It Happens....

❤️ Happy Valentines Day  ❤️

 I finally have some weaving to show you and I have mixed feelings about it.  I used 9/2 French linen from Brassards as I have done many times before. This time, a new to me colour called brick. Its a coppery red and really a rich, deep colour.

It beamed on with no issues, threading went well and I laced it on okay. There were no threading errors or denting errors.... always a nice treat no matter how many years you have been weaving.  Its an  eight shaft huck lace draft, similar to my usual diamond lace but this one has two sizes of diamonds, that in turn have lace floats and all surrounded by all over huck lace.   I was looking forward to seeing it.

That's when the trouble started...

I couldn't really see it! These two pictures were taken to help me see the lace and if I was on track.  Photography is a good way to spot errors ( and recall what your start looked like!)

I had an overhead light, a floor lamp to the right of the loom, and a second one with two halogen lights to my left. What ever daylight there was was 'encouraged' by lifting venetian blinds up but it was dark and dingy out with heavy rain and the inevitable shorter winter days.   I was double checking the pattern as best I could along the edges and literally calling out the treadling as I went along. I placed large numbered pieces of tape on the treadles to help and took my time.   I caught a few mistakes and corrected them and literally crossed my fingers and hoped that was all of them!

A second issue arose but it was one I was expecting actually.  There is a difference in take up between the plain weave border edges and the all lace centre to the runners. The lace is thicker and builds up on the roll faster than the edges. Eventually it starts to cause some distortion at the fell line.   You can either cut off and re-lace on again, which gets expensive with linen, or try this trick.  Set in a round of warping sticks, best is only a bit longer than your warp is wide,  all tight up against each other and carry on weaving.  I had three runners on the cloth beam, each with a round of warping sticks. (I use warping sticks at the start to cover knots and such at the start, along with my two stick start method ).

I serged my runners apart where I had woven some scrap yarn.... then pressed the hem allowance into thirds.  I wanted larger, more generous hems this time and so wove six inches on either end of the three runners. It really shows the nicely tucked and tight ladder hemstitching off too!

I was amazed that I had a thread colour that was a close match and made a tiny stitch at each ladder and ran the thread through the fold to the next spot. I call this a running blind stitch but I'm not sure if that's the proper name or not...   I quite enjoy this step and usually do it while we watch TV, but once again I found there wasn't enough light on the job. It meant I had to do it in daylight, while under a halogen light. Don't let these bright pictures fool you.... they were taken with a flash.

The picture below shows the lace off tension and relaxed. You see a lot more of the pattern now but its still difficult. Only wet finishing will shift the threads to their proper places.

So a good long soak. Twice in fact as some fugitive dye come out in the first soak.  A rinse and then I rolled them into older towels to absorb the excess water. I had pulled them into shape and gently pulled on  the edges.  Then I lay them flat on counters overnight to dry.

The next morning I set up my Singer steam press and gave them a good fine misting of distilled water and pressed the heck out of the hems first.  Then I shifted to pressing them firmly down both sides of the runners, front and back.   This took a lot of the heavy work out of the job as I have arthritis in my hands and wrists.  Next was the ironing board to do the final finishing touches.  I  start in the middle of the runner and then pressing firmly move the iron out to the sides of the runner.  I do this 'pushing' motion all the way down the runner, then flip and do to the other side.  I find it stops that bowing  inward effect from the defined plain weave hems to the  central lacy part of the cloth. Your runner actually regains some width and looks nice and straight from hem to hem.

Now is it necessary to do this every time you launder the runner?  I don't think so. As weavers we are 'finishing' the cloth and that includes the heavy pressing that sets the threads into their final position. It is most likely that in the future all that will be needed is a normal ironing, although linen needs a hot steam iron to be wrinkle free (or a cold mangle).

So the runners were completed in January but as I mentioned it was simply too dark to take pictures. I tried though and deleted them all.   Then in early February the clouds parted for a brief hour and I dashed for the camera and runners!

The pattern really shows up nicely now. This runner is forty six inches over all and is error free. 😊

This one above is thirty six inches and has a small error. I got the wrong lace treadle on half a lace unit. ☹️  Can you see it?

Here's a close up of the lace floats and all over lace... after laundering and hard pressing. It brought out the shine of the linen beautifully.

Then there is a seventy six inch long runner that is beautiful and also flawed.  😢  Some how, I missed treadling the reverse side of a small diamond shape. No other errors, just that..

A close up of the thread world.   So two runners out of three woven not 'perfect'.  I was pretty bummed out for a few days.   I started doing a mental review of the project of what I had done wrong and what I would do differently next time.  The answers are: get better lighting or simply don't weave such dark colour in mid winter. Especially lace weave that doesn't show its structure fully until washed. Weaving linen mid winter with drier interior air isn't a good idea anyhow....

The over all effect of the lace.

So the two runners are being sold as seconds as it would take a practised eye to find the spots. You and I could as weavers but it simply may not be that important to someone else.  They are hand made and 100% linen and quite lovely.    Very few things in life are perfect..... but that takes us down a  philosophical road.....

The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From the Tree

Look what I got in the mail the day before I left for Vancouver! Handknit socks. These are a belated birthday gift from my daughter Carrie who lives way over on the other side of the continent in North Carolina. The knitting genes skipped a generation over me and landed with her! She now spins on her Kromski Prelude wheel as well and naturally progressed to dyeing her own fibre. Her fibre Etsy page is here. Her Ravelry name is Gnomenapper and her project list is worth a look.

Here's a close up shot of the heel. I just love the lavender colour....which she tells me is properly called 'hyacinth' and the yarn is a fine merino wool.

The pattern is called 'Ribbon Lace Socks ' and come from Wendy Johnson's book: "Socks from the Toe Up". I have them stretched over my hand in this picture to show the pattern work.

But it gets better!

These are my husband's birthday socks too. She's been busy!

Close up of the heel and the colour 'ash' is darn close to the real thing. Results vary according to your monitor.

That's my lumpy hand expanding the sock to show the mock cables. Again, also from Wendy Johnson's book "Socks from the Toe Up".

He loves them!

My mother was taught to knit by her father which is a bit different from most other families. He would knit to pass the time during his duty as part of the Home Guard in WW2. During the bombing blitz of London, he and other men who were too old to serve in the military were given the duty of attending the places where bombs hit and securing the scene and rescuing people if possible. Important job when you think of the scale of the bombing and how thin fire fighters were on the ground. Anyhoo, he passed his skills onto my mother who tried (in vain) to show me how to knit at age 16. It seemed that she couldn't slow it down enough for me to get the steps... and my teen age brain didn't like her style of teaching. Let's just say we didn't push it too hard and I went onto embroidery, which I did well... and she didn't. Then I learned to crochet from a neighbour... and she didn't know how and..... Ah, the teen years, a classic adolescent battleground.

My mother was a beautiful knitter and did some amazing pieces and I recall her aran knit sweaters clearly. I wish she was still here so we could try once more but she would be so proud of her grand daughter who now carries the torch. Yes, I did try to show Carrie how to weave 'once' and she beat the fell into submission with every whack! I played her Penelope and unwove it by night, then rewove it, and in time the runner came off the loom and was given to a friend of hers as a gift.

Secrets out of the bag now I guess :)

A Personal Look Back

I recently found a long lost friend! My very first piece of weaving:

It's a plain weave table runner with an alternating warp of pale cream synthetic orlec and natural cotton as warp and I used a fine cotton boucle yarn as weft. I don't recall the sett or total warp length and it seems I didn't write it down either. I did manage to hemstitched the ends and this runner was on my dining room table for a time but somehow it was packed up for one of our many moves and disappeared from view. It was woven on a 4 shaft, 45 inch weaveable Leclerc Colonial loom which was stuffed into a small spare bedroom. The brake slipped a bit and so there were jugs of water to help tension the bands, which were later replaced by a new brake ring.

To back up a bit in the story, I had heard of weaving and seen the Richmond Guild's studio space at the local library. There was no one there to let me in so I looked through the large windows at the looms and equipment and was fascinated. The loom right under the window had a beautiful warp on it and I was smitten! So I decided to go to the next meeting. To that point my textile endeavours were related to embroidery and crochet. Time to expand my horizons! Then my hubby came home and told me about a coming transfer for his job. Oh, dear....

Two months later we were into our new rental home in the Okanagan Valley in south central BC. I lived quite close to Lynnette actually. We went straight into the one of their longest and hardest winters in 25 years. We had 3 feet of snow in the back yard in late March. My main activity was shoveling snow and being bored, bored, bored! I knew no one there and to make matters worse my husband worked long night shifts and slept all day. He was a locomotive engineer. I cross stitched myself into a stupor that winter, but I hadn't forgotten about the looms and weaving. I had taken a video out from the library and watched how to beam a warp and remembered being totally stumped by the process. Obviously it would be better if I was shown how to do this. It couldn't be all that complicated right? A long story a wee bit shorter, I found the local guild and then discovered they had held their weaving classes back in January when I was more concerned with digging myself out of the snow! This was April and I still had lots of snow in the back yard. By May hubby Bruce had found a used loom for sale on the coast and we drove down and back in one day to collect it. I had no idea of how good a deal this was at the time but we paid $500 for a 45" Leclerc Colonial loom that could be either jack or counter balance, a bench, a Glimakra swift, an older electric bobbin winder ( which still runs great today after a new pedal was installed) shuttles and bobbins, reed hooks and lease sticks and even some yarns. There was a box of books, most are of the 1970's publications we all have or seen but there were some classics such as: Burnham's Keep Me Warm One Night, Collingwood's classic Rug Weaving Techniques, Davison's Pattern Book, among others. In fact all that was missing was the apron rods but a trip to a local machine shop fixed that. One weaver volunteered to come and show me the basics and she spent a day with me. Winding the warp around chair legs (I had no warping board as yet!), then beamed on from front to back.... and threaded a straight draw. There we stopped as we discovered the missing rods. I got a copy of Chandler's Learning to Weave and picked it up from there and wove off two runners. This was back in the spring of 1996.
The rest is history as they say.

I thought I had lost out on joining the Richmond guild when we moved there, but unknown to me, I had moved to weaving heaven! Not only was there the companionship of the local guild, there is a weavers guild in most of the cities in the valley there and I eventually joined many, became president of one and made many friends! The weaver who helped me that first time has a yarn store in her home and I spent many an hour absorbing colours and inspiration there ( and we won't talk about the money left behind either...) She freely shared with me and I will always be grateful. Woolhouse Tools also is in the top end of the valley and my new Gertrude loom came to me in July 1998. I renamed her Emmatrude.

Until that day, I used a variety of other looms. It seems that the Valley had enjoyed a weaving boom in the 80's and there was a lot of gently used weaving equipment coming out of closets and storage. We would buy the used equipment and my hubby would restore the wood, make repairs or replace and when they were ready to sell, they were as good as new. This was a neat way for me to be able to collect all the bits and bobs that you need to have. I'm still in touch with some of the weavers who bought our refurbished looms.

I met and made some real neat friends during those years and they are friends still. I also learned to spin, dye and attempt bobbin lace along the way as well. I had some great mentors who shared and encouraged me. I heard such things as:

• "Want great edges? Then weave a mile"


• " Get yourself in front of as many teachers as you can"


• "There is no right way or wrong way to do anything."


• " Always put on extra warp and play around with the treadling... experiment!" ( sample?)

So, enough about me.... I follow a number of weaving blogs and we all visit each other. I'd like to ask you to share your first weaving project and how you came to weaving. I'm sure that you are passionate about weaving as I am, and it has changed your life too. There is a 'real line in your life' where there was BW and AW. Those mean 'before weaving' and 'after weaving' of course.

To finish my story, I can't...... I'm only part way on my journey. Besides, the next warp is ready for Lilibet...

2/16's cotton to be sett 36 epi for tea towels..... 12 yards worth!