liked and what I didn't like about both garment and cloth.

3. Goals for Q2.

How's that? It feels doable and I like having a goal on a month-by-month basis. Smaller bites to eat the elephant.

Happy New Year, everyone! I'm going to have some champagne and cake.

Time to Get Serious

It's time to stop dithering around and commit to goals.  I just finished the white wool warp that's been sitting on my loom for the past month, so I am free and clear for new warps!

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.

That ought to keep me busy enough, you think?  That's seven warps in 13 weeks, which seems doable to me, if I stay focused.

I'm really looking forward to this, as you can tell by the detritus on my dining room table!

Sampling some sampling

I really do want to embrace sampling. And what better way than with a fabric structure that I truly know nothing about - but has incredible possibilities.

Overshot.

After finding a number of coverlet books in Jeane's "Dead Weaver Stash", I was overcome by Sarah's "white hot enthusiasm" and really, really started itching to give it a try. I'd no idea whether I'd be able to find a suitable use for the fabric (other than coverlets) so that meant sampling would be a good idea! Looking around for actual samplers didn't turn up much - there were even complaints that overshot didn't lend itself to sampling other than pattern wefts since the threading/treadling was so complicated. More fuel for the fire.

Fortunately, I have a copy of Fiberworks (best money I've spent in a long time) and that would let me play around with things a bit just to see if I could put something together. The "Namedraft" function lets the user enter a phrase (8 - 40 characters) and generates a threading/treadling based on one of seven (!) alphabets. There are also four tie-ups from which to choose - Rose, Star, Transposed Rose, Transposed Star - so there are just a ton of patterns that can be generated. That got me to thinking about taking a more traditional overshot pattern and playing with both treadling and tie-ups to see if I could make a sampler. That was yesterday.

Anne Dixon's Handweaver's Pattern Directory has a few overshot patterns that include a few treadling suggestions - and I settled on "Star and Rose", page 108. A little further research on Ravelry helped me choose yarn (10/2 cotton for warp and tabby weft, 8/2 wool for pattern weft) from stash and then I did a quick threading plan. 204 ends, 4-ish yard warp, sett at 20 epi. Boom.

Today I beamed and threaded, tied on and started weaving to check threading and to see if this sett/weft would give me square squares. I'm not getting hung up at all on colors. I'm just weaving. I'll do a set with this tie-up, then I'll do some of the two other treadlings in the book, change the tie-up, later, rinse, repeat.

I'll likely also use some 5/2 cotton as weft - just to see the difference in fabric. Strictly traditional overshot is cotton and wool, but depending on the end use, maybe this will be better. And, understanding this might help me figure out a garment use for the resulting fabric. But the real goal is just to sample.

So, Lynn - are you proud of me? I sure am. :-)

Another crazy idea

This past weekend, Jeane and I were talking about sampling. Both why it's important and why I, personally, have such trouble doing it.

When working on the shirt last year, the benefit of sampling was absolutely clear. I'd never have come up with the final fabric had I skipped that step, and I ended up with a garment that pleases me to no end. Keeping that in mind, why do I still struggle with sampling? After thinking hard about it, I settled on the fact that it's really, really time consuming. And it means a lot of time and effort to get, well, a scrap of cloth. That's a tiny bit less appealing than going straight to a project - or minimizing the amount of sampling that I do.

That realization hatched another Crazy Idea for this coming year. Lynn, you are also a bit responsible for this. Your thought of working toward, and building, a sample book got me to wonder if we can't all work together on this sampling thing. As each of us works on a garment, or project, I'd like to toss out the idea that we *all* sample for it and then exchange what we've got. For example, if I want to do something in wool, but don't know about sett, I could hand off two sample setts while I do the third. I'd even be willing to wind/send a warp if that'd make the process go more quickly. Then we'd each weave off our portion, cut and finish and send to the other two. That way, we'd get a wide variety of samples, at different setts, and help to build out our respective sample books. Jeane even said that she'd be up for joining in.

So there's my next crazy idea. And, I'm totally in for helping you two with sampling as well.

Thoughts?