Oops. It's May, Isn't It?

And that means I need to get my ass back in some semblance of organized gear, doesn't it?

First, a review:  The Towels.  The Dreaded Towels.

They're not yet hemmed - given my history with this wedding present, I didn't dare try hemming them whilst dealing with dying cat, a bad cold, or excessive pollen, meaning all of the past week and a half.  However, they are woven and I like them.  And they go reasonably well with the scrap of upholstery fabric the bride assures me matches everything in the house.

I will be very, very glad when these are wrapped and given away.

Second, last summer's homework:  The homework I never got around to after learning how to paint warps from Lambspin last summer.  I think we need to see those photos again, don't you?

I was quite pleasantly surprised by how much this softened up after washing; it really would make good coat fabric now - warm, lightweight, windproof.  So, I suppose I ought to attempt making a coat from this.  What do you think I ought to use for a lining?  Cotton, silk, polyester?  Tell me cotton, please; I have bins and bins I could use.  And should I go whole hog and use a wool batting as insulation, or just a polyester batt?  I'm thinking of the Folkwear Turkish Coat here.

Next up:  More weaving off of the painted warp chains.  First is the last remaining bout of the mill end wool I used for the fabric above.  I'll weave it off with the same weft (Harrisville in Aubergine) as the wider fabric, so it coordinates.  After that, I know I have painted cotton and silk bouts to weave with - and maybe more wool?  Lots, in other words, plus I'd like to paint some more and try ikat. 

Finally, I'm definitely not going to SOAR this year, for several reasons, not the least of which is $$$ - I don't want to think about how much I've spent in the past four months on everything that's broken down around here.  This is why we have stashes, you know.  However, I'll still keep trying to figure out a cheap way to get together, somewhere, somehow.

Dangerous Curves Ahead

This past weekend, a whack of us descended upon Nevada City to learn Chimayo tapestry weaving techniques.  The three-day workshop was organized by the Foothill Fibers Guild and featured a husband and wife team out of Chimayo, New Mexico.  They supplied warp for us to set-up our looms and then came armed with tubs and tubs of dyed yarns for us to use as weft.  These are the yarns they use in weaving their blankets, rugs and vests.

My previous experience with tapestry had been limited to some solo-fumblings and a less-than-successful "studio" experience through a local community college.  The notion of tapestry and the idea of painting with fiber continued to appeal, so I jumped at the chance to not only take a class, but also spend the weekend with friends.

The class started with us coming up with a design that we'd then weave - using Chimayo techniques.  I drew geometric blocks/triangles of the ever-present mountains and ocean, chose colors, and got busy.  I weft-joined.  I plied/blended.  I made blocks and attempted to lay-in ends.  I wasn't having fun.  It was a struggle to get the yarn to make the picture in my head and that nearly turned me into a petulant toddler.  So, by late-afternoon, I gave up and started to try and make the curves that I saw in my head.  Then we went home, spun, ate a HUGE salad, and went to bed.

The next day was more of the same; curves, colors and just soldiering on.  I was happier and definitely more productive.  Then we bought rugs, looked at other's handwovens and retreated to another HUGE salad, wine and bed.  Third day was more of the same, this time peppered with conversations about whether or not we'd continue and if tapestry was in any of our futures.  I do think that it's in mine - there's enough opportunity for creativity and organic expression that I think I can keep going.  Plus, the Mirrix makes it easy.

First efforts are never what we expect.

But I expect to do more.

Some Assembly Required

When last we left our heroine, she was getting ready to cut the now-dyed fabric into bits and pieces.  Yesterday morning looked like this:

And after about two hours of laying out, cutting, maneuvering, etc., I had umpteen pattern pieces of the main fabric laying about the studio.  I unvented something in the process - underneath the fabric is the back side of my blocking board.  It has a soft nap, rather like felt, and absolutely eliminated the problem of the fabric moving about on my otherwise slick folding table.  Also, the nap is fine enough that the shears had no problem gliding along, and I could have put pins into everything if I'd so desired.  It made cutting pieces out a breeze.  Plus, the fabric behaved like a champ.  I even took a moment to try and orient the pattern at key points (where the front closure will be, for example) and hopefully that all works out in the end.  After I finished the cutting, I dashed out for a run, had lunch and then went to work until nearly bedtime.

Cut to this morning when I swallowed my coffee and headed back to the studio.  Lining and interfacing are now also cut and I started stay-stitching and assembling the vest.  Here's as far as I've gotten:

Interfacing attached to the fronts and I've pinned the fronts and side-fronts together.  The pattern calls for ease-stitching at the bust but the fabric is so lovely and compliant, I'm going to skip it.  This isn't shirting so I'm not worried at all.

Amazing, this.  I'm so much more confident than I was with my shirt.  Whether it's because I could check shoulder slopes and waist points, or have a better understanding of how this whole process works (thank you Vogue Sewing!), I'm just not worried about anything.  It'll be what it is, and I suspect I'll like it a lot.  Because it's mine.  :-)

Now, the down side is that we're going away for the weekend.  Today.  Shortly after lunch.  No sewing, no assembling, no nothing.  I'm hoping to be able to make some further inroads on this when we come home on Saturday afternoon/evening, but that feels unlikely.  And, Sunday is a memorial service for a dear friend, so that might be off the table as well.  But!  There's hope that it'll be done in time for the tapestry workshop next weekend and then Sara can provide a review.

Regardless, I'm very happy so far.  And I'm learning.  Perfect.

Nearly there

I was going to put a picture of a bucket here.  And then I thought about a washing machine.  But, neither one of those are really interesting, so I'll save the picture for a little later and just say that my vest fabric is currently in the washer.

I finished weaving it off today - it'd been 100% trouble-free until I started to get a little greedy at the back end and I snapped a warp thread when I hit it with the shuttle.  I was at the end of a medallion anyway so I listened to the Weaving Gods and just wove a 12-shot header and called it done.  Then, I cut it off the loom, zig-zagged the ends, sewed the two warp ends together to make a big tube and banged the whole thing into a bucket of hot water with a little dish soap.  My aim was to ensure that the fabric was fully wetted and the size was dissolved before fulling it - we'll see if that makes a difference. Then I went off to go buy lining fabric, some interfacing and get a haircut.

Back to pictures!  After gazing at the roll upon roll of 8mm silk, and putting my little swatch up against all of them (started at yellows, went through the blues, greens, browns, purples, so many colors!), I kept coming back to a family of greens and a family of blues.  The greens made sense (Lynn - you're so smart!) since they're complements to the red, and the blue really helped make things pop.  So I pulled down five or six different rolls and just kept playing about.  Finally, I decided on two colors and just bought a yard of each:

In both cases, the value is much less than the actual fabric.  I just didn't think that a similar, or darker, value did anything for the pattern or the piece.  Given that it's fully lined, this will only be spotted occasionally at best.  And, with the amount of black that I'd put in the overdye, really saturated, BRIGHT! colors didn't seem to work either.  Hence these two.

A little closer on the green, and a little closer on the blue.

Anyway, as stated, everything went into the wash.  And, because I'm a dope, I didn't weigh the fabric before putting it into the wash so I'll have to wait until it's dry to dye it.  That means tomorrow.  GAH!

So.  Green?  Blue?  Oh, and I got dark interfacing for the fabric.  I thought white interfacing was a patently Bad Idea.

Remind Me Why I Like Weaving?

Oh, hell.

The rest of the fell is straight.  This is halfway through towel #2.

And in the back:

I'm going to go knit now, after I cut off a towel and a half.
 

There is Weaving Here

Towels.  Plainweave, 8/2 unmercerized cotton, design derived from this Etsy shop.  A 5-yard warp, aiming for 4 towels and leftovers.

I picked the colors from my stash, to go with this scrap of fabric from my friend Sue.  Sue's the one who got married last July, the one I still owe a wedding present to.  The fabric matches everything in her house, she says.  If the towels work out, Sue will get them and I will be DONE with the wedding present.

In other news, the Turkish Coat pattern came from Folkwear today and I found the jacket pattern I lost in the move to the new loom room.

Some progress is better than no progress, I say.

Checking My Math

It's time for me to get started on the cloth for the vest which means sharpening my virtual pencil by getting out the spreadsheet and weaving software to make sure I put on a big enough warp, have enough heddles and that I'll have a shot at getting sufficient cloth to make the garment.

Rather than using the pattern I drafted, I decided to go with a store-bought version because it has full instructions for doing a fully-lined, turned vest.  I'm pretty confident in my ability to make small changes (shoulder slope, waist location/length, etc.) and, since there aren't any sleeves, the armholes should be able to stay as drafted.  However, since it's a commercial pattern, there's this pesky problem with fabric size and cutting layouts.  That means doing some math.

Step 1:  Open up the pattern and pull out the instructions/cutting diagram.  Here's page 1 of the pattern.

It's number 6075 from New Look/Simplicity - and their "Project Runway" series.  Before you start giggling, it's pretty much the only one I could lay hands on that didn't look like I'd just washed up on the shores of a Caribbean island.  And, it's pretty nice.  The instructions are clear and I've liked their patterns in the past.  Plus, at $4, the price was right.  :-)

Next up, a close-in of the cutting diagram.  Please take particular note of the two grey pieces on the far left of the upper drawing.

This is where it gets interesting.  The simplest (and safest) estimate is to look at the 44"/45" wide fabric estimate for my size and double it since I'd be aiming for cloth of ~22" wide.  The pattern calls for 1 1/2 yards of 45" wide fabric, without nap - so I should be aiming for three (3) yards of 22" wide fabric.  Simple, right?  Sure.  Except for those grey pieces.

In the view I want to make (View A, with the collar - because I think the collar looks better), I need to cut two looooooong collar pieces.  Instructions call for them to be cut on the fold, cross-grain, so that they're effectively a single piece wrapping around.  From the get-go, I can't do this.  I'm not interested in weaving 45" wide (finished) fabric as that'd mean double-weave at a minimum plus the loom waste would be silly.  So, that leaves me to cutting and seaming.  In principle, it should be ok, but I don't know enough about how these things work to know what it'll do to the way the collar behaves.  The seam would be at the center line of the back neck and that also implies a build-up of layers.  I'm also a tiny bit concerned about making sure that I have a wide enough piece of cloth so that I can cut the four collar pieces, now with seam-allowance at the fold, and join them to make the two large pieces.  I went ahead and measured the pieces for my size and they clock-in at just over 20", so in theory, they should be fine.  Emphasis on "should".

Next is the cloth itself.  From my sampling, I get about 15% shrinkage in length and 17% in width.  If I get out the calculator, I need to weave the full-width of the BW, 26", to get a 22" (almost!) overall piece.  And, I need 3.5 yards woven to get three yards finished.  The medallion is a 32-end pattern, so I get 29 medallions plus eight ends left over, and I'd thread those for plain weave selvedge - four on each side.  I'm pretty sure I can turn the draft so that I'm weaving with a single shuttle, which will make it go much faster, but that means warp rather than weft floats - and I'm a little concerned about tension issues over more than three yards of weaving.  Intuition says that it should be fine, since they're evenly distributed.  Regardless, turning the draft makes all kinds of things go more quickly so I should just do it.  Then again, given the turn, I may get a reverse in the shrinkage - more in the length (floats) than in the width, which would help me with the collar pieces but hurt me in fabric length.  If I end up being short, I can always delete the collar.

If you managed to get through all that, congratulations!  In a nutshell, here's what I'm wondering:

1. Other than possible difference in shrinkage rate, can you think of a good reason why I shouldn't turn the draft?  I'm highly motivated to do this.
2. What, if any, are the ramifications of having a seam in the middle of the collar?  Remember, this is a fully-lined/turned piece, so it's the build-up of seams that I'm most concerned about.  But what else?
3. Also, if I turn the draft, my grain goes in the opposite direction.  It also means vertical rather than horizontal squares.  Should I go with that?  Can I ignore grain and turn my fabric?

What else should I be thinking about?  (or should I just get my ass in gear?)