What’s on the looms on the first week of January

First of all, Happy New Year!  

Every year we have a little tradition to show what is on the looms on January first.  It’s a little late this year but better late than never.

Starting with Mom’s loom she has finished one scarf with the parallel threading in orange and green Tencel and the weft is a blue/purple Tencel (here is the blog post) and she is getting ready to start scarf number two.

On my loom is piles of white linen, I’ve decided to reweave the table runners that I messed up at the end of last year (here is the blog post).

The garden photo is of a Mexican Orange Blossom (Choisya ternata) with the first flower blooming!  What a lovely sight in January.

Diversified Plain Weave Fleur de Lis

 I’ve decided that it’s time to tackle a project that is quite challenging and that has been on my bucket list for awhile.

A couple of years ago my guild study group project was to explore Diversified Plain Weave.  The end result of my study was that I developed a pattern for a Fleur de Lis.  Ngaire posted a really good explaination of the ins and outs of diversified plain weave here.

I wanted to weave this pattern as a table runner so I began hunting through my yarn ‘stash’ for an appropriate warp yarn.  I found a 2/8 mercerized cotton and a 2/16 orlec in white that will do nicely.  The warp for diversified plain weave is two thin ends followed by 2 thick ends; the best ratio is that the thin ends should be 1/2 the grist of the thick ends.

I pulled the warp of 746 ends in three bouts, alternating 2 thin and 2 thick ends.  I had 372 ends in 2/8 cotton and 374 2/16 orlec ends by the end of it.  

I was well into pulling the warp and I thought that my 2/8 cotton (it was labled that way) just felt ‘un-cottony’.  So I did a burn test and, it was definately not cotton, the melted blob at the end proves it isn’t cotton at all!  I was much too far along to do anything but to proceed.

Diversified Plain Weave is in no way a balanced weave because of the tie down threads.  My pattern called for 186 ends on shafts 1 and 2 and a whopping 236 on shaft three, the rest have only 16 ends on them.  My loom is set up to have 100 ends on every shaft, so moving heddles was on the agenda.

To move heddles on the Louet Spring Loom is daunting to say the least.  My first job was the count out the heddles to move from the back shafts.  I took 80 each from the back 4 shafts.  To make sure the texsolve heddles don’t twist during transport I put a blue twist tie through the top and bottom of the back of each heddle bundle and a black twist tie through the front. 

Now comes ‘biting penguin’ time.  These little holder/adjuster thingamabobbies are lethal!  To get the heddles off the shaft you have to pull the texsolve shaft lines out of the adjusters, hold the two ends of the shaft open and move over the heddles, then re-affix the shafts.  Let me tell you, there are always tears and broken finger nails!  Now to do the whole process again to add the heddles to the front three shafts.

My plan told me that I was going to beam the runner at 24 ends per inch, so I put the warp threads though the raddle on top of my loom as 6-6-0-6-6 ends to spread it evenly.  I was almost half way done and had far too many ends left.

So I went to the computer and had another look at my plan and saw that I had counted the 2 thick ends as one, since they are duplicates.   In fact I don’t have 24 epi I have 34 epi, so I had to move every thread over.....can you see a pattern here.....gotta check things out before I jump ahead!

The threading was pretty simple because most of the ends are on the first 3 shafts.  I have decided to lash on the warp this time.  Generally I tie on my warps (see here for how I do it), but yet again I hadn’t think things through!  I hadn’t actually thought about how long the runner(s) would be before I pulled the warp.   I wanted to get three runners – small, medium and large out of this warp and so saving as much warp as possible was key.

After the warp was loosely lashed on, I tightened the tension and kept my eye on how tight the lashed on bouts were.  As I started to feel them tighten I checked the overall tension by running my hand on the warp web behind the beater bar.  This gives you the most accurate feel.

Now that a few of the bouts were pretty tight, it was time to play the lashing like a harp.  You find the loosest bouts and pluck the slack up and distribute it to the tighter bouts.  The end result is a very even tension.

To splay the warp web evenly I put in a couple of venetian blinds and then a couple of thick soft yarns and now I’m ready to start.

At this point I know I want three runners.  My table is 71 inches long with a 2 inch drop over the edge; so I knew that my longest runner had to be about 80 inches to allow for hem and take up.  The shortest should be about 50 inches including hems and the middle length is somewhere around 66.  Since I have never woven this pattern I have no idea what height each of Fleur de lis motifs will turn out, so I will start with the smallest runner and figure out how much between each motif by trail and error.

 My garden photo today is of my lovely little garden shed.  My husband built it out of HardiPlank several years ago and here it is on it’s final day before we start tearing it down.  We have ordered a greenhouse and this just had to go!

Grey Striped Tea Towels

I am doing another set of tea towels; they are a great summer weave because you can play in the garden in the morning then in the hot summer afternoons weave a tea towel.  I went back to an old tried and true tea towel draft Mom and I have both used multiple times.  Here it is in an Easter Egg Plaid, here in Grey with Purple Stripes, here in Grey with Yellow Stripes, here in Grey and Red Stripes and here in Caribbean Blue Stripes.  It is a much loved 8 shaft false damask, which is based on a 1/3 broken twill instead of 1 /4 satin like a true damask.

I wanted to do the grey stripes again with a different colour as the accent.  I pulled seven different colours and lined them up with the base colours of white, black and three different greys.

The middle grey was the hardest colour to match with; it is a funny shade of grey with a touch of brown.  I ended up choosing the blue because I liked the bright and clear tone of it.

Pulling the warp is when you get the first glimpse of what the tea towels are going to look like and they are going to look great!

When the warp is this pretty it is amazing how fast the threading can go.

The tea towels warp is now ready for me to start weaving.  

Final Garden Photo is a Cardinal Flower (Lobelia cardinalis).  The plant has dark red leaves with these spikes of crimson red flowers.  They are about 3 feet tall and really stand out in the garden.

And an update on the Orange tree (Poncirus trifoliata monstrosa 'Flying Dragon citrus'), we have one orange!

Tea Towels Started

If you remember from the last post I wrote, I was planning to use some of these small bits of 2/8 cotton for my warp.  I worked at the computer for a very long time trying to get stripes of colour and a pattern to work.

In the end I ended up only using one cone of royal blue from the little bits pile.  But the colours for the warp are bright and happy which makes me happy too.  The final colours are in the middle, the royal blue, turquoise, emerald green, peach, pink and white.

I like to pull my tea towels in four small bouts of about 100 threads.  It makes it easy to keep track of the number of threads and the stripes.  It also helps to stop my natural inclination to cram a lot of threads on the warping board.  The problem with cramming a lot of threads on the warping board is that the tension of the threads slightly pulls in the warping board pins which means that your warp gets a little shorter; it can be quite noticeable.

The Louet Spring has a build in raddle at the top of the loom.  It makes quick work of spacing out the warp in preparation of beaming the warp.  But it also comes in handy in double checking your work, this time I missed ten threads in one stripe but I was able to fix it before beaming the warp.  I used to have a Leclerc Minerva and I would lash on a 5 dent raddle to the top of the loom and use it the same way.

I use heavy white bond paper as the separator for the back beam.  We found a very large ream of it many years ago, we are still using it.  I cut new warp paper at the beginning of the year as by the end of the year it is starting to tear from the pulling on it.  I like to cut two different lengths, one 6 yards and one 12 yards.  I use the 12 yard one mainly for tea towels.

There was a rainy day last week and I was able to quickly thread and tie the warp onto the loom.  But it has been nice the rest of the days I’m still working in the garden so the warp is sitting waiting for me.

I pulled out some 2/8 cotton cones that I’m thinking about using for weft.  They are sitting on the corner of the mantle waiting for me to start weaving.

The Garden Photo this week is Blue Speedwell (Veronica ‘Flover  Blue’) and a bush Cinquefoil (Potentilla fruticosa ' Yellow Gem').

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.

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.

Weaving To Frame

I have been home for a couple of weeks now, and I’m ready to jump back into my weaving.

South central Spain was amazing and The Great Mosque of Cordoba was probably one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.  The Great Mosque was begun in 784 and when the Christians conquered Cordoba in 1236 they built a cathedral within the existing mosque.  This place is massive and the Cathedral was built without demolishing the existing Mosque, it is a stunningly beautiful and wonderful place.  The other places that were beyond expectations were The Royal Alcazar in Seville and the Alhambra in Granada, but after weeks away, it’s always nice to be home.

Now back to what is on my loom.  I belong to a study group within our guild, called Exploring More and our challenge this time is to design, weave and frame a piece that could be displayed on a wall.  Sounds easy, right?  I thought so too when I suggested it.

I started looking for things I wanted to weave and the more I thought about it, the less sure I became.  Finally, in a bid to get something on the loom I put on a natural 2/16 cotton warp 2 yards long with 280 ends, 10 inches wide on the loom and sett at 28 epi.

I threaded the loom in a 1-2-3-4 twill and tied up the loom with some options.  Then I went to Spain to enjoy the sunshine.  I have tied the treadles to weave plain weave, treadles to weave twill, treadles to weave dukkagang and treadles to weave basket weave.  I know, I’m really hedging my bets!

Now that I’m ready to begin I went searching for something that would look good on my studio wall; and since I love flowers I started there.  In my dining room I have a lovely watercolour of tulips and that was my inspiration.  I love that this painting is just a suggestion of tulips rather than being too literal, so right up my alley.

I still wasn’t sure how I wanted to weave the tulips so I took some coloured sharpies to the warp to rough in the general shapes.

I’m sorry that I didn’t photograph my efforts so far, but first I started just laying in colour in the general shapes I wanted using the Italian inlay method.  It just looked lumpy and bumpy, so that came out.  Then I started laying in colour blocks in a tapestry method and that was just far more work than I was willing to do, so it has all be pulled out too.

As it stands right now, I will use the natural 2/16 warp cotton and just weave this off as plain weave, then I plan to paint over my rough outline and perhaps do some embellishments.   Hmmm, I have a feeling that going at this all loosey-goosey wasn’t the best idea.  I still have lots of warp to play with, so that's my task for the next few weeks.

The garden shot today is a photo of one of the front garden beds in full autumn glory. It is Dwarf Fothergilla (Fothergilla gardenii 'Mt. Airy) with Japanese Silver Grass (Miscanthus sinesis 'Sarabanda' in behind.