We're Baaack!!!

The last month or two have been hectic times around here, so my apologies to my regular readers for my absence! My sister-in-law was visiting from Australia and we were constantly on the go, showing her the sights of Vancouver Island. The rest of the time has been spent on never ending landscaping, but oh, how beautiful it’s all beginning to look!

The 2/8 Tencel warp that I had on the loom was a study in frustration and although I did manage to get one of the two planned scarves woven; I must admit that I gave into my annoyance and cut the rest of the warp off the loom without weaving it! This turned out to be a decision I’ve since regretted…..the pattern is stunning! It's a 12 shaft advancing twill.

This shows the light and dark sides of the scarf.

I was having constant selvedge challenges and it was slowing me down while watching the selvedges for mouse nibbles. I’ve since discovered the culprit was the tension on my end feed shuttle.

I regularly walk around ‘Lily Louet’ my 12 shaft countermarche loom, and tighten up all the screws but I never check my end feed shuttles! My friend Susan at Thrums, suggested that tension could be the problem and she was absolutely right; while I was weaving miles and miles of warp it was getting looser and looser, to the point that my weft was pulling out very sloppily and causing this problem. It’s fixed now!

I’ve very hurriedly taken a few photos of the scarf and they really don’t do it justice. This scarf is sooooo amazingly iridescent and I just couldn’t capture it in this light.

This is such a beautiful scarf but I’m not thrilled with the selvedges so it’s going to be mine, mine, mine! I love the colour combination and I will weave again but I may choose a lighter azure blue to really showcase the iridescence.

On a completely other track, I received a shipment of silk and 50/50 wool/silk in the mail a few weeks ago which I ordered from Superior Carpet Mills who are selling off ‘mill ends’.  If any of you are in Canada and would like their contact information, just email me and I'll pass it on.

I received 4 pounds of silk and 3.5 pounds of 50/50 wool/silk blend  the idea is so that I can use my silk stash which is in very bright colours as well as my handspun yarn stash.

I had requested grey, silver and cream and sent them paint chips with yarn samples for a colour match. Luckily they still had these colours in stock.

My request for grey blue, grey green and navy unfortunately couldn’t be filled, so after a quick phone conversation I asked for chocolate brown and copper, which should go with much of my stash...hopefully!

More Hand Dyed Cotton

I was looking through the stash and I found some more hand dyed cotton, it was hiding in the bottom of the tub!  Mum and I thought that we had used it all up with the blue scarves, pink scarves, purple scarves and gray scarves, but no...it was there!

This is 2/8 cotton in hunter green.  I thought that it would be great to use in an overtly masculine scarf using a pattern in A Weaver’s Book of Eight Shaft Patterns edited by Carol Strickler that I think looks like bugs.  What can be more masculine than a bug?!

The warp is stripes of the green cotton and a really lovely gold that didn't photograph at all well.  The pattern is a two shuttle weave with the same colours.  I am really disappointed on how the pattern is working out.  The bugs are hard to see! 

Here is a close up and you can see that the buglike pattern is mostly created from the interaction of the two colours.

I don’t like my edges either, I had placed a twill tape down the edges but I don’t like the result.  And to top it all off the scarf feels  too thick; that's when I realized that I had set the epi wrong.

I didn’t like weaving the scarf, I had set it up wrong, and the pattern wasn’t working so I cut it off.  Usually I would have unwoven the scarf to save the warp and then reworked the entire scarf but I just didn’t want to do all the work for some warp that I didn’t really like.

After cutting it off, the sample relaxed and I could see the bugs!  I'm glad that the scarf is off, I just didn’t like weaving it at all!  My loom was only empty for an hour before I had another warp on it, this time another table runner warp.

Some of the cotton scarves are in our Esty shop - Woven Beauty.  There is three blue scarves and one pink scarf.  The purple scarves have not made up yet but soon!

Slow Progress

There has been so much going on lately that weaving has definitely taken second place!

Two weeks ago I had dental surgery that set me completely on my butt for 10 days; it was the anesthetic that did me in, OK, OK and the weird feeling that I have a moon crater in my mouth! My eye tooth, which had a regular root canal treatment done and a few years later had an Endodontic retreatment root canal done, packed up and needed to be pulled!  I was horrified! I will after several months of healing get a tooth implant, but for now I get to wear what my dentist called ‘A Party Tooth!’ It’s a clear plastic mouth guard with a fake tooth…..yup, a real joy!!!!

So long story short ~ I have a warp on the loom, but I’m going nowhere fast!

The warp is coral coloured 2/8 tencel sett at 24 ends per inch. I worked up an Advancing Snowflake pattern in twill on twelve shafts using PCW. I decided to put on enough warp for two scarves, but I want each one to have different coloured weft, so I’ve hung the selvedges. There are 6 weighted film canisters on each edge and to keep them from twisting I’ve threaded them through a small plastic mesh.

This photo shows the first pattern repeat ~ this scarf is woven with Azure blue 2/8 tencel weft. This is the dark side, mostly teal with coral peeking through.

This photo is of the other side of the scarf where the coral colour is the background with a teal pattern. Hopefully this will become clearer once the web is off the loom and fulled.

Each pattern repeat is 158 picks long, so it’s pretty slow going ~ I just can’t get it memorized, but I do get into the swing a little bit when it follows numeric runs…..

My sister in law is visiting us from Oz (even though she is a New Zealander, Sydney is where she lives now), so I expect that this scarf may be a ‘work in progress’ for awhile. We have spent our days discovering our local beauty spots and towns ~ a great ‘staycation’ for us!  However; I have a nice silk yarn order arriving in 7-10 days so I really want to get this warp off the loom so I can play with the new yarn!

Here's a quick link to Woven Beauty where you can visit our shop. 

Piano Scarf Redux

I thought that the piano scarf would be a great addition to our Esty store, Woven Beauty.  Esty is about unique handmade items and this piano scarf is it in a nutshell!

I wanted to try something completely different with the piano scarf (as always!) so instead of using chenille I decided to use rayon as the warp and weft.  I thought that it would give the scarf a lovely shine and drape.

I started weaving and l didn’t like the look of the rayon at all as weft.  The ppi was correct but it looked too loose and I was afraid that washing the scarf wouldn’t close up the mesh like texture.  I also thought that the scarf felt terribly rough. 

The scarf looked gray and washed out from a distance, instead of the dramatic look I was seeking.  I also didn’t like the spotted look of the black keys, so all in all ~ not what I wanted.

I did what I seem to do every time lately and unwove the scarf and started again.  I used chenille as the weft and I was so much happier.  The chenille fills in the warp and it is much more forgiving when placing the keys, it also enhances the strong colour blocking that I wanted.

The chenille worked much better than the rayon but I do prefer the one hundred percent chenille piano scarves that I did previously.  One of the thoughts about using rayon was that I could have a fringe but again I prefer the look of the our first piano scarves with the point at the ends.  The photo shoot for the piano scarf was a little tricky, I wanted to show off the fact that the scarf has all 88 keys. 

I like the look of the piano scarf but I always forget how long it takes to weave and how finicky it is using the clasped weft technique.  But it is worth it for the end product as it is completely reversable and that can't be achieved using double weave or summer and winter.

The scarf can be found here on Etsy if you'd like to own it!

Table Runners in Twill

We have been really concentrating on getting the Esty shop loaded with inventory.  When we first opened the shop we were photographing all the items on a grey background but we noticed that the majority of people on Esty who were being featured on the front page were using a white background.  So we tried some items on a white background and it made a huge difference! We are retaking all the photos – it is a lot of work!

Above is before on a grey background and below is on white background.

But there has been some weaving going on too!  I put on a 2/8 navy cotton warp enough for two table runners.  I like using navy instead of black because navy adds a warmth and depth of colour to the finish product.   The weft for the first runner is a lovely leaf green cottolin.  It is hard to get a good photo of the colour, but trust me it is pretty!

The pattern is a fancy twill on 8 shafts; I really like the large boxes and strong diagonal lines of this pattern.  I had reached the halfway point, about 30 inches, when I noticed it – the treadling mistake!

I had written down the pattern wrong, I had transposed two numbers a 78 instead of 87, so the entire piece was wrong.  I did the only thing that I could – I unwove the runner.  It is much faster to weave this pattern then it is to unweave!  I had to take it back all the way to the 2 inch border.  But it was totally worth it as the finished runner is stunning. 

The green runner went up on Esty last week and it sold this week!  Woo Hoo!
For the second runner I changed the treadling so that it would be different from the first runner.  I made a two diamond repeat that is really pretty.  The weft is bronze linen that makes a dramatic statement for the runner.

Unfortunately I ran out of weft before I got the desired length that I had planned for but it will make a lovely centrepiece for someone’s table.  Here is the Esty listing for the bronze table runner.

I really enjoyed weaving these table runners - so much so that I have put another table runner warp onto the loom!

Done, Done and Done!

Surprisingly this week has been a good one for getting things completed! Usually the summer months are a complete bust for weaving and blogging because I’m working in the veggie garden. Sadly, we didn’t have time to get the veggie garden developed in this new house, so I’ve had time to spare in the past few days.

The first project I’ve completed is the hand dyed cotton scarf that was woven in the spring. The scarf was lovely, but it just lacked something….and it was pizzazz!

I hauled it out and started beading and shirring it following the pattern blocks ~ the time was well spent because I think it looks wonderful!

The beads are studded along the selvedges and when the scarf is worn they pop up and glint in the sun….really special.

Last night as ‘Maillot Jaune’ powered past the finish line on the second to last leg of the Tour, I completed the actual knitting on my Tour de France cardigan.

I’ve just pinned it together and will do the final seaming tonight while I watch ‘The Boys’ sail down the Champs Elysées and complete the race. This project has taken me 21 stages to complete and even though I’m not thrilled with the wool quality ~ I love the cardigan. Fingers crossed that it fits once it’s blocked!

My husbands’ sister will be flying in from Australia in a few weeks. I’ve been working at relocating the stuff stored in the closet and making the room really pretty for her. I’ve been on the hunt for night tables that will bracket the bed but it’s been a difficult search. If I liked them they were either the wrong colour, too dark, too heavy or too big….isn’t that always the way!

Ngaire found these two plant stands and from there a project began. The scale, the price and the airiness were perfect ~ now to make them personalized and unique.
I wanted to bring some bold colour into the room, but to keep it in small amounts; so we decided to cover the triangular plant pots with a printed fabric.

This is the fabric we chose – boldly graphic, but still keeping it traditional for my French yellow and white room.

I made templates and cut out the fabric, then the fun part began ~ we used Modge Podge to affix the fabric to the metal pots. I couldn’t believe how easy and fun it was. We used two coats and it was all dry in one day.

Now my husband Michael stepped up to the plate and he made the table tops out of white wood planks. This was his first try at beveling edges and he did a fantastic job! We chose to make the table tops 14 inches by 14 inches. Michael made wood frames on the bottoms that fit into the plant stand openings, keeping the tops in place. He then sanded like mad and then two coats of pale green paint and one coat of polish and ~TA-DA, they are done.

They are completely fun and do the job without making the room feel too full of furniture and came in at just $40.00 each!  I took this photo in my foyer, it's the only place the light was right.

Unexpected Echo

We’ve changed the name of our Etsy shop today and have chosen to call it Woven Beauty to better describe our scarves. Today we were featured in our ninth Treasury so that means that we are finally being found on that humongous site!  Still waiting for our first sale though....sigh....

Here’s the link if you want to check out our Woven Shibori Scarf in the latest.
www.etsy.com/treasury/MTgwNTE5MDl8MjcyMDUwMTY4NQ/cool-summer-blues

The final scarf to come off the blue and green Echo Weave warp and it is not at all what I expected.
I rarely, hmmmm that would be never ~ choose to weave a scarf with a white weft, but this time the white 2/8 Tencel seemed to beckon.

I was more than a little amazed at the result! This scarf was treadled exactly the same as the last one, just the colour of the weft has changed from coral to white, but the result is astonishingly different.
The Tencel and the rather close sett that Echo Weave needs brings a high lustrous sheen to the scarf. The missing piece to the weave structure is the split complementary weft colour; so there are no unexpected colours coming through as the warp and weft interact. On the last scarf I got turquoise from the blue/green/coral combination!

What I do have ~ besides a whole bunch of pretty! ~ is a scarf that is predominately white on one side with a green motif at each selvedge and a larger blue motif running down the centre. These strong motifs were not really noticeable on the other two scarves, but are front and centre on this one!

The other side of the scarf appears more azure blue with white motifs running down the selvedges and a darker blue/green centre panel. As I said, it was a completely unexpected bonus feature!

I’ve been glued to the PVR every evening watching Le Tour de France and I’ve been knitting madly as they race over the flats and slog up the mountains.

This is the pattern I’m weaving. I chose something pretty simple because frankly, my attention has been on the screen not on my knitting!

I purchased the wool in New Zealand on my last visit and thought it was time to use it. Unfortunately I’ve been plucking all sorts of short cuts of wool from between the ply as I’ve been knitting. Ending up with a ¼ cup at the end of a session is not unusual…..and a real pain in the butt!

I have finished the back and both front sides…..

The cardigan is basically plain stocking stitch with these funky little rows at the collar to add interest.
We’ve still got a week of watching ‘The Boys’ and I started the sleeves tonight!