When I first started weaving one of the first projects that I did was Bead Leno. I absolutely loved it! So when I found a ball of hand dyed yellow/orange/red 2/20 Cotton/Tencel I automatically thought Bead Leno.
For some reason I didn’t like weaving it this time. I wove and unwove numerous times getting the same result and disliking it. I didn’t like my edges or the fact the scarf was getting narrower as I wove.
The warp was threaded with a straight 4 shaft twill and I tried to find a pattern that I liked but nothing leaped off the computer screen. I like patterns that are busy and complicated and I wanted to keep to 4 shafts so the best weave structure to go to was Crackle. I love the shapes and colours that Crackle produces.
The weft is black 2/20 Tencel and the pattern repeat is 180 picks. On the computer the centre motif looks like a honeycomb, all hexagonal. But when I was weaving the area where the pattern starts again came across the stronger image. Which I didn’t really like but the guild meeting was the next day and I only had a couple of hours until bedtime to start and finish the scarf! I didn’t want to bring the placemats as I was still upset by them, and by the way thank you for all the great comments. The placemats have made it into the remaking box instead of the trash.
The scarf was almost finished by bedtime I had about 10 inches to finish weaving in the morning then twizzling, washing and pressing. I thought I was going to be OK because the meeting was at 7pm, until my Mum said that we were going in early to update the library and we were leaving after lunch. Yikes! I was rushing to the finish when I realized that my hemstitching looked funny. It was upside down.
After doing it again, I added black threads to the fringe, to help transition the black; otherwise the yellow fringe looked jarring. Then I got the scarf washed and damp pressed, it would have to dry on the road. During the pressing I noticed the tension and beat issues that I had with the scarf. Ooops.
From a distance the scarf looks great. I love all the little motifs that I can pick out, the pinecones on the edges, the circle in the centre and the bowties. I don’t usually do such a busy pattern with a variegated warp but the depth of colours and shine that this scarf has is amazing!
I had put on enough warp for two scarves so I changed the treadling for the second scarf to get rid of the jarring transition between pattern repeats. I also picked a different weft. I went with the top choice which is orange 2/10 Tencel, the other two are hand dyed singles silk.
I like what the larger grist weft does to the pattern; also I did an advancing repeat so the pattern was also elongated. The shapes that are made are incredible.
I ran out of weft so the scarf is quite short but I love it. The warmth of the yellow and orange are just wonderful. I love the jigsaw effect of the Crackle, just stunning.
Below is a picture of the two scarves side by side and the difference is just amazing. The pattern shows much better with the orange scarf and the shine is marvelous.
I have learned a lot of lessons with this warp and I am glad that I didn’t do Bead Leno. I love Crackle!!
The pattern is a ten shaft, ten treadle advancing twill. It was woven as drawn in and has only a three thread float. The pattern repeat is 33 threads, so it goes on extremely easily and weaves quickly. The warp was 2/20 hand painted silk, and while the painted warp was lovely it really posed a huge set of problems. 
Every weft that I tried seemed to blend in with one of the colours or the other, so basic black was my best option. It wasn’t the option that I wanted because it masked and changed the values of the warp colours. 
The warp was very lively in colour when I dyed it, and now it’s very subdued….ah well, the best laid plans and all that! 
The great thing about this scarf is the optical illusions that the pattern produced. The scarf is totally flat, but appears to be a series of raised pillows – very cool. The reverse of the scarf is the essentially the same. 
After looking at the grapes on my arbour which are budding up nicely – Pinot Gris came to mind as a name for this scarf as it has all the same colours as the grape variety.
Our weather has not been stellar this year, but my faithful clematis vines are almost all in bloom now, so I thought I’d share a few photos I took this morning. This clematis is pale pink with lilac stripes and has blossoms the size of dinner plates – really massive!
This is a local native variety and soon the whole fence will be covered in these sweet yellow bells and then the seed heads give another great show in the autumn.
This is one of my oldest vines, it was here when we bought the house twenty years ago and the flowers are a dark magenta, it will completely cover on side of my garden shed by fall.
Not too many of these vibrant purple with pink stripes are in bloom right now, but soon they will put on a huge display.
An electric red violet is the closest I can describe this one….so pretty.
I used to have six or seven peony varieties, but it seemed as soon as they started to bloom we would get rain and then I’d be left with a huge mess – this pink peony is the last man standing!
The size of the placemats after washing and pressing are 17” x 14” which are a very good size for placemats, if anything they are a little too big. 
The pattern on the above placemat is really pretty. I like the strong diagonals across the placemat yet when looking closer circles are the dominant structure. 
With the second set of placemats the centre panel is all over huck lace and had the greatest amount of shrinkage. 
The third set of placemats has more of a lattice appearance. And is a little boring when compared to the other sets. 
I wove these placemats for sale and I’m unable to sell them because of the wrinkles. Even if I was able to get the wrinkles out by pressing, once the placemats were washed the wrinkles would be back and that is not acceptable. So now I have to come up with an idea to use the placemats in a creative way. I don’t really want to add more material costs or time with these placemats as they are not a high cost item so if I can’t come up with something in the next couple weeks I will be throwing them out. And that is really hard to say but it is necessary in a business sense. 
I received an email from a lady in Montana saying that she had just received her May/June Issue of Handwoven magazine and she saw me in it. Now that the issue is in circulation I can at last stop being a ‘secret squirrel’ about it – it was very, very hard not to say anything all these months! Later the same day I received the parcel from Handwoven returning the scarves along with a cheque and a lovely note from Madelyn Van Der Hoogt the editor; this day just keeps getting better! If you get Handwoven Magazine – yup that’s me on pages 46 and 47….and my article is titled ‘Spaced Warp with Leno’.
We have booked an apartment in Paris for a week in the Montmartre a minute from the Moulon Rouge. I'm jumping the gun on this one a bit because I haven't confirmed the booking, but I'm pretty confident as the owner has agreed. 
This is our gîte (a self-catering holiday home) in The Dordogne region, this one is confirmed and paid. It is in a tiny medeval village and we have it for a week.
Then a few hours south east and we have our gîte in The Languedoc region for another week. This time we chose to be in the centre of a small town and right next door to the village church, it's going to be great! Then one night in a Paris hotel near the airport, then home on October 2. I can foresee some excellent wine and cheese in my future!
Our very cool spring made planting extremely late and my poor tomatoes are mere babes, maybe if you squint you can see a leaf or two! The rhubarb however is amazing this year and the dark marks in the soil is where we've watered the seeds and plants! I grow my organic heirloom tomatoes from seed that I save myself, and this year I started them outside in my potting shed/greenhouse. Needless to say the weather conspired against me, but nature will win out and they will soon catch up. 
The lilac in my back garden is simply amazing this year, with abundant blossom heads over a foot long! 
And the chestnut tree in the front garden is covered in snow white cone shaped flower heads, while the ginko tree in the background is just coming into leaf. 
Before we left for the Island I warped ‘Lily Louet’ with 3 yards of hand painted 2/20 silk, so when I got home all I had to do was thread and tie-on. The silk was dyed in very bold deep purple, red and yellow. My goal was to weave a scarf that would show strong colour changes; I dyed some 1/20 bombyx silk purple for the weft. 
What I hadn’t counted on was that the weft I’d planned on using (in the ball) completely killed my pattern when it crossed the purple patches. Now I was on the hunt for weft, which seems to be a never ending saga in my life! I pulled out my Itten’s Star and found the split complementary was olive green, after a few picks I thought that the olive overwhelmed the yellow portions of the warp, actually changing the colour to a weak dull lime green, yuk! Then I tried a yellow gold which blended into the yellow and hid the pattern, the same with red…….so back to basic black which was the only colour that seems to enhance all my colour changes! I chose 2/20 black tencel as the fine grist of the weft makes the scarf very light and still allows the colours to show through.
The pattern is advancing twill on ten shafts, which is treadled ‘trom as writ’, and I’m extremely pleased with it. You can really see the neat pillow shapes that this pattern makes and the black weft doesn't seem to darken the colours too much.
The thing with placemats is that it is hard to get them to be the same size so I am using the idea that my Mum had with 
The placemats are 15” in the reed so I placed them as far apart as I could so the extra heddles had to go in the centre. I was able to get 5 inches between them, making room for me to manipulate the shuttles.
Actually weaving the placemats is pretty easy; the one thing that I have trouble with is the tension, I am used to using fine yarn grist and changing to such a thick grist meant that I had to re tension the loom. For the Louet Spring that means releasing or tightening the texslov cord that leads from the springs on the back of the castle to the floating front beam.
The first set of placemats has the huck blocks offset which produce diagonal lines. This one is my favorite of the three. The colour in the picture is true, a very pretty teal.
The second set of placemats has a pattern of huck blocks all over. They are very light and airy.
The third and final set has huck blocks and then the next row is the huck blocks up side down.
The interesting thing that I found was the sheds were different on the two placemats. The placemat that was on shafts 1 through 4 had a much larger shed then the placemat on shafts 5 through 8. I then realized that geometry had reared its ugly head. Because shafts 1 through 4 are so much closer to the fell line, the angle that is produced when the shafts are moved is more obtuse. But shafts 5 through 8 are much further away to the fell line so although the shafts move the same amount to angle is much more acute. In this case the shed was half an inch smaller.
The size of the shed really impacted me at the end of the warp. I was able to weave with the normal shuttle on one placemat but the other one I had to change shuttle to a little tapestry shuttle so I could get the last couple of picks that I needed to finish the placemat. I also wove as far to the very end of the warp that I could!
I didn’t like weaving these placemats because they were boring! So I finally got them off the loom and put them away in a drawer. I am going to have to get them out and wash them at some point but not today! 