Making Waves 🌊

 Time for a finished project!    Woven on the Megado that doesn't live here anymore, a month or two ago.  It has been so busy here and  this one slipped my mind!    With all the studio rearranging, it was folded and put away....

I wove this pattern a couple of years ago on my old Spring loom and enjoyed it very much. I could see some potential for treadling variations and colour pairings.  I wound a 4 colour gradation from royal blue to deep teal green on my warping mill. It does take some time but I quite enjoy the process.

The warp yarns were 8/2 tencel as they have so many lovely rich  colours:  royal blue, azure, greyed teal and dark teal. The first scarf I used salmon which looks very terracotta to me.   The sett was the usual 24 epi. 

Its a very rich looking mix and there is irridescence!

When it came time to weave up the second scarf and I had to choose a weft colour, I was stumped! Last time I wove this pattern, I used black for one and coral for the other.     I auditioned a few candidates and finally chose lemongrass..... and a different treadling for a whole new look. 

I would have to say it's my favourite of the two.  Sometimes you just have to push through and test your comfort colour barriers!   😊

Here's the draft  which is 8 shafts and I found it on Pinterest, with no credit given to who ever designed it sadly.   The colour gradation was done by me using Fiberworks for Mac. 

Butterfly Scarves 🦋

 You have been very patient and waited for some time.... so right at the top of this post is some 'eye-candy' 🍭

So if I'm down to one loom, and must weave in shorter time increments, then why not have fun with it and try out new ideas, colour blending, new drafts?    So I worked from my existing stash and found three tencel colours that are close in value (depth of shade intensity) and work well with each other.  Why tencel? Well, I have a lot of it and there are some lovely colours to work with.  I used the gradient program in Fiberworks for Mac and did a 3 colour gradation. Some minor tweaks to soften it out and then printed off the colour order.   

I wound the warp one thread or a few more at a time on my warping mill, inching little 'post it notes' across the colour guide.   The draft I had chosen was very open ended for where the colours landed. No points in the draft to hit the mark, so that is a good thing. 

Each of those bouts are hung with 3 pound weights on an 'S" hook. I shifted them every 2-3 feet or so. It was a lot of back and forth but so worth the nicely tensioned warp!

The colours flowed on nicely and looked wonderful! Dark Teal, Iris and Red-Purple

When I took this picture I didn't know that there were two threading errors lurking in that huddle of heddles! 😬

Sleying also had an issue with crossed threads behind the reed.   I was feeling like a real newbie and it seemed like this start was the slowest ever!

Then I finally started weaving and this is what I saw.... I'm weaving it upside down!   So I'm committed to weaving this one, this way at least. The weft is an old gold / bronze age gold (?) 20/2 silk  from Treenway Silks from the stash. 

I end up having some difficulty with the far right teal edge thread. No matter what I tried, it would fray and break.   Advance the warp more frequently, sit closer to the right on the bench, subtley shift the reed in the beater.  I checked for spurs on the dents.   Lifted the floating selvedge up at the end of a session so it doesn't unwind the plies.... and so on.   Eventually, I could see when it was starting to soften, and I would lift and pin the selvedge thread and start again. It was easier to  needle weave stronger ends in than wispy bits of nothing!

Here is the result of the first scarf.... and now you can see the right side.    Its more warp dominant one side, weft faced the other.... but you know, it works nicely to compliment the whole scarf.   The back side does have a ghosting of the pattern visible.  As you can see from the pictures.

So for scarf number two I had to audition some new colour choices....and there was no silk in something suitable unfortunately.   I found  this salmon shade in tencel. They've tried calling it other names such as red clay etc.  I called it the right colour !  I also wove this one upside down and decided that I liked the big reveal when it came off the loom and so would be a surprise. 

The salmon is rather powerful, but still melds all the colours with a blush of colour throughout. It's my favourite of the two scarves.

They measure 9 inches wide by 73 inches long, plus the  swishy fringe.  

This is the draft I used and you may notice somethings are missing.    This is not my draft, or come from a public source such as handweaving.net or other places.    Its not mine to share and credit must be given to the designer / author.

You will find this 16 shaft draft here in this book, on page 122, by Janna van Ledden who designed this and other drafts inside and authored the book.  It has drafts for 8 shaft to 32 shafts and is presented in both Dutch and English. I do recommend reading the section on how to use and read the drafts *first* and to also seriously bump up your heddles on shafts one and two. Or at the very least count them against the draft.  It's a twill and half basket weave as was related to me by Marion Stubenitsky.

There really aren't much for fresh inventive weaving books right now but this book and also Marion's (such as Echo and Iris)  are ones for your book shelf. 

🌷🌷🌷

A Tale of Two Shawls: part 2

The second shawl is all finished and finally photographed.  I find bright sunshine will bleach out the colours much like a flash on the camera. So yesterday there was some high overcast clouds here and it seemed to be the best I could hope for and so I got busy snapping.

The finished dimensions are 21 inches by 83 inches, plus the fringe. So you can elegantly drape the cloth.

The rolled over section around the neck shows the shawl's other side which is slightly more warp dominant. Also, the fuchsia does appear less intense here. The sunshine was still a bit bright, even with high cloud cover.

Between the picture above and below, you can see the iridescent effect.  It somehow reminds me of some of the Venetian fabrics you see in old paintings.

I found the fuchsia 8/2 tencel a bit softly plied and so I had some issue with fraying in the first shawl. This time I used a temple and it went much better, if slower for weaving.  Interestingly, the final width of this shawl was 21 inches, same as the first shawl I didn't use a temple on.  The final length was 83 inches but was woven to the same length on the loom as the first.... so another mystery!

I sure wish my Judy had arms...... she wouldn't look like such a wrapped mummy!  😁

So we have crocus and snowdrops up and other little shoots coming up, and buds appearing on the trees.  We have seen flocks of redwing blackbirds pausing here as they migrate through and  crows flying overhead with nesting material firmly gripped in the beaks.  The new season and life in general  is rolling on but its hard to see any joy when the Ukraine is being bombed into submission by a dictator.

Canada has the highest concentration of Ukrainians and their descendants living outside of the Ukraine and they immigrated here and settled mainly on the prairies.  My parents came to Canada in 1960 and settled in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Our next door neighbours were an elderly Ukrainian  couple and they made our family feel welcome and they became like substitute grandparents to us.   My mother learned how to make cabbage rolls from them and they became a family favourite ever since.   Another memory I have is visiting another Ukrainian family and helping to make perogis by hand and I helped pinch the edges after the filling went in.   They are such warm and generous people and simply don't deserve what is happening to them now.

This is a picture of the couple that lived next door to us and helped to make us feel so welcome.  It's taken at my brother's christening  in 1964 and I was 8 years old.  Sadly, I don't recall their names but I remember the feelings and somehow I think they would be okay with that.....

Canada is once again opening their doors to Ukrainians to come and live with us again and they can be sure of a warm welcome.   🌻🌻🌻

Trials and Tribulations ~ Copper Glow and Magenta Mist

About a week ago I uploaded these pictures getting ready to write a blog post. I was blissfully ignorant of the trials and tribulations ahead.  These have become the last pictures I can access on my computer until I find out if my back up drive has them or not.  

Let me back up here.... (pun intended)  😊

I set up my computer that night to do a back up to an external hard drive and woke the next morning to a back up (great!) and a whole new operating system on my Mac "Big Sur" (really not great).  

That's when I discovered a few things.

• all my Fiberworks drafts have vanished. (over 500 of them)
• Big Sur won't run a computer dobby and the weaving program developers have no work around and no time line of when they will. Apple isn't helping them either.
• All my 6000+ pictures of family and my weaving were in iPhoto and Big Sur won't support it and so they appear to be all gone too.

So, any good news?   some....

• I have a fresh back up on my external hard drive!
• it may have all my photos and a tech *might* be able to locate and shift them to Photo.
• failing that, I have saved emails with all my scanned old family photos.
• Between this blog and ravelry, I can get a lot of my pictures resaved again.
• Its all going to take LOTS of time if the tech can't find and save them first.

So after some chats (okay, many phone calls) with Bob Keates of Fiberworks, I have worked out the following:

• updated the latest version of Fiberworks that will 'shake hands' with Big Sur so I can at least do some design work. It won't however run my Megado....
• to get some thing to run my loom, I needed a Mac with an older operating system on it like High Sierra or Mojave on it.   Every OS after that got difficult as Apple made subsequent changes.
• it just so happens my Hubby has an older 2013 Mac with High Sierra on it...... and subsequently was traded my shiny brand new MacBook Pro (2020) with Big Sur for it.

 💻 😳 🖥 ⌨️

So I have a newly updated version of Fiberworks Silver Plus on the old clunker Mac and (after many calls with Bob) it works and runs my Megado again!  A big thank you to Bob at Fiberworks! 

 Meanwhile, my hubby can't believe his good luck and scooted with his new shiny computer and didn't look back!

Okay, enough of my woes and wailing.     Let's get to some weaving...    This is the scarf project on the Spring loom and just getting started. A rather large size diamond pattern that was approx 7 inches in length for a full repeat.  Its 8/2 tencel in amethyst for warp and Pompeii for weft.  I really wanted to see this colour combination together and it seems to work nicely.   The draft is from Handweaving.net  #74014.   There is a partial draft at the very end.

So it took 10 repeats to get a full scarf, plus some runs for a border at the either end.  There are quite a few pictures here, which normally I would not post them all but just the better ones.  Since they are all I have for now, I'm going to leave them in.

For the second scarf I used magenta as weft and while I like it, it doesn't have the zing of the first.   What comes to mind is 'safe choice' and sometimes you have to take a chance and go for something out of your comfort zone.   

This last picture below was taken as I was stepping back inside and the lighting hit it just right and showed the rich glow.  It might be a safe colour choice but its very elegant nonetheless !