No More Empty Loom

I’ve finally decided what I am going to put on my loom, tea towels!  Aren’t all these colourful  2/8 cotton cones just full of possibilities.

There is a small bag of little cones that I want to use up.  I think that I’ll only use a couple of colours but these cones are going to influence the stripes in the tea towels that I’m planning.  I kept some notes from other tea towels and I know that 10 ends at 7 yards weighs about 0.35 oz.  So with some math I’ll figure out how many stripes that I can do of each colour.

I haven’t decided on the draft yet but I am going to do stripes of colour woven in some sort of twill.  I’m looking at old drafts and at the Strickler book to see what leaps out at me.

Thankfully I’ve got a little extra time to find a draft as Mom gazumped me to the warping board.  She is also pulling a tea towel warp in white 2/8 cotton.

An update on the orange tree (Poncirus trifoliata monstrosa 'Flying Dragon citrus'), the flowers have bloomed and the smell was amazing.  Now there are little oranges!

During May the front garden starts to really come into its own and blooms abound.  The Siberian Irises (Iris sibirica) have started to flower as well as the first of the Alums.  In the background there are two Jupiter Beards (Centranthus ruber) in red and white that have also begun to bloom.  It is quite exciting and the bumble bees and honey bees are going nuts.

Table Runners Yet Again

The white 2/10 cotton warp pulled onto the warp beam beautifully.  I was a little worried because the cotton is quite sticky while I was separating it onto the raddle at the top of the Spring loom.  But, happily, it flowed on quickly and easily.

I was most of the way through threading the 650 threads when I realized that something was wrong;  I had a lot of heddles left unused on shaft six.

Off I went to the computer and compared the paper draft that I was using to thread the loom with the draft that I was looking at on the computer.  Well they are two different drafts!  But they are very similar; the computer draft had 4 more threads for extra flourish.  So I printed out a copy of the new draft and hopefully this will be the end to my problems.

I put on enough warp for a 40 inch a 50 inch and a 60 inch runner.  For the first runner I am going to use the rest of the blue slub rayon that I used with the Pima cotton runners.  At this point I am not sure how long it is actually going to be. 

The pattern is called Bethlehem Star, and the large diamonds are quite striking.

The runner didn’t take long to weave up; I think that it helps that the pattern is 'tromp as writ' so after threading the pattern twice it is firmly memorized.  I finished the runner with only a little bit of weft left; I don’t think that I could have done better.  The runner is about 50 inches long on the loom.

So for the next runner I had a good old rummage through the stash.  I found this cheese of silver grey silk.  It is really lovely with some subtle flecks of white.  I know the weight of the cheese, but I have no idea of the yardage.

The silver silk is weaving up quite differently from the blue rayon.  It is more subtle and it is a finer grist so the pattern repeat is shorter.

The silver silk keeps twisting onto itself.  I have to keep a close eye on it to make sure that the weft is straight.

But the runner is beautiful and well worth the effort.  I am still weaving this runner so I don’t know how long it is going to be but I think that it is going to be about 40 inches long.  So I still have one more runner to weave about 60 inches long and a lot of stash to bust!

The Final Garden Photo is the evergreen perennial Candytuft (Iberis sempervirens) that is starting to bud.  Unfortunatley we have a winter storm warning for tomorrow and it may snow 5 to 20 cms.  Yikes!

Cotton Table Runners

Table runners are going on my loom today because we are running low in the Etsy shop and our guild has a sale coming up in April.  I pulled out some pink and peach 2/8 cotton that has been in the stash for awhile.  These cones are unusually tightly spun and quite ropey; so not great for tea towels but I think they would be lovely for some runners.  The idea for the runners was making a flower motif with Diversified Plain Weave.  I spent a couple of days making different flower patterns on the computer but once I scaled the patterns up to the width needed for a table runner I needed a lot of heddles on shaft 1 and 2, far too many and too weighty for the loom!  So, I changed my mind about using the pink and peach cotton.  I just can’t figure out the perfect pattern for them right now so I’m going to think about it some more.

I went back to the stash and found the last two balls left over from a large 30 oz 6 ply cone of Pima Cotton.  We spent hours unplying the cone an rolling it into balls of 2/10 Pima Cotton.

I had used some of the 2/10 balls previously for table runners so I was able to go back and look at my notes.  I did some quick mental math and thought that I could do a 6 yard warp at about 18 inches wide.  So I leaped in and pulled the warp.  As I finished one ball and counted the ends, well, the warp isn’t going to be wide enough, only 12 inches wide.  My mental math wasn’t so good, so, I wound the warp back into a ball, with help from the ball winder.

Before I started to pull the warp again, I spent some time with an excel sheet and found that I needed to pull a warp that is only 4 yards long and it will be 18 inches wide.  I made the warp but it wasn’t until I had started to pull off the warp chain that I noticed that I had short changed a warp thread and made a short loop.  Once again I put the warp chain back onto the warping board and pull the warp back into a ball, with help again from the ball winder.

So for the third time I, this time carefully, pulled the warp.  I have now threaded, sleyed and tied the warp onto the cloth beam.  Today I’ll pick a weft and finally start weaving!

Final Garden Shot is Lithodora diffusa ‘Heavenly Blue’ it has one little flower open and beside it is the first bit of snow on the plant. We got a skif of snow yesterday, but it didn't stay.

What’s on the Loom on January 1st

I know that we just did a blog post on Monday, but I love the weaving blog tradition of showing what is on your loom on January 1st!  It started 10 years ago by Meg from the blog Unravelling.

Starting with Mom’s loom, she is getting ready to thread her loom.  The warp is 2/8 navy cotton for - you guessed it – tea towels!

My loom is empty but not for long.

The next project is table runners and it is still in the planning stages.

Final Garden Shot is Daffodils, they are peaking up through the ground already!  We just planted them this fall and we are a little worried about them.  They maybe up too early.

Handmade Christmas Ornaments

I have two scarves that I wove a long time ago, I love them but they are very short and very purple, but they are also very cute with lace butterflies.  I decided that it is time to do something else with them.

I have the idea to turn them into Christmas ornaments.  I tried to find some wood ornaments that I could cover but they were all too small.  The butterfly motif is 3 ½ by 3 ½.  So I decided that I cut my own shapes out of foam board and cover the back of the ornaments with decorative paper since I don’t have enough fabric to cover the whole ornament.

I used some cardboard to make some test pieces to see what size I wanted to make the ornaments.  Definitely the bottom one, the bigger the better!

I cut a test piece of foam board, then I cut a piece of test fabric from a scarf that just wasn’t woven well enough, my beat changed from really hard to just a gentle tap by the end of the warp!

First thing I learned was that my fabric was too short to go around the ornament.

So I cut off a ¼ of an inch.

I used school glue to attach the fabric to the foam board and I clipped the corners to reduce the bulk of the fabric.  I think that it worked out pretty well.  The glue attached the fabric well and it didn’t soak through the fabric.

I tried another ornament; I wanted to perfect the corners.  I made the foam board a little smaller and was more aggressive with cutting the corners.

The corners are definitely better on this one.  I think that they are cute, they look like little presents.

But I think that the ornaments don’t really suit the butterfly fabric.  So the new idea for the fabric is cards.  The pre folded card stock comes in three or four different sizes.  I used paper to see what size of window will work for the butterflies.

Today the card stock arrived!  Soon there will be butterfly cards.

Final Garden Picture is a Littleleaf Sage (Salvia microphylla 'Hot Lips') it is still blooming even after a couple of frosty mornings.

Something to Frame

I am a part of the same weaving study group as Mom called Exploring More, and this fall the project that we are weaving is to weave something that we can frame.  There is really no rules you can do any weave structure, any fiber, anything really.  It is surprisingly hard to come up with an idea!

I have always wanted to weave a textured canvas (like for an oil painting) and paint over it, letting the paint pool and collect in the texture.  I only have a vague idea of how I am going to do this project.  First step was to find some artist canvases that I am going to use to stretch my fabric over so that  I can then paint on it.

Now that I know the size that I need to weave I can pull my warp.  I wanted to use a fine thread so I used a 2/30 cotton.  Yup I went from Chenille set at 10 epi to this cotton set at 40 epi!

I pulled the warp with no idea what pattern I was going to weave, I just wanted to get started!  The warp is 18 inches wide and 3 yards long, enough for four paintings.

I decided that for the first painting I wanted to weave something with a lot of texture.  I went with an advancing twill that looked like ripples on water.  Of course I made a threading error that I didn’t notice until the end of the threading process.  I had to rethread over 700 threads, yikes!

While I was busy weaving; I heard something fall with a metal clink.  I looked down and I saw a huge screw had fallen out of the bar that holds the treadles to the loom.  Thankfully it screwed back in with no problems.

The pattern is really adaptable; you don’t really have to follow the pattern exactly.  The woven piece is only 22 inches long so I was able to just weave the piece with no repeat.

I washed and dried the piece because I wanted to remove the reed marks from the cloth.  I ironed it really hard to remove the wrinkles.  Here you get to really see the watery ripples of the pattern appear.

Next step is to staple the fabric piece onto the art canvas.

The hardest part was figuring out how to do the corners.  I’m still not happy with how they look.

But the finished canvas looks pretty good!

Last step is painting the canvas.  I chose to use acrylic paint because you don’t have to prepare the canvas, you can paint over the raw fibres.  I didn’t want to use gesso to fill in the texture of the fabric.  I wanted a modern look to the painting with just one bold stripe of colour.  I had too much paint on the brush so there is a big glob of paint and I hate that I applied the paint on the diagonal.  I tried to balance it with more paint but still hate it.

So I added more paint, now I hate it more.

I like the light areas where the paint picks up the woven pattern.  But I hate the dark globby areas.

I am not sure where I am going now; do I work more on the painting or just leave it as a failure that I learn from?  Should I keep going with the other painting ideas I have for the warp or should I just weave something else with the warp?

As I am writing this blog I think I may have a solution for the blue painting.  Maybe I could paint it all over blue then use silver paint to dry brush over it to bring back the woven texture of the painting.  Maybe . . .

Final Garden Photo is flowering plants, it may be November but we still have some plants flowering.  They will keep going until a heavy frost.  They are Anise Hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), Wand Flower (Gaura lindheineri) and Garnet Beardtongue (Penstemon 'Garnet') and peeking around back is Alyssum.