12 Shaft Fancy Snowflake Twill

I am a little behind on my blog posts; I wove these scarves in October.  But they are so pretty that I still think that they are worth a blog post.

The first scarf is a hand painted silk warp, it is actually the last one from a dye day in 2016.  The bottom two warps have already been woven and blogged about here.  The warp is a really pretty blue and soft green.

I thought that a weft for this warp would be really hard to find, but I really lucked out.  I only had to try two wefts, a dark teal and a light teal.  Right away I could tell that the dark teal was the winner.

The pattern is a 12 Shaft fancy snowflake twill; the pointy jagged diamonds in the dark teal really highlight the shifting colours, especially the green.

The finished scarf is really spectacular.  The pattern definitely highlights the painted silk warp and it is one that I will use again.  It has sold.

The second scarf is from the same dye day but it is a Tencel warp.  We had two large cones of buttercup yellow (I don’t know why) so we pulled yellow Tencel warps to over dye.  This warp was split into five stripes, and then two of the stripes were flipped before dyeing.  After the warp was dyed the two stripes were flipped back and that creates the striped effect.

I like to get out all the bins of Tencel so I can see every colour that we have.  The bins have been separated into colour families.  There is a neutral/yellow bin, a red/orange bin and not shown are the blue/green and purple bins.

This warp was dyed in autumnal colours of brown, orange and gold with some of the original yellow showing through.  The brown dye has broken a little and there is some green too.  There is a lot of brown in the warp so picking a weft colour was a little tricky.  I tried straw, gold, taupe and orange.

I went with the orange, I know that a lot of people hate orange but it was the best choice for the scarf.  The pattern is the same tie up and treadling as the first scarf, but I changed the threading.  I like to change up the threading or treadling and reuse the tie up especially when the tie up is for twelve shafts!

The scarf is very bright and autumnal.  It has also already been sold, but this time at my weaving guilds Christmas Sale.

Final Garden Shot is the two hummingbirds that have staked out our humming bird feeder.  We have two feeders and we switch them out every hour so the hummingbirds can have unfrozen food all during the daylight hours.  We also bring them in at night.  This week is the first cold weather we have had this winter, it is our version of the polar vortex, it is going down to -8 C but feeling like -15 C.

Eight Shaft Tea Towels

January is synonymous with tea towel weaving month for me, so very satisfying after the holiday season.  I take the time while weaving a straightforward pattern to make sure my posture at the loom is correct.  Weaving tea towels is  comfortable enough for me that I can concentrate on my throw and really think about technique, balance and comfort.

To that end I wanted to put on tea towels that used only one weft, so I found a pattern that would give me lots of interest without any colour changes.  I found this lovely 8 shaft Scandinavian pattern called Korndräll.  FYI  dräll in Swedish means twill.

I put on a 535 end warp in white 2/8 cotton and put enough warp on the loom to weave 6 tea towels.  Working towards my ‘always years’ resolution (because I make this one every year) to use up odds and sods of weft, I wove each in a different colour.  I know I have enough weft to finish a 36 inch long tea towel if I have more than 2 ounces on the tube of cotton.

The pattern really shows off the warp colours and is the same on the reverse side.

Here they are just off the loom.

Ready to stabilize the hems and wet finish.

All done.....you’ll notice that there are only 5 in this photo; and that is because the wine red towel ran like crazy.  The white warp still has a slight pink tinge to it even after soaking in warm water with dye catchers.  Lesson learned, no red and white; and yet another tea towel for me!  Another lesson learned is that this pattern has quite substantial width take up; I put 22 inches of warp on the loom and after tumble drying I ended up with 16 1/4 inches of width.  The upside of this is that these are beautifully lofty absorbent towels.

I have already pulled the warp for my second batch of 4 tea towels using what was the same colours that were left over from the wefts on these towels, minus the wine red.  I did however, take the pattern and made each square larger and made the warp 601 threads,  I am still debating about weft.

The final garden shot is not a living plant at all.  This is all that is left of my lovely Himalayan Birch tree that we had to remove last autumn.  What a lovely reminder of a lovely tree.

The Guild of Canadian Hand Weavers Samples for 2018 Overview

Woven during the Summer of 2017, but we saved the posts until the samples had all been mailed to the Guild members, because  we didn't want to gazump them and spoil the surprise!

The Qualicum Weavers and Spinners Guild decided to do the samples for the Guild of Canadian Hand Weavers newsletter to be mailed out in 2018.  There are four newsletters per year with a weaving sample in each one.

The sample theme we went with is how many different weave structures could we weave using the same threading and tie up?  We decided on a 4 shaft threading and a 2/2 twill tie with plain weave.

The first sample is the base sample, a 4 shaft crackle threading woven as drawn in. This one was Mums.

The second sample is woven as twill, using a M’s and W’s treadling and was woven by Linda Wilson.

The third sample is woven as Swedish Lace and was woven by Pat Collins.

The fourth sample is mine and is woven as polychrome crackle woven with a traditional crackle.  I had intended for this sample to be polychrome crackle with an echo treadling, which it kind of is because the traditional crackle treadling is interleaving of a twill and plain weave but . . . it is stretching the definition of an echo weave.

It was really fun and easy to weave the samples.  In the previous posts I’ve shared how we did it so if anyone is interested in doing the newsletter samples will have an idea of what to expect.

Guild of Canadian Hand Weavers Bulletin Samples Part 2

The samples have been woven and this blog post is about what happens next to the samples.  I put the finished fabric on the counter so I could make sure that I had enough samples.  Thankfully I hadn’t miscounted otherwise I would have had to put on another warp!

Then the monster sample was washed and hung it up to dry.  It quickly dried in the summer sun.

The next step is to iron a small chunk of the samples, I did about 10 rows.  Then place a piece of plastic between the ironing board and the sample fabric.  Make up your glue solution 1/3 Elmer’s School Glue and 2/3 water.  Using a paint brush, brush this solution onto the waste yarn between the samples.  We then used a blow dryer to speed up the drying of the sample.

When the glue is dry remove the plastic sheet and add rotary cutting board in its place.  Cut the small section of samples free.  Repeat the steps of ironing, gluing and cutting until done with the large sample piece.  I have to admit that this took awhile!

Almost done, just need to cover a table with a plastic sheet and place the now small sections of samples on it.  Use the same glue solution to paint the lines of waste yarn between each sample.  The glue will sit on top of the yarn so a paint brush is needed to force the glue between the fibres.  Be generous with the glue.  I placed it outside to dry and move onto the next section.

The sections are dry and now it is time to cut all the samples apart.  We found it was easier to use scissors then a rotary cutter as it dulled the rotary cutter immediately and replacing that can be expensive.  If you have a friend or a loved one to help to it goes quite fast, about an hour.

Now the samples are all separate and  ready to be sent to the Bulletin newsletter editor.

We sent three out of the four draft samples in one box.  Each set of samples was wrapped with plastic to keep the samples dry and a paper copy of the draft was attached.  An email copy of each draft was also sent to the Bulletin newsletter editor.  And that was it, done!

Final Garden Shot is the strikingly veined leaves from the Lords and Ladies (Arum italicum).  Spring is in the air!

Guild of Canadian Hand Weavers Bulletin Samples Part 1

Now that the Guild of Canadian Weavers has had a chance to mail out their newsletter for 2018, I can tell you all about making the samples for the year. A small group of us from the Qualicum Weavers and Spinners Guild decided to volunteer to weave the samples for the year.  We chose to use Orlec for the samples as it has lots of bright and bold colours, it is also very easy to use and readily available in Canada.  Mum did the math and worked out that for each set of samples we would need 3 8oz tubes of warp, 3 8oz tubes of weft and ½ tube of contrast yarn for spacers in both warp and weft.  To be on the safe side we choose to order an extra tube for the warp and weft as it would be the same dye lot if we needed it.

The warp length was 8.5 yards long and 606 ends for each of the samples.  Mum did the Spring 2018 sample and I did the Winter 2018 sample. Each warp was six samples wide.

I pulled each bout of samples separately, 96 threads plus the 6 threads of the separating yarn.  I had two thread colours in the warp so it took a little longer to pull but each bout took me 40 minutes, so fairly time consuming.

The warp pulled on beautifully because of the smoothness of the Orlec, which is orlon fibre.  We did 6 samples across, for a width of 25 inches.  The samples were 4 inches wide in the reed; we decided that we liked large samples, so the recipients could really see a good section of the weave.

The sample is a four shaft crackle but I separated out the samples onto 8 shafts because I don’t have enough heddles on shafts 1-4 to do them all.  The threading took 15 minutes for each set of samples, with only 100 threads and on four shafts it was quick.

As the samples are not much wider than a tea towel warp putting the warp through the reed and tying onto the cloth beam didn’t take too much time, but I forgot to time it, I'd guess it was about an hour in all.
The samples are an absolute joy to weave.  Each four inch sample only takes 10 minutes to weave.  It was really easy to find to time to do a couple of repeats at a sitting.

My sample, Winter 2018 was the polychrome crackle.  The warp colours were purple and green and the weft was orange.  Really bright and cheerful.

I did 55 passes of samples to make a total of 330 samples.  There are a couple of extras which is good because I had 3 samples that had errors.  The samples are great also because you get to leave your ends hanging out as they will be clipped later.

The finished fabric is crumpled up on the counter and you can see some of the iridescence starting to appear.

I will leave the samples here for now.  The next blog post is going to be about preparing the samples for the newsletter.

Final Garden Shot is our first snow of the year on the New Zealand Flax.

What's on the Loom 2019

Happy New Year!

It’s nice to take the time to look at what is on the looms, what needs to be finished up and what is the next project.

On Mum’s loom is a seven yard tea towel warp in 2/8 white cotton.  Every January she puts on a tea towel warp!  The weft is a pale greyed purple, almost mushroom coloured and quite exciting.

On my loom is a black and gold shawl in 2/8 Tencel and stunningly lovely.

This year it feels like there are a lot of things that need to be finished.  I need to twizzle the fringe of a shawl plus a scarf for Mum and give them their finishing press.  The scarf is on a coat hanger because it has been hanging in the closet for a while!

I have another scarf drying outside, waiting its turn to be finished.

The next weaving project may not go onto the loom right away, while I catch up on everything, but I already know it is going to be tea towels!

Final photo is of a Victoria Grevillea.  It is an Australian plant and it always blooms in the winter here on Vancouver Island.

Twelve Shaft Silk Scarf and Travel

In mid September I put a warp on the loom using 2/20 silk that I had dyed a year or so ago.  The warp was painted an all over light blue and then mid toned pink splotches were added.  My goal was to get a bit of randomness into the scarf I intended to weave.  I have an immense love for pattern and I really wanted to feature some spontaneity in my colour choices to offset the pattern.

I chose a twelve shaft pattern with a geometric motif that is not quite perfectly linear.  There is a slight flaring and thickening of the diamonds that tend to make it a bit more interesting I think. I found the pattern in a book and had to make a number of corrections to fix very long floats.

After my usual pfaffing around with wefts I chose to weave the silk with tencel weft in grey blue.  I warped the loom and started weave a few inches and before I knew it, it was the end of September and the beginning of what I think of as ~ trip time!

At the end of September we were off to Italy on a three week holiday.  We were headed to Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria, so we really were going to see Italy from heel to toe!  Our flights were enough to put me off travel forever!  We seemed to have to transfer planes constantly and had really tight connections ... so very stressful!

Italy was magical as always and this part of Italy is moderately less travelled.  Our trip was archaeology and architecture focused and we saw everything from Roman ruins to Baroque churches in Puglia.  I cannot begin to tell you how wonderful it was, with amazing food and wine and weather, but I’ll share a few photos.

These are the Roman ruins of Egnazia which is still being excavated, it was a stop on the via Appia and this part of Puglia has 1000 year old olive trees which are amazing.

Alberobello Puglia is a Unesco site and home to the Trulli architecture which was stunning.

We moved on to Mattera in Basilicata which is the Unesco European City of Culture 2019.  Happily we were there before it hits it really big.  It was once known as the shame of Italy as people were living in hill caves right up until 1952 without any plumbing or electricity.   When we were there they were using the old village for a Bollywood movie!

Calabria was my least favourite part of the trip and frankly it was only because it was studded with piles of garbage and plastic floating in the wind.  The highlight was seeing the Riace Bronzes in Reggio, luckily we got there early in the day and had the Museo Nazionale almost to ourselves.

Now that I’m back home and our annual Guild sale is behind me, I am going to sit at the loom and finish that scarf! Well... and bake... when I come home all I want to do is bake and enjoy being home, this is Martha Stewarts Marbelized Roulade before baking, I took it to a dinner party and what a hit!