I Was Here Somewhere

Oddments I should tidy up...

The band for the Turkish Coat.  It's all woven off and wet-finished.

I like the visual effect, but the fabric is rougher than the body of the coat.  The weft on the body fabric is Harrisville Highland; that of the band is Harrisville Shetland.  I suspect the Shetland packed in too tightly for the cloth to full well.  The weft floats held up well to washing and drying, but we shall see how they do when I cut the fabric.

Don't hold your breath till you see the sewn-up coat; I'm scared, for one thing, and for another, I need to do a muslin.

Second:  The next warp.

Every so often, I get a strong urge to use up a lot of the yarn I have all at one time.  A bit of stash-busting, you could say.  I can't imagine why I feel the need to bust my stash.  (Did you know I have 29.5 fleeces?  Well, did you?)  That's this warp; it's 8/4 cotton rug warp that was given to me.  I used up all of the green I had and all of the blues I had in small quantities, but I'm still left with two almost full tubes of blues.  It's 34" wide, sett 16 epi, for a double-binding rug (a blue and green rug; Sara, you might as well stop reading right now).  For the blue and green wefts, I'll use 5 or so strands held together of mill-end rug yarns and what not, including some of the enormous bag of Paternayan I have.  A double-binding rug is reversible; I've never used this draft before, but I think what it's going to do is squish alternating wefts on top of each other, such that only one color shows on each side.  I might, if I work at it, start weaving Tuesday night; I'll post more photos then.  This could be an interesting fabric, or not.  I'm looking forward to finding out which it is.

Plugging Along

A quick drop-in now that I'm back from holiday to show a bit of the pre-Art Fair process.  Part of getting to know the AVL is to use it as much as possible - and this latest batch of towels threw another tool into the tool box:  the cloth storage beam.  After weaving off about 3 yards of cloth, there was enough to reach to the back, and it meant I got to do this:

that's the warp coming off the warp beam above and the cloth going onto the storage beam below.  The storage beam has it's own tensioning system so that as I advance the cloth it just winds on.  And, there's only enough tension to keep the spring going - the actual tension on the just-woven cloth is delivered by the sandpaper beam.  It's all very clever; and exceedingly simple to use.  Best of all, the rollers direct the cloth in such a way that my knees never interfere with it - a nice change from both the Gilmore and the Baby Wolf (curse of being a tall person!).

This also being a long warp forced me to keep changing tie-ups and treadlings so that I didn't lose my mind.  I also tried different weft colors within patterns - all of which led to me discovering a lovely Color-and-Weave variation:

I absolutely love this pattern.  I may just have to keep one of these for myself.  Or, I'll have to make more.

That said, it's time to finish beaming the next warp (three sections to go) - it's a variant of this warp in all browns/naturals.  Part of that is clearing the stash, part is to have more color options within a pattern group.

Once Fair is behind me, it's time to get serious about the cotton shirt and also to start thinking about this:

I have a few thoughts about how to incorporate this into cloth - and I'm hoping that Sara and Deb will have more when I see them next month.  Next month!  Where does the time go?

Yes or No

When I took the Margo Selby class, I was reminded of a local weaving resource I've been debating using.  The Hill Institute offers a four-year program of Master Weaver classes, about an hour away. The classes are very, very reasonably priced and cover a wide range of weaving structures, different yarns, looms, etc.  You can take one year and never come back, or take all four years and go on to do independent work that is then evaluated towards a Master Weaver Certificate.  I've met maybe five weavers who have taken the courses or are in the middle of taking them, and they all rave about the process.  The courses are popular enough that there is a wait list to get in; it might take a couple of years to be able to take them.

Now, I have no real desire to get the Certificate.  I don't intend to teach and I don't need official recognition.  However, I keep being attracted to the idea of taking the courses and I want your input on whether I should at least sign up for the wait list.

Pros:  I'd learn a lot about different weave structures.  I'd be forced to try many different kinds of weaving, fibers, looms, etc.  I'd meet lots of other local weavers.  I'd get to see and touch good fabrics, which would help inform my own standards.  There is some homework, but there would still be time to do my own weaving over the years.

Cons:  It's a major time commitment.  If you have to miss a class for whatever reason, you are expected to make it up at another session that week (I don't know what happens if you're away on vacation for a week).  I worry that I will get sucked into a "style" of weaving - let's call it the Hill Institute style, even though I can't identify any such thing - and not develop my own ideas.  To explain this concern further, imagine I throw myself whole hog into Scandinavian weaving as taught by the Vavstuga.  Becky Ashenden and her Vavstuga are fantastic, but after four years, most of what I'd know would be solely Scandinavian weaving.  Chris Hammel at the Hill Institute is by all accounts a very good weaver and teacher, but she's just one person, teaching mostly a standard, let's-call-it-European style of weaving.  So, not Saori, not Scandinavian, not backstrap/inkle/tablet, not any of that (I think).  Finally, if I commit to the Hill Institute, I probably wouldn't spend that much time knitting or spinning (or gardening or dragonfly-chasing) over those four years.

So, I'm torn.  What do you think?  If you only had 25 years left in which to weave (remember, I just turned 60, so this weighs on my mind), would you commit four years to the Hill Institute coursework?  Or even just take one step at a time and ask to be put on the waiting list?

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!

Making

As promised, I'm now working away at the loom and churning out cloth.  It's only fair that I provide some proof.

Yes, dear Sara, I went with purple/blue.  While I'd gotten a lot of prodding from others that the blue/jade or purple/jade would be so stylish, I knew I'd get no joy from either the weaving/sewing or the wearing.  If I'm going to make yards of this stuff, and create a garment that (hopefully) I'll wear for a lifetime, the least that I can do is make cloth that is pleasing to my eye.  And my hand.

I did, however, make one concession and that is in pattern.  There was another in the gample (still using it!) that I liked more, but it didn't really have the look of a plaited twill.  So, I went with this:

It's an 8-harness, 10-treadle pattern.  Threading is straight-forward (straight twill) and treadling is simple (straight-treadle) and the fun is in the tie-up.  I'm pretty sure that this is one of the tie-ups I did on my own, rather than one drawn from either Strickler or Oelsner, but that really doesn't matter.  What does is that it's interesting, easy to weave and makes a lovely finished fabric.  Complex, but not.

And, I'll leave you with this - proof that there's a person actually doing the work.  I didn't know this was happening, but it was there, so I'm sharing it.

The weaver at work.  And oh, how happy she is.  :-)