Shuttle Diplomacy

That's a Bluster Bay send delivery shuttle with a honex tensioner.   Curly black walnut wood.  I decided recently that I did not like the Bluster Bay shuttles with the cup hooks. Simply too much fiddle faddle for me. Drop the yarn through the slot and adjust the tension once and get going!  Much more my style.    So I sold off two of the 'cup hook' models and bought this one.  I used it for the entire new project and so have a good feel for the shuttle now. Its lighter than the twelve inch Schacht EDS and so was fine for a narrow warp.  It uses tapered cardboard pirns (which I think come from Louet) and you have to learn to build the end up, not have it collapse and then do the inch worm winding across. Takes a bit of getting used to but my weft was tencel and so slippery. (That's where the tensioning device on my AVL winder really came in handy!)

The shuttle worked nicely but my one pet peeve was how the shuttle felt to my hands when catching and throwing. I  throw and catch palm up and so the thumbs use the bottom end of the rounded area where the pirn sits to throw and catch. That edge is smooth but still what I would call a 'sharp' edge or angle.  The Schacht has a softly rounded depression that the thumb slips into.   Its a small detail like that that makes all the difference in the world to the operator, especially when you consider the thousands of throws you make in a project. So the honex tensioner is a big improvement.... shuttle design needs a tweak.    The exotic woods are beautiful and its well made otherwise.

So what's that on the loom I can hear you ask ?     Well, I had a cone of 8/2 variegated tencel called "Sapphire Blue Combo" from Webs and I decided to give it a try.  Very pretty colour way and any thoughts I had of trying to get colours to pool disappeared when I saw the short increments of the repeat. To work it out would take more patience than I possess right now and so I decided to embrace the 'heather' look of  flecked colours.  (what the heck eh? :)    I decided to use a bolder weft colour of eggplant  after seeing how navy blue simply disappeared and I wasn't happy with other colour choices pulled from the warp.    I used a sett of 24 epi with my snowflake twill.   The 'X's" would not be so squat if I had resleyed to 28 epi, but it was okay and I went ahead with my sample.    {Resleying to 28 epi would have increased the angle of the edge threads and breakage.... the tencel was softer spun than the normal tencel and it was not something I wanted to deal with.  Choose your battles!  :)  }

After my sample was all woven up,  I looked to my notes to see how much length I allocated for fringe ..... and there was none!   I had calculated for two scarves seventy four inches  each, twelve inches samples, then my take up allowance for the woven areas......then I had added in my loom waste of twenty inches  and then  forgot to add in the fringes!   My sample was only six inches and then I reduced the over all woven length of the scarves and I hoped the rest would come out of the loom waste!

I left six inches for fringe allowance at the start and end of both scarves and at the end I got finished scarves of  seventy inches plus four inch fringe and a second scarf of seventy three inches plus four inch fringes.

Phew!    I had to laugh at myself as I had never in 20 years of weaving ever left the fringes  out before so it seems you are never too old to learn new tricks.  I had to play "mental gymnastics" with the warp length and fudged myself up an answer!

Here are the beauty shots:

I had planned to do more blog posting but simply put, I have been ill with walking pneumonia and so my energy has been a day by day thing.  That flu/ cold bug we had in August evolved into another situation entirely and I can't seem to shake it.  The cough just goes on and on! That's the problem with a compromised immune system when you have SLE lupus.   Until I finally get rid of the bug, my surgical date will be 'on hold' unfortunately and that will have a trickle down effect on Life. 

I am enjoying the cooler temperatures and watching the wildlife around the house. The squirrels are busy in the trees again, and the deer don't even move out of the way of our car when we're using the driveway anymore. 

This little critter still has spots on its haunches and Mum is showing them the 'all you can eat smorg" at this nice house with the friendly people!   Don't forget the yummy hydrangea in the front of the house. There's still one bloom left...

Then we came home the other day (driving past the deer that barely moved) to find this fellow on guard duty at the front door.   He didn't move for us either!    :)

Back From Purgatory

Late last year I wove a silk scarf in this pretty eight shaft pattern and thought : "this is great! I'm going to weave something else with this pattern."  To be fair to my cranky lower back, I try to do double projects on the same tie up on the Louet Spring so I get more weaving and less tie up wrangling. 

So I got busy and wound a fine warp of 16/2 mercerized cotton (thirty six epi and roughly fourteen inches wide). Its a lovely taupe that Brassards calls Flax. The weft is a navy blue from Brassards also.   Beaming the warp went just fine, or so I thought. ( don't get too far ahead of me now) The Louet method is a snap.  Threading? no errors....sleying? well, three per dent and no issues there either.

So I wove away on what I like to call my Gothic Diamonds and there were no issues. This eight shaft twill runner was woven to fifty nine inches and it was planned to have a tidy twisted fringe and runner number two was to be woven in cream 16/2 against the flax, and have a hem allowance. One of each style, and light and dark. Perfect right? Not so fast....

I wove the hem allowance, then did some  lovely trellis hemstitching to mimic the pattern in the runner.   Then I ran of of yarn on my pirn and stopped to change to a new one.  It was a good time to leave the project for the day and I went off to make dinner. The next day I advanced the warp an inch or two and got started and that's when I noticed the tension on the right hand selvedge had softened. So I checked things over and weighted those threads and got back to the bench.  Then the left hand side went soft! What the Heck!!  I weighted those as well and wondered what was going so wrong and if I could make it to the end of the runner. I could have struggled through but the weaving looked dreadful. Fine threads are not forgiving of uneven tension and I wasn't happy either...

So next thing I knew I had scissors in my hand and was cutting away! What went through my mind was: "I do this for fun and this isn't fun anymore.... my time is more important "

Besides, once you have that first cut done....  then its really all over!

That's when it dawned on me that I had cut in the wrong place. It was only a scant 4 inches from the end of the runner that needs to have a twisted fringe. Oh, Crap!

So I cleaned up the loom and got it ready for another project. I did give the loom a good check up to make sure nothing was out of sorts but it seemed fine. I put it down to problems during beaming the warp. Subsequent warps have been fine and I've been paying better attention when loading the loom. I guess I got a little sloppy or something!

So this is all that's left of the second runner. It's become a sample stored in a binder, complete with draft and notes on the whole fiasco. If you look at the second picture, you can see the hem allowance on the right...hemstitching... then notice how the selvedge starts to go wavy with the tension problems!  If it can't be a good project, then it can  serve as a horrible warning not to get sloppy with tension when beaming a warp!

The runner with its clipped  too short fringe was folded up and sat on my sewing table for four months while I decided what to do. Normally I follow through with final finishing right away, so this was a first for me. Recently, my good friend Lynnette showed a neat method on her blog for a short fringe treatment and so I gave that a try.  I couldn't get it to look quite right, so I took it all out.  Then I tried simple finger twisting the warp bouts together just to see if it could be done. Apparently, if you went slow and took your time, it could be done. So, no fringe twister... and using my fingers and it slowly come back from the dead pile and purgatory!

Actually, if you didn't know the full story, you'd never know by looking at it....

As a bonus this time, I want to show you a silk shawl I bought myself from an Australian shop on Etsy for my birthday last month. I wear it with my black fine wool coat:

If it looks like there are feathers, you are quite right....

I wear it more bunched up and folded under the coat collar so the pattern isn't so much "in your face."  I've noticed that there are a number of "wings" on television lately:  the black crows of the Night's Watch on Game of Thrones, the Edgar Allan Poe's crow connection in the Following, and the perky 'angels' in the Victoria Secret ads.  I'm so right in fashion !    But more crow, and less angel.... :)