Happy Conclusions

Bruce came through his surgery very well! In fact, he hasn't been the total invalid I was expecting. He has good mobility and went from crutches to cane in twenty four hours, with minimal swelling. The trouble is, he's feeling so much better than anticipated that he tends to do too much and then... well, you know how this ends!

The flowers were a sunny get well from friends Lynnette, Michael and Ngaire! Simply beautiful...

I love the little green/ yellow flowers, inside the red ones. They are so dainty. The whole bouquet is red's and yellow's with lush greenery.

Another conclusion is the much promised  waffle towels. It took me far longer to hand hem them as the royal blue was dark to work on at night so I had to sit and do some of them during the day. The old eyes aren't as sharp as they used to be!

So for folks seeing this post first, there were two others related to this   here and  here. (The draft is at the first.)  I don't normally take this long but its been a busy fall!

I haven't woven waffle weave in many years and I must add some thoughts and feelings about the project.  Weavers normally weave flat cloth, so this waffle weave was a delight! The pattern took shape on the loom  and once the tension came off, the squares started to form right away. Laundering deepened them considerably and the cloth was springy and soft. Really nice to touch and squeeze!  The shrinkage rates was understandably large. I allowed for 30% in both warp and weft but will allow more in the length next time. The yarn used was 8/2 cottons sett 24 epi.

The project width on the loom was 25 inches and final width is 21 inches. I cut the towel lengths to 34 inches, then with a small one inch hem at either end, the final length was 27 inches. So greater shrinkage in the length!  The towels are a decent size (I like them large) but I would prefer more length next time.  I would allow for 36 inches per towel next time. Not much more but enough to make a difference!

You can see the difference the slightly darker blue made in the second picture. Can you spot them?  I'll be posting these towels to my Etsy shop for sale. Now,  I like blue, but I think I'll leave move onto other colours for the next project! 

So the next up and due to be woven off next is ....(drum roll please).... more towels!  I have the turned twill towels on the Louet Spring to get busy on next.  For a quieter, slower time of year, I seem to be challenged to get time in on the looms lately!

I'll leave you with a picture of one of the fall crops in from our small orchard:

Cold, juicy and crisp! And as usual, the squirrel horde got all  the hazelnuts...

At the End of the Day

If this image looks familiar, then you'd be right. This was a warp put on last October no less and was to be a quick experiment in treadling variations. But then throw a sick Hubby and Christmas (with house guests) into the mix and you have a long drawn out affair.  I never claimed to be a fast weaver but this really is beyond believing.  I enjoyed the warp and so can't say this was a 'dog on the loom'... far from it!  Life simply decided that I had other things to be doing...

So the premise was to have one threading and one tie up and then by changing the treadling only produce three different patterned scarves.  Here is the previous post where I started, but I will repeat the drafts here for convenience:

The threading is an elaborate M's and W's and the tie up is a standard twill for eight shafts.  The first scarf was treadled 'as drawn in'. The second scarf was treadled in a 'network style'. The third scarf, and my personal favourite,  is treadled 'snowflake twill'.  (both scarf two and three treadlings are called twill progressions) Three separate looks all for only having changed the way you dance the treadles!   I would be the first to admit that this was made far easier by having a weaving program and so I could try things out ahead of time on the computer screen. 

I can recall having a conversation with my weaving mentor Margaret back in 1997 or 1998 about this very topic. I had an overshot threading on the loom and Margaret sat down and simply started playing with her feet!  Once she knew what style of threading it was, she understood how it was tied up and so could improvise on the fly. I sure wish I had kept the sample she made that afternoon. I also recall the big smile she wore as she wove as she was having fun. She said that being freed from the constraints of a rigid recipe was when weaving comes to life.  She did tell me that you have to know how the basic weave structures work first, then you can bend and stretch the rules!

The warp was 10/2 tencel, sett 28 epi and was 7.29 inches in the reed.  That's 204 ends.

The weft was 30/2 fine black silk which contrasted nicely with the rose, and mineral green, with a dash of violet.

All were woven to 72 inches, fringes twisted and left at roughly six inches including the tasseled end. All were hand beaded with various glass beads for a bit of sparkle. The shine and drape is beautiful.

A great project and I'm only sorry it took so long! Hopefully, it will encourage you to play with treadlings when you find yourself stuck and bored with a project.... you might be surprised at what you find!

Late for the Party

My big loom 'Emmatrude' has been very patient this year. (She is a Woolhouse Tools floating parallel countermarche, model name Gertrude) Not much happened on her while I dealt with life issues such as my cranky lower back. I found my loom bench aggravated my sciatica and my 'fix', the big black chair has been working  very well and I find I can weave longer sessions which is fantastic! I'm under no illusions and I listen to my back and rest when it tells me to.

My Louet is busy right now... but more on that next time!  :)  I am keeping the other loom busy with a series of three scarves. The warp is 10/2 tencel and the weft is 30/2 silk; sett is 28 epi and it's approx 7" in width. I was given a dusty rose pink skein of tencel some years ago and I was challenging myself to team it up with other colours and put it to work (stash busting?) Perhaps I saw too much dusty rose and sea foam green back in the 1980's and so the rose skein has sat a long time waiting its turn. I found a mineral green, violet and black that seem to work nicely. The colours are all medium hues and so of similar values.
The threading is a fancy 8 shaft point twill and here's the draft for scarf number one (which I'm still weaving on the moment, but in the home stretch!)

The scarf in the picture at the top of the post shows it being woven 'as drawn in' or the old fashioned 'tromp as writ'. Since its boring to do the same thing over and over, the second scarf will look like this:

Same threading but now the treadling will be network. Changes everything doesn't it?  I love to be able to play with the treadling possibilities on a screen. I can even view the back of the work and then check for  overlong floats in warp and weft!  The colours are much brighter than the ones actually used but I was okay with 'close enough!'

I have been playing around with variations for the third scarf and thought this one is a good contender and may happen. We'll see. I'll continue to play with choices while I work through the first two!

This treadling is is a twill progression such as you would find in a snowflake twill. I'll have to try a sample to see how it works with the real cloth and colours to see if its a go.  Its too bad that these weren't ready in time for the coming sales, so they are officially late for the party!

So if you have a long warp on and want to change the project, try changing your treadling sequence! Its amazing what appears when you dance the treadles!

I have also been busy preparing for sales like many of you are doing as well. I spent time going through my hand wovens, tagging and making up inventory sheets.  Happily, they are all coming at easily to handle intervals this year! I divided my items into two groups with newer items going to be set up on display with other guild member's contributions at a month long sale in Mill Bay, BC. It runs Oct 30th and closes Dec 1st. I'm on the list to sit a couple of shifts at the sale, but not until the 17th and 30th of November. I'll have to go in much sooner than that to photograph the entries before they all sell!

The balance will be mailed off to a one day sale in Salmon Arm which is in the south central interior of BC, held by a guild that I'm still a member of despite having moved away. They are such a great bunch of ladies !

Last, but not least... one of the benefits of my recent stash collection clean up was the rediscovery of an antique! I bought this from a friend some years ago and the general consensus is that it was new in the late 1950's or early 1960's. I'm the third owner of this little machine since then. It still has the original cloth wrapped cord which makes me a bit nervous! I did replace the rotting cotton cloth on the roller with some new cotton ticking.

When plugged in, the roller turns and I believe (if my memory serves me right) you pull the lever on the right to to snug up the curved metal plate  at the back. It holds the cloth between the metal plate and the roller and presses it in a continuous rotation, with the cloth being slipped in the top and rolled out the bottom. No steam but I can recall that two or three pressings gave good results.  I guess you could mist the cloth before slipping into the roller!

 Hubby watched me trying to hard press towels this week on a conventional ironing board and hinted that a steam press might be in my future. That sure would be sweet but with a new well and plumbing, I think it might have to wait a spell.

As a parting shot, one of the items being pressed up and prettied for the sales is the 12 shaft snowflake twill shawl. Rather than fold it up, I thought it might be nice to look at it for a short while until it ends up around someones shoulders for Christmas!

10/2 undyed tencel, sett 28 epi, silk seaweed blend is the weft so its buttery soft. There's hundreds of twinkly crystal beads along the edges. Madge Manikin looks like she's ready to party now   :)

In Which We Actually Weave Something!

This project has been a long time coming. I have woven it before and chose it again knowing it was what I call 'mindless' zen weaving, great for listening to music or podcasts  while you treadle one to eight, and one to eight again and again, occasionally  measuring for length or mix matching colours for the borders.  No, this warp has sat patiently due my bad back and then again while I worked on a new seat to weave from.  Rear mounted treadles make for lighter work but the whole leg must depress down almost to the floor which in turn pulls on lower back muscles.  So it waited and rather patiently too. I even thought about selling this loom (which I really do not want to do) but now with my new chair, and well rested back, I'm weaving there again. Mind you I'm not breaking any speed records but I don't want another three month time out again for a cranky back if I can help it.

I'm not certain when the warp was wound but this warp was already on the loom when Lynnette came for a visit last September. Yup, that long. in my defense, I did keep my Louet Spring, 'Lilibet' busy as best I could!

So let's start at the beginning: The draft is # 47 'Breaks and Recesses' from The Weaver's Book of 8-Shaft Patterns by Carol Strickler (Interweave Press). Sorry but I don't have a draft to post but this book is so common in guild libraries, if not your own collection. Here's a great post on this same pattern. At weaving Carol and wood working hubby Craig's Studio Tupla you can see that even more complex versions are possible. It is a simple straight draw threading and all the pattern is in the tie up. Then you treadle a simple run of one to eight.  It produces nice tidy little boxes with a clear plain weave line all around the squares. Little thirsty squares and so perfect for kitchen towels. There are no long floats and its completely reversible. My last effort was in 16/2 finer cottons and they sold quickly. The idea was to use 8/2 cottons this time and do it as a stash reducer ( and I use that term loosely). My sett is 24 epi so there are three squares to one inch. It sure makes planning stripes easy. If you do a single rows of colour, then you get diamonds as shown in the Studio Tupla link

Here are my colours:

 It would seem my planning last fall worked out nicely for spring! They are very Easter like, although I'm even late for that now! White, plum, celery green, salmon pink and a yellow. All are from Brassards in Quebec.  I wound them in one inch bouts and beamed them onto the sectional beam in my hybrid method. It looks  neat all wound on the back beam! The warp is twenty five inches wide. I like big towels.

Then I suspended the lease sticks from the upper castle and started threading, followed by sleying my 12 dent reed, two per dent:

Time to start winding pirns! I'll be using  my Schacht 15 inch end delivery shuttle and it uses the longer black pirns:

My loom has a tie up assist and it makes it possible to sit on a stool at the back of the loom and pull the cords I need. Since it's at the back I must reverse the tie up on a new grid, and then since treadle one is now on the right instead of the left I must reverse the treadle order as well! Its easier than it sounds and I save the new 'flipped and reversed' tie ups and reuse them. Here's my grid in use:

I isolate the row being worked on and you can see everything is clearly marked so I know where I am at all times. Here's the reason why!

The long cords hanging at the bottom are for shafts 9 through 12 as they are not being used in this 8 shaft draft. The other cords are pulled and clipped depending on either upper or lower shaft (or x's or o's) on the tie up grid. It takes me roughly ten minutes to pull the tie up above. Now that's a vast improvement over lying on the floor with the foot beam in the way and craning my neck up to do fiddly tie up's for lord knows how long.

As you can see in the picture above, I tied on and have my temple ready to go. I tried out some different colours for wefts as I wove in my header.

I'm weaving six inches for hem allowance, plus a short section of the towel that is plain solid colour, and then do a coloured border which is approximately two and half inches, then weave seventeen inches for the main body of the towel and then reverse my start. This adds up to  thirty four inches per towel. I weave a separation  between towels using scrap yarn of one repeat and then it starts all over again.

This shows the cloth making it's way down to the cloth beam. You can see the tail end of a green towel and the start and first border of a salmon pink towel......

In my next post, we'll be working on finishing and final show and tell.... in between showing our house, housework,  looking for another home and even having company for a few days! I should wear my Super Woman cape but I'm too tired to look for it!