Rigid Foam Display Board

My textiles (mostly towels) have been displayed on a table at the art gallery.  A friend suggested that I find different ways to display them.  I took in some free standing towel rods that I used at the Farmers' Market, but I also made some display boards to hang like framed art.

First off, a big thank you to Sue Parker-Bassett from the Weaving Indiana weaver's guild.  In November she did a presentation on Leno Lace and had samples mounted on boards like these.  

These boards are made from 1/2" rigid foam insulation (~$12 for a 4'x8' panel at Home Depot).  The foam was cut to size with an exacto knife.  I fashioned duct tape hangers/tabs, then covered the front of the board with a layer of polyester batting and some black fabric.  The batting was glued and the black fabric was stapled.  A piece of wire was strung between two duct tape tabs for hanging.

Here's the backs (that's a stack of three boards).

Here's a front.

And, here are some test shots with towels pinned to the boards at the gallery:

I left the two small boards (18"x24") at the gallery, but brought the large one home.  I'll be taking it back to the gallery in Feb. for the new "hang".  The towels are pinned at the top, but not the bottom, to allow for guests to feel the textile.

PVC Weaving Tool and Plain Weave Stripes

I had a student at the studio this week.  She is a new weaver and ran into some trouble warping her rigid heddle loom with a pre-wound warp chain.  I wanted her to see how a warp chain was made on a warping board, but I use a warping reel.  This pvc warping "board" was put together from pieces of my pvc niddy noddy/yarn skeiner.   It's one yard long.  Aside from the straight pipe, it uses some T's and one X connector.  PVC is flexible enough that I'm not confident using is as a real warping board, but it worked great to show how a cross is made and how weavers tend to tie the cross in a warp.

The next pretty little piece is on my 8", 4-harness Structo loom.  It's plain weave with a cotton warp of stripes from commercial 8/2 and handspun yarns.  I planned this warp and had to re-do my calculations about three times.  The first issue was one of sett.  My handspun cotton was 18 WPI.  I usually sett plain weave at 1/2 the WPI.  Sara Lamb in her book Spin to Weave describes using a closer sett with a weft that is finer than the warp.  She says that this helps create good drape in a plain weave fabric.  I decided to try it, and recalculated the warp stripes at a closer sett (I ended up using 20 epi, threaded 1-1-2 in a 15-dent reed.)  The next re-calculation was due to concerns with the accent stripes at the edges of the plain weave stripes.  

Theoretically, when plain weave is being woven, a warp thread becomes a dashed line as the weft covers it every other pick.  I didn't want one side of my stripes to have a dash-dot-dash pattern and the other side to have a dot-dash-dot pattern!  I hate to tell you how much I worried about this!  Finally I realized that if my blue stripes were all odd numbers of threads, the purple accent warps would be on the same shed and would always lift together.  Whew!  There was one more related recalculation when I realized that I needed to have the white background in odd numbers of threads as well, otherwise one group would have a pair of dash-dot-dash accents and the next stripe would have a pair of dot-dash-dot accents.  Woo boy!  Well and good, I finally got it all worked out and am happily weaving at the loom.

Guess what I discovered today?!  I made an error winding the warp.  There is one group of white background threads that is an EVEN number of threads.  But check out the woven fabric: it doesn't make a difference in the way the stripes look!  I guess I got all worked up about nothing.  I wonder if it would make a difference in a different piece....maybe if the weft were thicker??

Quilting Frame to Warping Reel

**This post is very late. The work shown here was done in 2008. I went searching for a post about it, and discovered I never wrote one. Dooh!**


Years ago, my mom gave me an old quilting stand with a hoop.


I do quilt, and, until recently, only did handquilting. However, I have never used this hoop and stand for quilting.


Rather, I turned the stand into a home made warping reel!










The ends of the reel are plywood triangles with their corners cut off and notched to hold a slender piece of wood (~1" x 3/8"). A steel rod goes through the center of each plywood triangle and rests on the notches in the stand that originally held the support bolts for the hoop.

Three dowels stick out on the right to make a warping cross. They are in a piece of 2x2 that has been grooved to rest on the plywood. On the left, there are holes drilled in the 1x3/8 boards for dowels for the end of the warp.

The strings around the reel in the photo are two separate warp measuring strings. I use the light colored one for warps 4 yds or less; the blue for longer warps. I think I can wind up to a 7 yd warp on this reel (it has been a while since I have wound a warp that long...I tend to do short warps).

The reel was constructed in October or November of 2008. It has seen almost all my warps since it was made. It works great for me!

A word of thanks--my husband is the woodworker at our house. I drew up the plans and he made them a reality. Many thanks for this and other projects!

Wabash Weavers' Guild Meeting

Today's Wabash Weavers meeting included a "weaving/fiber garage sale". I sold many cones of acrylic yarn and purchased two wooden boat shuttles.

The long, dark wood shuttle I purchased because--well, because it was long. Those are approximately 6" bobbins with it. My red LeClerc shuttle that uses 4" bobbins is at the bottom of the photo for size comparison. I think the long shuttle will be great for multi-bobbin weaving as well as for projects that will use a lot of weft!



The middle shuttle I purchased because it is pretty. (Isn't that terrible! :) It looks like it will take the same 4" bobbins my LeClerc shuttles use, but the two colors of wood were just too pretty to pass!











Our guild has been doing a towel exchange for the last couple of years. These are the two I drew this year! Aren't they beautiful!?


The white M's and W's is stunning. I do not know how to use this beautiful piece. If I use it like my regular handwoven towels it's bound to get dirty, but it's too beautiful to just put away. I don't know what to do, but I love it!





The blue towel is huck lace and I know this one will get regular use! It's just right to join the ranks of my other towels from the last few years!

Handspun Wool Singles as Warp

More headway on overcoming my "fear" of handpspun in weaving. I'm beginning to think that it's not so much a fear or quirk as it is a lack of data. I'm not confident how it will behave, so I hesitate to use it.

This continuation of my quest uses a handdyed, handspun wool single as the warp. It was a small skein, but I was able to get 121 ends out of it for a two yard warp.

I know two yards is almost nothing for a warp, but this is a sample...it's just a test. And, it turns out, it was a good test.



One warp thread broke early in the weaving (oh, details: 8h, straight twill threading, woven as plain weave throughout). Later on, two or three threads started to pull apart and I could feel that the piece wasn't stable anymore.

So, I got a one yard sample woven. My weft yarns obscured the warp colors. It's so sad :(
That will be the focus of yet another set of samples! I want to learn to get warp stripes in my weaving!!

I didn't use any sizing on this warp. I have sized wool singles before, and I would rather not mess with soaking the yarns in the sizing solution, letting them dry, picking them apart, etc. While I was reading one of Paula Simmons' books ( "Spinning and weaving with Wool" or "Spinning for Softness and Speed") I noticed the comment that while Paula preferred to spin and weave with singles (using a sizing on her singles warps), her husband liked his two-ply warp yarns...and so he spun his own warps!

I may be spinning two-ply warps!

:)

Oh! The photo at the top of the post needs a word of explanation! I usually warp front to back, but I was concern about the integrity of this single yarn as a warp and didn't want to expose it to any unnecessary stress, so I rigged a raddle (the thing with twisty ties on it!) and tried warping back to front. It was easier on my back and shoulders to warp the Baby Wolf this way. It may be time to make a "real" raddle.

New Tools

I got some new tools recently. This one (being explored by my youngest) is a spool rack. It is different from other rack I've seen, but will work well for storing yarn and also for putting cones of yarn together to see if I like the color.

















This is an amazing tool--it's a bobbing winder! It winds almost as fast as the little hand mixer winder I made! It's nice because it allows for greater control in winding speed and doesn't use any electricity! Plus, it's easy to wind!


Good tools are amazing!

Works in progress

My last dye-day produced some gorgeous rovings. Most of them were on a light grey wool and done in families of color. This purple one has some blue in it. I started spinning it last night... I like it!













Lest I forget...This is my new bobbin winder. One of my weaving guild members suggested this to me. It's a $7 hand mixer from WalMart. I used the tin snips and removed the cross bars from the beater, then wrapped tape around it so the bobbins would be snug on the post. It works pretty well--the speed control could be improved (it goes really fast on the slowest setting), but I'm not ready to take it apart to play with the gear ratios yet!




The weaving is progressing! That's almost an inch of yardage wrapped on that beam. I hate to tell you how hard it has been to work on this big project. I can only work on it a little each day. I have a paper where I'm keeping track of my progress. It's about half full of measurement numbers now. I think the end is in sight!

Spinning wheel!

My incredible husband helped me cut, create, and position the flyer assembly on the treddle base I refinished earlier this spring. Right now it has a cotton drive band and slips a little at high speeds, but it works! I was able to treddle and spin roving into yarn! Yee-haw!

There are a few things that are probably going to happen before we call this done, but it's amazing to see it actually work!

Dust bunnies

As I was winding another bobbin for my color gamp, I found lots of dust on the loom. It turns out my make-shift bobbin winder is slowly being eaten away by the teeth on the conewinder! Go figure! I had no idea I would be spending so much time winding bobbins, but it sure beats having to wind all that yarn by hand onto a shuttle!

Bits and Pieces

These are my finished object for the week. They are my first pair of toe-up socks! I cast-on with the "easy toe" in Charlene Schurch's Sensational Knitted Socks, worked a 5-stitch pattern, did a short-row heel, and chose to make them anklets before I ran out of yarn! (That's what I get for using up leftovers!) I was pleased with the easy toe start--it was, well, easy. I'm not sure about the short-row heel...I may need to experiment with other types of heels.








This odd looking invention is my newest bobbin winder. I usually use my charka to wind my boat shuttle bobbins--a rubber band on the spindle holds the plastic 4" bobbin reasonably well. But this is better.

On the left is my Grandmother's cone winder. On the right is a cone (that fits the cone winder very well) with a screwdriver taped in it. The cone and screwdriver go on the cone winder. The bobbin goes on the screwdriver. One hand turns the cone winder crank, the other helps the yarn wind on smoothly.

Someday I will probably invest in a "real" bobbin winder. For now, this makes bobbing winding almost easy.