2012 Island Retreat

I'm back home again... just!  Parts of me are still reviewing the retreat hosted by the Qualicum Beach Weavers and Spinners Guild and held in Parksville, BC. and my time away, while the rest of me is doing laundry... back to normal again.

It was a fun time and it was especially neat to spend it with Lynnette.  I'm very lucky in that she's an easy and caring room mate and I enjoyed our adventure.

The sun was shining when I left and by the time I reached Nanaimo on my journey north, I was driving through snow!  Mostly driving rain and lots of water on the road, but still snow. I can recall telling myself that March was not going out like a lamb!  I finally arrived and met up with Lynnette and we settled into our room at the Quality Inn Resort.

This was our view:

I believe that's Hornby Island and beyond that is the mainland and Coastal Mountain ranges. I love the little gazebo....

When the tide came back in later, it looked like this:

Its a very shallow flat bay and at low tide many people were out walking on the flats. I could imagine a sunny warm day and going walking in the shallow water pools!

We took our spinning wheels downstairs and set them up.... then went to the vendors room and went shopping! Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures in there but there were four vendors: Knotty by Nature (from Victoria), Pagan Creations (from Campbell River) and Hummingbird Fibres (from Errington) and PCW Fiberworks (from Saltspring Island. I bought some spinning fibre but nothing else... despite being labeled a 'spinners and *weavers* retreat, none of them really brought anything weaving related! No yarns, no books,.... nada!   Rather unfortunate but I do have a full stash  so can't grumble.   I hope that next time they will reconsider their inventory.

After supper on Friday, there was a show and tell. Here's a sampling:

Double weave placemats by Sharon S. 

Defected double weave scarf by Jennifer V.

Paper spots by Lynnette

It took me a long time to wind down and finally go to sleep that night!  Even then, I watched the clock advance all night long. The best sleep was the hour before the alarm of course!

After a lovely breakfast, we got busy spinning and the important job of saying hi to familiar faces from retreats of the past, and meeting new friends.  Another cruise through the vendor area...... and then it was lunch time. These retreats are such hard work!  :)

After lunch we attended a presentation on the history of Tartans by John Fitzpatrick and it was quite enjoyable. We viewed many slides of various tartans, the recorded history of tartans from 4,000 BCE to more present times. It ended with a slide of the tartan of the Guild of Canadian Weavers!  Both Lynnette and I applauded as we both know the tartan designer as a friend. (The GCW have a newly redesigned web page by the way!)

There were other presentations: all about PCW Fiberworks with Bob Keates (which I have taken before), and a talk and slide show on Peruvian Textiles by Judith Crosbie which I hear was very good and I'm sorry that I missed it!

There was also a bag exchange. Make and bring one...get another to take home. There were some very creative bags!

Meanwhile, you spun that newly purchased fibre on your wheel, visited with your neighbour and caught up with old friends:

Here Lynnette is sitting on my seat and chatting with Heather. Looks like Heather's unique Scottish Haldane wheel (built in Fife, Scotland) is getting a closer inspection. That's my Majacraft wheel in front of Lynnette.

The spinning room was destined to become the banquet room for that evenings dinner so we went to our room for some quiet time and to get ready.  Every one was back at 6 pm for dinner and wearing their finery. The dinner included roast beef, pork medallions and salmon and it was all delicious. Finally it was fashion show time and there were twenty four entries. Here are a few entries and there will be a link to all photos at the end of the post.

Beautiful hand knit shawls in the audience

A stunning coat with card woven band details. 

Scarves and shawls!

The weavers hand shake was happening all over the room!

My thanks to Gloria for modelling the Little Lochmaben shawl.

Here Sharon is waiting her turn to take the shawl Aurora for a walk around the room.

It was a wonderful time and all too soon over! The next morning, we woke to this:

April Fools joke?  NOT!  I had to shovel  two inches of snow off the car before heading for home.  Some of the die hards were still in the hall spinning away...

I have created a Photoshare with 80 pictures of the weekend and you can access it here   If you were an attendee of the Retreat  or know someone who did,  please feel free share the link and also to download. Please just add that these pictures were taken by me. Thanks...  Susan Harvey

Elena's Shawl: getting under way

This is part two of Elena's special shawl.... these posts are being written with non weavers ( or a newbie weaver) in mind.

Okay, where were we? We're real close to starting on Elena's shawl... I take smaller half inch groups of warp and divide across the warp and then start by tying on the far left and far right groups to the apron rod.

This means the bar is supported and ready for the balance of the tie up.

In this picture I have done a surgeon's knot ( sort of like the first half of tying your shoe laces but with an extra wrap around) This holds all snugly until all groups are ties in place. Tencel can be slippery to work with but I managed quite well with this. Now once all are in done, we are about to do a dash from far right to far left doing up the final tightening and complete the top or last tie. Lift each group and take out the slack and quickly tie the second half of the knot and move to the next group. The key is to move quickly and decisively. Even with speed on your side, if you feel the warp tension you will find the right hand side is bit looser than the just finished left. As per Jane Staffords' method, take the flat of your hand and roll the palm over the warp from the left towards the right, easing up as you approach the right side. Do this two or three times and stop. Go make a cup of tea, and take a break... a 20 minute break. When you come back, the tension will be even and you can start.

At the very most, I *might* have to tighten the edge groups just a touch and that's all! Next I wound 4 red threads, divided between two film canisters, and the third is the floating selvedge. There is another on the other side of the warp. With twill patterns, the weft or filler yarn may not be caught at the edge every time and can produce a messy edge. Having an extra thread passing from front of the loom, through the reed, to back, but not threaded through a heddle, helps to keep things neat and tidy. The shuttle enters the shed (or opening when the treadles are depressed) over the floating thread and come out under the thread on the opposite side. It take just a short time to get used to and then becomes routine. {For weavers who do not want to use a floating selvedge, there is a method of where to start your shuttle to avoid this. We'll talk about this another time.}


Thanks to Lynnette, I now make a small separator to keep the canisters from tangling. A piece of card board and a hole punch. That's it. By the way, film canisters are now a rare breed! I snagged a bag of them from a camera department. I'm glad I did and hopefully I have enough for the coming years.


I have removed the hanging supports or cords from the lease sticks and pushed them to the very back of the loom. They are taped shut at both ends so secure. They will stay there until we see if there are any threading errors. They maintain the threads in order if we need to re work a section to correct a mistake. If all is okay, then they are taken out. Even at the back, they can restrict the threads from opening as fully as we would like.


The locking pin, which holds all shafts securely in place, is now removed. If you have a balanced tie up, the jacks won't move! They shouldn't with the 20+ in place. Note the hooks and texsolv towards the back of the jacks. These are shafts 9 to 12 which are not being used this time and are secured in position by attaching the cords to the hooks. If they weren't tied, then all the shafts would slump downwards and get in the way. ( you only forget to tie them up once!)


Time to wind the weft! In this project the weft is 2/8 black tencel and I'm carefully and tightly winding a pirn for the end delivery shuttle. You concentrate only on the last half inch and advance slowly and methodically.... until it's full. I normally wind three or four. Winding more pirns usually is timed to adjust the hanging canisters at the back and have a good stretch. For a great tutorial on winding pirns, go here.


My bobbin winder is an old late '50's or early '60's Leclerc model. It came with my very first used loom and all that was needed was to replace the foot pedal. Fifteen dollars at the local sewing machine repair store and we were back in business. ( I do have a manual hand winder as a spare. Power outages can happen :)


So here you'll see my blue scrap yarn that pulls all the warp threads into alignment. I throw three shots with no beating in between, then beat after the three are in place. I might need to do this a second time. The white yarn is for seeing the pattern better. I have treadled it running from 1 to 8 twice. The verdict is in and it seems I can't count.... there are no threading mistakes!

Those four red warp ends didn't appear anywhere else as an 'oops'. (phew!) I wove the border repeats and then I have hemstitched every 4 ends across the warp. But I didn't use the 2/8 tencel. It's a bit on the thick side and so will produce a thicker hemstitch line, which I really don't care for. The purpose here is this case is to secure the ends from moving and destabilizing the cloth, not be a feature. With some projects, fancy needle treatments such as trellis hemstitching, for example, are lovely. That would be lost with the size of the shawl and the patterning in this case. The picture below shows me laying in the finer silk thread. The silk has more 'bite' to it and stays snugly wrapped.

Here the hemstitching is going well and I'm taking the threads in groups of four warp ends. The twisted fringe later will be two groups twirled together. I'd like the fringe to be a bit finer than normal.

I'm using the larger version of my Schacht end delivery shuttles (or end feed shuttle as some call it) This means I can load more weft, cross the warp quickly and have nice selvedges. I'm not using a temple on this project and so it should go a bit faster. A temple 'stretches' the warp to keep the weft from drawing the sides in excessively. It must be moved every inch or so.

After weaving the border, and a couple of repeats I paused to look things over..... and, ta da! here it is:
Looking good! I will post more progress soon. I have another project that is time sensitive on the other loom as well. It's been getting ignored lately and that's about to change!

One Step Forward, Two Back...Three Ahead...

So this is a 'state of the studio' address :)

Above is my Louet Spring, 'Lilibet' and she has been languishing with a double weave sampler. This picture was taken few days ago and I now have the double weave sampler woven off. The end result is I will warp up and weave another double weave project soon but this time use 2/8 cotton over the cottolin I used this time. I have downloaded some neat workshop notes from Double Weave pro, Paul O'Connor and will try his method. But for now, the next warp going on this loom is white 2/10 tencel and a huck lace pattern for a shawl. That will be inspiring for me to weave. The warp is all wound and ready to go.

The fine huck lace in bamboo on the Louet Jane ' Cricket' is sort of in limbo. I moved it out of the way to get the old loom dismantled and off to it's new home and I just haven't picked up where I left off.
Why? Its because of this project on 'Emmatrude':

I want to do a shawl project, using tencel ( I have scads of the stuff!) so I chose my colours and even ordered a particular dye lot batch from Yarns Plus to ensure I had enough. Worked out my colour scheme, my draft, my project width and all particulars. I started to wind my warp and one colour, my main colour was *not* the 2/8 I was using but 2/10 instead. I had stored it in the wrong storage box!

So now I had to go entirely with the other taupe colour throughout and just skip the other. I wound the warp and was winding it on the loom. It just didn't excite me, but I got it all on the sectional anyway.


I even threaded it in the elaborate M's and W's. Sleying went well. Two per dent in a 12 dent reed. Tied it up and sat down to weave. I had forgotten to take the front apron rod over the back of the knee beam. Seems all the messages I was getting and ignoring were coming with a firmer 'oomph' now. If I had to untie, to fix the beam problem, then why not fix the entire problem? Okay. I replaced the cross once more, untied, unsleyed, unthreaded, then one by one I snugged each bout back into it's one inch section on the sectional beam. Then I unwound the three stripes and removed them and wound new replacements. Then started the process all over again, but now going ahead. Why all this? We'll take a look at the colours:


I've used this colour combo before to good effect but for some reason I placed taupe inbetween the red and black. It did nothing for the red at all. But I had thought " the black weft will fix that". Here it is on the lease sticks waiting for threading. I persevered despite that feeling something isn't working here.


Here's my spinning chair all set up for the threading:


So was it worth it? I feel much better with the new look and it was worth the changes and the work. You see I also changed my mind about the treadling as well. It was originally going to have a 'Coast Salish' Aboriginal feel to the colours and pattern. The colour change meant the advancing network twill treadling that created tall feathers was nice but it wouldn't work given the colour change. I opted for a complex M's and W's treadling with runs to and fro. No interruptions, phone calls or distractions... again.


Lots of impact now! The wimp factor is gone. :) So a closer look at the pattern...

Knowing my love of pattern, would it surprize you to know that you are looking at three repeats of a straight run of 1 to 12 on the treadles ( see bottom of photo) then from that point up to the fell is ONE repeat of the main pattern. It reminds me of some of those beautiful Nordic sweaters with the intricate pattern work. The true inspiration for this style of bands came from my viewing the stunning work of Master Weaver Inge Dam. Please look at her amazing work and you'll see the effect she achieved. She weaves with tablet bands incorporated into her weaving. This concept came to her through the study of textiles found in Iron Age sites in Northern Europe. While I'm not ready to attempt card weaving on the loom *yet* I thought this gave me the same look until I'm ready to try the technique for myself.


In the mean time I hope that my weaving time in the next few days is smooth sailing and trouble free. (touch wood)