12 Shaft Drall Scarf

Like so many of us I am forever looking at the news and social media and frankly, both of them can make you a tad sad.  I often feel that events beyond my control are flying off willy-nilly and it all seems a bit much at times.  

That's when I really enjoy weaving; there is something so very comforting about the simple process of warp, weft and colour.  

Usually I am drawn to weaving curves and spots, but the chaotic feel of life right now is leading me down a different path.

I am looking for structure and there is nothing more structured than a square!   

Now that I have decided to weave a simple design I started hunting through some of my previous drafts and I was immediately taken with some 12 shaft drall scarves I wove back in 2012.  I had named the post My Comfort Weave and I guess it still is.

I have been watching a lot of gardening shows on BBC of late and they have been showing a lot of Escheveria, and although I don’t have any of these lovlies in my garden I have embraced the colour scheme.  This photo is not mine, I give all credit to the photographer.

I began by pulling the warp in silver, sea coral, rose, mineral green and lavender.

The colours are in varying widths to try and replicate the overall colours of the Escheveria flower.  

I had previously woven my drall scarves in a random treadling pattern, creating the blocks as I went along, but this time I want structure, so I planned my colours very carefully and I decided to treadle the pattern ‘Exactly As Drawn In’. 

This gave me a nice mix of boxes with plenty of interest to the weave.  As I treadled it each different colour was woven once as a true square as the pattern progressed, the rest of the time they were rectangles.  I think this gives a little more interest to the weave.

Off the loom and before washing it looks a little flat and wavy, but after washing and steam pressing I am pleased.

Each side is different and lovely in their own right, but the squares are it for me!

I really loved creating this scarf and have already put on another warp in a different colourway with a different threading.  This scarf will appear on Etsy for sale and as a PDF pattern in a few days.

The garden this year has been amazing and the Brugmansia is a real show stopper.  Today I have 12 buds ready to open and to fill the garden with the sweet smell of baby powder. This is a bog standard Brugmansia and didn't come with a name so it is called a NOID.

Weaving Drafts for Sale

I have been thinking for a while that I would like to sell some of our original drafts, especially the 12 shaft designs as they are hard to come by.  So when I got a message asking if I sold weaving drafts, I took that as the push that I needed to get started.

It is surprising the time and information that needs to go into each pattern.  First I started by naming the drafts, as some of my drafts have silly names like ‘Interesting Motif’.  I went with a space theme; all the drafts are named after Nebulae.  I then created WIF, which is a universal weaving file that can be used with most weaving programs.  

The next part was to create a PDF with the draft, project guide and further breakdowns of the threading, tie up, and treadling just in case the person buying the draft doesn’t have a weaving program. 

The first draft is an original Crackle Weave pattern that is on 6 harnesses.  This draft is called Helix Nebula Crackle Weave.  Etsy listing for Helix Nebula Crackle Scarf Weaving Pattern.  

The second draft is an original Echo Weave pattern that is on 8 harnesses.  This draft is called Cat’s Paw Nebula Echo Weave.  Etsy listing for Cat's Paw Nebula Echo Scarf Weaving Pattern.

The third draft is an original Crackle pattern that is on 12 harnesses.  This draft is called Orion Nebula Crackle Weave.  Etsy listing for Orion Nebula Crackle Shawl Weaving Pattern.

The fourth draft is an original Crackle pattern that is on 12 harnesses.  This draft is called Rosette Nebula Crackle Weave.  Etsy listing for Rosette Nebula Crackle Shawl Weaving Pattern.

I will be adding more drafts in the coming weeks so please check out WovenBeauty on Etsy.  Next week the drafts are going to be the Piano Scarf and the Music Note Scarf.  I’ll also be adding a page to the blog (beside the Tips and Tutorials Tab) that will have links to the drafts that I have available for sale.   We will be posting more regularly again, I have some tea towels to share with you!

 

Final Garden Photo is Climbing Lilies (Gloriosa rothschildiana).  We got these as tubers from the Horticultural Society and we didn't know what to expect.  We planted them in early spring, dug them up in June to see if they were alive, they finally started to grow in July and by August we had these lovely flowers.  They were well worth the wait!

How I Do Photos for Etsy

I’ve not been weaving lately but I have been tidying up our Etsy shop, WovenBeauty.  First I redid the photos for the tea towels.  I've been experimenting with styles of photos, trying to get photos that are quick and easy to do and still show the product to the best of my abilities.  I use to have the tea towels on a plain white background but they looked like weird flying carpets, so I started incorporating the kitchen countertop for the photos.  This gives a sense of scale and grounds the photos. One drawback is that the light isn’t the best in the kitchen because we have a skylight competing with a north facing window so the photos can be quite grey, especially now that we are going into the winter months.  Here are two photos for the purple striped tea towels, the first is the old photo of weird flying carpet tea towel and the second is the new style photo on the kitchen counter.  Much better!

I have also restyled the first product photos for the tea towels; this is the photo that first appears on Etsy.  I now use a wooden bowl to raise up the tea towels on the vertical, not just lying flat, because then you can see more of the tea towel and scale.  To the side of the photo I have included a stack of tea towels; these are the tea towels that match the tea towel being shown on the bowl.  When we do different colours of tea towels I like to split up the listings, one colour per listing; then by having the stack to the side customers can see that there is more than one tea towel available in the series.  Old photo for a turquoise and white tea towel and the new updated photo below. 

  

Last week I spent some time doing photos and making videos for the table linens.  Etsy recommends having seasonal photos so I did some winter themed product photos and I will change the first product photos for the table linens to the winter themed ones over the next week.  At the same time I did some videos of the table linens and that was a challenge!  Here is an example video for a red lace table runner. The winter light is terrible so I'll be redoing the videos in the spring, but these videos seem to work as I sold a runner just yesterday!

This week I’m retaking the photos for the shawls, now we can have up to ten photos for each listing, right now for the shawls I only have six so I took some more photos to fill the missing spots.  In one day I took over 660 photos of just 7 shawls!  Now it will take some time to process the photos so it’ll be a couple of weeks before the new photos hit the store.

Since the shawls are unpacked, I decided that I should do some videos for them also.  I wanted to do them outside showing the colours of the shawls in natural light, but the cold Artic air and the garden not being at its best, this means that I have to find a spot inside.  The slate fireplace in the studio made for a lovely backdrop.  The navy echo shawl is a good example on how well a video can help customers to see the true colours of the shawl, the green and magenta in the warp is quite hard to see in photos.

Looking at the shop I still need to top up the photos for about ten items; mainly for the knitted items and the skeins.  Hopefully I’ll get a couple more nice days for the product photography and maybe some more videos!

Final photo is of my orange, grow outside in Canada!  It was hard to tell when the orange was ripe, but the internet told me that when all the leaves fall off the tree the orange would be ripe.  Well there were still some leaves on the tree but one morning the orange had fallen off the tree, so I considered it done.  We cut it open to look inside, there is a lot of pith and the juice is quite bitter and we found three seeds inside!

Tea Towels Just Keep On Rolling Off the Looms

The blue tea towels are off the loom, here they are waiting to be cut into twos and then the raw edges sewed to stabilize before going into the wash.  I machine wash and machine dry my tea towels before hemming.

I also steam press the tea towels before hemming, I think that it easier to fold up the hem.

It can be hard to choose which side is the right side.  There isn’t much difference between the two sides but with the tea towel on the right the pink stripe creates triangles which I think looks better.

It has been a cold and rainy June-uary but the last couple of days have been nice enough to sit outside and hand hem the tea towels.

I will give the tea towels one more steam pressing before I take product pictures so they can go into the shop.  Hopefully they will be available by next week.

Speaking of Etsy I’m part of a prototype group for testing videos in listings.  So I’ve been learning how to video my scarves.

Each video is only about 15 seconds long but it still seems to take a while to video each scarf!   I hope that the videos will help to show the true colour of the scarves because frankly sometimes the still photos just blah out!  Here is a sample video.

Since I live on an island there is always going to be wind, and I think that the wind adds drama and interest to the video.

Final garden shot is Salvia microphylla ‘Hot Lips’ and Jagged Leaf Verbena.  The Salvia looks like little Canadian flags, perfect for Canada Day on July 1st.

Table Runners Part 4

While I was weaving the grey silk and white cotton table runner something weird happened.  After I advanced the warp I noticed that one of the warp threads was loose, turns out that it had frayed apart.  I think that this is only the second time that I have had a broken warp thread.

I finished the runner with just the tiniest amount of silk left on the pirn.  The runner ended up being 58 inches long on the loom, honestly longer than I thought.  I was sure that the silk would run out at about 40 inches.

For the last runner I threw caution to the wind and used a coral coloured cottolin.  It is amazingly pretty.  The coral just glows against the cream warp.

The cottolin is a thicker grist then the grey silk so it woven up slightly wider than the grey silk.  I had to add venetian blinds around the cloth beam to support the wider width of the coral runner.  If you don't give the extra width support it will pull the warp tension tighter at the edge as it travels around the cloth beam at a different rate.

This warp seemed to be just as dusty as the last runner warp with the pima cotton.  Although this warp produced some impressive stalactites and stalagmites made from dust under and on the loom.  We are truly embracing our blog name and creating amazing 'dust bunnies'.

I have cut the runners off the loom and have machine sewed the edges to stabilize them before washing.  I’m hoping that I can wash them tomorrow; a nice, sunny day has been forcast.

Now that the runners are off the loom I’m trying to find my next project by going through some old Handwoven magazines.  I’m also doing some homework for my weaving study group; we are looking at weaving layers, like double weave/pique/Finnweave/Bedford cords/swivel/deflected double weave and the ilk.

This January has been record breaking as one of the rainiest and cloudiest in the last 60 years.  So it has been hard to take photos of the new pima cotton table runners but we finally had some sunny weather so here are the beauty shots for the pima cotton runners.

The pima cotton and blue bamboo rayon runner.  For Sale.

The pima cotton and green cotton runner.  For Sale.

And I also finally got photos of the fine white cotton and blue bamboo runner.  For Sale.

Final Garden Shot is of our first crocuses pushing up through last years alyssum.  These used to be in the front garden but the deer would eat the blossoms clean off, so I moved them to a cool spot in the back garden and hoped.  I am very surprized about how many flowers there are!  They started out with only 5 free bulbs that came with a seed order.

Handwoven Garment Number Three

I’ve finished my second vest using Ngaire’s yardage.  This time rather than drafting my own pattern, I used an old favourite, McCalls 7407.  I have used this pattern before with pretty good success, so I thought I’d make my life easier.

I’ve again used decorative river stones to hold the pattern in place while I’m sorting out where the pieces will best fit.  I love this trick as it is much easier than pinning and unpinning each piece as you move them around.

This is a fully lined vest, so I did the same again with the lining.  I have a real beef with the linings that are available to me on the Island.  We have a very limited selection and sadly lower quality than what I would have wished for.

I will fast forward through all the sewing as it really was very straightforward and move on to where the real angst began.

I wanted to show that this was a truly handmade garment and there is no better way to do that than with embellishment.

My first thought was to make tassels on each side of the bodice.  My thought was to attach a cord and make a loop on each side and pull them over one another giving a loose tie.   Hmmmmm, no!

Then I thought I would make a tassel cord.

I used Bamboo 7 for the three strand cord and slip knotted it into a loop.  I made the tassel using the slip knot for the centre of the tassel.  Then using basic wrapping created the tassel.

The idea for the vest was to use buttons on each side of the bodice and loop the tassel over them to act as a closure.

Out came the button box and then I spent a blissful hour picking and sorting through them.  I became very nostalgic because this was something I did as a child, sitting on the living room carpet sorting away!

Buttons were chosen and the tassel was hung....nope, it didn’t work and it made the bodice sag.

My solution was cheap and cheerful, hook and eye closure.  Sometimes the simplest really are the best.

I think it worked well and it quietly makes sure that the neckline remains in place, showing off the nice scoop neck.

Our fashion show at the guild is next week and I feel really happy to be able to show all three of the garments made from Ngaires yardage projects.  This lovely Capelette, the Open Backed Vest and this vest.