Three Projects in the Works

My last project ~ the handspun and wool/silk shawl is off the loom, washed and dried and not what I envisioned ~ I saw it as being deeply pleated and….the pleats are really a lot shallower and floppier than I’d hoped.

The other HUGE problem is that my handspun is streaky, really, really streaky and not in a good way streaky!

The third problem was not so big, but still not what I’d hoped ~ the colour in my 50/50 Silk Wool blend ran like a cheetah. I swear about half of the dye abanoned ship in the wash! I had started out with a warm milk chocolate brown and ended up with a toffee brown, but oh man is it ever soft!

Ahhh well, best laid plans and all that! I’ll just have to wait and see what I can do with it! This is the third project I’ve woven with handspun and so far I’m batting a big fat zero!

Today to make myself feel better I pulled a 2/5 Perle cotton warp in black for a series of table runners. I’m hoping to make 2 runners about 50 inches each and a table square. The length of each will vary depending on how the pattern repeats work out, but I know that I want to hem them, so I need a 3 inch border to work with and how ever many pattern repeats gets me close to about 50 inches. I’m using the same basic pattern as this one. Ngaire has worked out three treadling variations so each runner will be unique, and I know they are a fun weave. I've got the warp threaded so I'm almost ready to roll.

Last April……I know……six full months ago….I warped up my Louet Jane loom with bookmarks! Sadly there it sat, looking mournfully at me each and every day. I love to weave bookmarks, but not one at a time ~ on my last project I wove 5 at a time, you can see them here, but because this loom is smaller I’m only doing 3 at a time.

All three of the warps are Bambu 7, two in black and one in taupe. I will be using various wefts (insert flying by the seat of my pants here), but my plan is to use matching coloured linen for the tabby picks to make them nice and firm. Well, that’s the plan ~ see above for best laid plans and how oft they go awry for me lately!

This May we planted 2 tiny fig trees in our garden and amazingly we got fruit to harvest. Well, only one fig, but it was a huge fig!

We ate this beauty as part of our ‘amuse bouche’ course at Thanksgiving. It was so good wrapped in Parma ham with lettuce, Dijon mustard and topped with a jaunty yellow Winter Pansy!

Project Based on Handspun Merino

I've been longing to weave using my handspun yarn for a while, but haven’t found just the right project until now. The yarn I’ve chosen to use in this project was black and brown merino sliver that I bought from Aurelia Fibers. I then cherry picked a package of ‘firestar’ and pulled out all the weird coloured fibres and just kept the gold and purple. I spun this blend loosely in a semi-worsted style making sure I got a fairly even blend of black and brown. I didn’t have a huge amount of the sliver, and I knew I wanted to use it as warp, so I plied it with a very fine black linen yarn. The idea was to reduce the ‘sproing’ factor and it worked! I’m really pleased with the result!

My plan was to weave a shawl using my handspun and some of the new 50/50 Silk Wool blend I’d just purchased. I also wanted to have two unique sides to the shawl and to have surface interest.  Here's my draft.

I decided to go with an 8 shaft pattern of bands of 1/3 twill and 3/1 twill which will give me pleats of solid brown 50/50 wool silk and handspun on one side and all black handspun on the other. The little bit of 'firestar' in the handspun really makes the yarn sparkle!

I didn’t want to use my favourite Schacht end feed shuttle because it just doesn’t hold all that much of this fairly uneven yarn, so I used this 15 inch Little Man Howell shuttle which holds an amazing amount of yarn. What you can get on this shuttle is astonishing!

I didn’t have a temple that was wide enough (well, actually I do have one, but it’s a Leclerc rug stretcher and it’s really heavy and so not a good choice for this lightweight fabric), so I made this simple home made version using paper clips, string and weights.  It hangs over the sides of the loom and really, really works!

I filled film canisters with pennies for the weights ~ this is a great solution and I found the idea here.

Side number 1 of my pattern consists of 2 inch stripes of handspun and commercial yarn alternating and you can already see how it’s already starting to pleat! I sett the yarn at 12 epi and hopefully this is not too close a sett. I didn’t want a sleazy fabric and I know that twill needs more epi than plain weave, so I’m still at the ‘fingers crossed’ stage and hope it works out.  As you can see from the streaking, my handspun was a tad unevely blended.....ahhh but that's the nature of the beast!

Side number 2 was really hard to photograph, but you can just make out the pleats and the all over handspun with each 2 inch stripe.

I'm almost finished and can't wait to see how it washes and pleats.

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!