Raddle Woes--Twisting Warp Bundles

Calling all Back-to-Front warpers!  I need help!  I am winding my warp with a 1x1 threading cross at one end and a 12x12 raddle cross at the other.  When I have wound my warp onto the back beam (the raddle cross is now buried under all the layers of warp on the beam) and start to thread the heddles using my 1x1 threading cross, I get twists in the warp.  Why?

Check out this photo.  The warp was wound in small, separate chains--greens, pinks, browns.  Why are they twisted?  The entire warp chain for each color is not twisted, just the threads in each raddle space are twisted.  (Did that make sense?  If the entire warp chain were twisted, I would expect to see threads from one side of the warp chain crossed over both raddle spaces for that color.)

Anyone have any insights?

Thank you!

Swimming in Color

My colorful warp is off the loom.  It was a wonderful vacation project!  I ended up with a long sampler (~20"), a table runner, and two very different scarves.  Weaving with color has been lots of fun!

The table runner and sampler were sett at 24epi.  The warp for the runner is a black slub cotton.

 The scarves were sett at 20 epi.  Here is the short one on my model.  The warp threads were used as wefts on this piece.

The other scarf used left over yarn from Mountain Meadow Wool.  I won a prize from them in the "Look, Ma, No Sleeves" contest that Handwoven ran a few years ago.  One of the yarns (there are two light brown wools being used as alternate picks for weft) has alpaca and the other has bison blended with wool.  I think that I may get this scarf, but I'm not sure yet!

 

Franken-Inkle Loom

I have a home made inkle loom that I have loved.  Sadly, it was too small.  I couldn't even weave a full yard of band on it!  So, we franken-ized it.  I found a piece of the original board, we cut apart the little loom, inserted the board, made some connection points, and viola!  Now I can weave over two yards of inkle bands!  Yay!

(And the loom looks much better now that I have sanded it....much less "franken")

PS.  After two hours in the shop with my husband as we planned and he milled the slots, etc, we decided that it would have been easier to just buy a new board and dowel and make a new loom.  On the positive side, this little baby works just fine!

Color..Kersplash!

Do you ever feel like you're a novice swimmer jumping into the deep end when it comes to color?  Me too!  I'm on a new color journey (swim?). Here's where things stand:

The beginning.
I went shopping at my friend Robin Edmundson's etsy shop.  I love her colors for cotton roving and finally decided to buy a color I've been eyeing for months!  While looking around, I discovered she had yarn grab bags for sale as well and you chose them by color family:  "bright cool", "bright warm", "earthy cool", "earthy warm".  I don't know about you, but there are times when I want to choose every last color in a piece and other times when I just want someone to fill my bag with pretty crayons and let me play (without having to think about which crayons got put in the bag!).  So, I purchased a "bright warm" grab bag.

This is what I have left after winding a warp.  There are two fine cotton boucle yarns (~24wpi), one cotton with a binder (~24 wpi), a rayon boucle (~22 wpi), and a nylon ribbon.  They are lovely yarns!  I have woven with the fine cotton boucle before when I won one of Robin's give-aways a year ago.  The trick with this group of yarns was how to use them in my color-limited way and have them look fun, nice, and well, awesome ('cause the colors are beautiful!).

So here's what I found:  Celeste Pryde has an article in the March/April 2000 issue of Handwoven magazine where she discusses weaving a Bronson Lace "log cabin" with multiple colors.  She uses silks instead of cottons, but the color use is fascinating!  She winds mini-warp bundles--enough ends for one of her two lace blocks (24 ends in this case)--and each mini-warp has two contrasting yarns.  The contrast can be color, texture, value...or even no contrast!  For a 28" wide piece she wound ~17 of these mini-warps.

So, I'm going to try it.  I had already played around with some of my 10/2 cotton yarns, looking to find similar color combinations as this grab bag from Robin.  I pulled out all the yarns.  I made yarn pairs--most of them were contrasts of color and texture--and I wound 9 mini-warp bundles and hung them over a cupboard door.

Here they are.  I've been moving them around and taking photos of them.  I knew I wouldn't be able to remember which order I liked if I didn't document them somehow!  I pulled my husband into the project and he suggested one of these orders and I really like it.

 But, check out what happens when I grey scale these photos to look at the color values:

The color order in the top left is a gradual shift from a dark value to a light and back to dark.  None of the other value shifts are as smooth.  The middle two have a shift, but there is a more abrupt dark to light shift from the left moving to the right.  The upper left color order is currently hanging on the cupboard door.  I'll look at it again tomorrow and hopefully warp a loom!

Ends Per Inch, Errors and Summer & Winter Surprise

Ever have a 'great idea' only to watch it fail at every turn?  After weaving the placemats for my friend I thought that I could use my cotton chenille to make wonderful baby blankets.  I included a bit of plain weave sampling at the end of the placemat warp, did some calculations and went to work.

There were, of course, limiting factors in my work.  To weave a wide blanket (I like 40" square baby blankets) I would need to use my AVL Production Dobby loom.  That was ok.  I'm not very fast at warping it, mostly due to lack of practice, so I figured this would be a good opportunity to practice!  Unfortunately, I only have one reed that reaches the width of the AVL.  It's a 10-dent reed and my test piece had been woven at 24 ends per inch (epi).  I could thread the 10-dent reed 2-2-3 for 23 epi or 2-3 for 25 epi.  I opted for the "easier" 2-3 threading.

Here's where things got sticky.  I made some denting errors. Some of them I was able to fix right away, but some would have required re-threading the entire reed. (Can you see where this is going?)  I wasn't willing to do that.  I had 1150 ends.  I didn't want to re-thread the reed.  So I didn't.  

Not good. Not good at all.  So I ended up with warp stripes randomly placed throughout my baby blankets.  They aren't even.  They weren't planned.  They aren't even the same type of error!  There are multiple spots where there are too many threads per dent and one spot where there are too few.  :(

Two blankets showing denting errors.

The other part of my trouble is my choice of ends per inch for the warp.  The placemat warp had been sett at 24 epi and was a relatively narrow warp.  The washed sample is lovely--soft and fuzzy  and the colors show up well.  My baby blanket warp was sett at 25 epi and was a wide warp --44".  Wide warps don't pack as tightly as narrow warps, neither do warps with extra ends per inch.  I was doomed!

Ok.  So it's not that bad.  Sure the cloth doesn't look like my sample and I really liked my sample.  Sure the cloth has irregularities in it, so I won't put it in the art gallery for sale.  But, if I hem them, I'll have two baby blankets or lap blankets to give to friends.  If I never show them my sample, they'll never know what they're missing.  Right?

While the baby blanket warp was on the avl I got to looking through some of my back issues of Handwoven Magazine.  I was looking for articles on using color, but came across a familiar graph and paused to look it over.  

 This wall hanging is a Mary Atwater piece and I remember seeing it in her book "Recipe Book: Patterns for Handweavers".  It is designed to be woven as Summer & Winter pickup.  The interesting thing is that the instructions provide two threadings and tie-ups.  One is the typical S&W threading with tie-downs on shafts 1 and 2.  The other is a straight twill threading !!!  Wow!  I didn't know that you could do Summer & Winter on a straight twill threading!  It turns out that you can!!!

I wove this little fish at the end of my baby blanket warp which was threaded straight twill on 12 shafts. I keep hoping that I'll like weaving pick-up, but I don't yet!  Still, the ability to do various weaves on a single threading is exciting!

Scarves

This olive green scarf was woven on my 8" Structo loom as an introduction to weaving for my daaughter's third grade class.  The kids all got to work the loom and weave a bit and then I brought the loom home and finished weaving.  The yarns are a combination of handspun and Cascade 220 that I dyed.  In the warp the two yarns alternate irregularly, but in the weft each yarn was used for about 2" before switching to the other yarn.  The scarf was wet finished following suggestions from Laura Fry's video "Wet-Finishing for Weavers".  The scarf was washed with a bit of detergent and rinsed.  The water was squeezed out and the scarf rolled up in a towel to remove any excess water.  Then, the fun began!  The scarf was repeatedly thrown onto a table multiple times to felt it slightly.  The felting didn't take long and the scarf drapes well!

  

This little piece is the end of a sample warp.  I took a double weave class from Jennifer Moore and used these 5/2 cottons for the class.  Unfortunately, after I finished my sampler, I didn't want to do more double weave on this warp.  So, I re-threaded the loom with this little flower pattern (I don't remember the name of the pattern. It was a 6-harness design with plain weave and floats to make the flower petals).  I wove with the bobbins filled from the workshop and just changed colors as the yarns ran out.  Then I had to decide what to do with this small piece of handwoven fabric.  My friends at the Conner Prairie weaving studio suggested a mobius scarf....and so, here it is:

The scarf is too short to wrap a second time, but it is a nice accent (my oldest tried it on for me this week and may be keeping it!).  If I were to make this again, I would aim to make it a little longer and maybe even make it out of something silky--either tencel or silk.

Polymer Clay, Reenactment Costumes, and Weaving

Here's a hodge-podge of photos from this month:

My friend at Needles and Knots here in town hosted an Altoid Tin Decoration Contest.  It was lots of fun trying to come up with a way to use the tin and then to decorate it.  The end result is basketweave in polymer clay baked on the tin.

 I started and finished a corded petticoat.  I've found that they did a great job of keeping long skirts from winding around my legs when I wore them at Conner Prairie.  This one is for the 1700's costume I'll wear at the Feast of the Hunters' Moon in October.  I'm not sure if it is period, but I don't intend to show it to anyone while I'm wearing it!

This is my latest set of handwoven towels.  They are woven on a 20/2 cotton warp, use a 20/2 cotton tabby weft and a very fine, handspun cotton weft.  The purple/blue towel uses three strands of the handspun together to create a thicker yarn.  The multicolored wefts are all single strands.  There are three towels missing from this photograph.  They were woven on the same warp, with the same tabby weft, but used a brilliant blue, handspun cotton.  Much to my dismay, the blue cotton bled and discolored the towels.  It was so disappointing!

Working with the fine (to me--I usually use 10/2 cotton) cotton was, well...fine.  The biggest challenge was that I put on a longer warp than usual and tied on to the previous warp, making for more weaving to be done.  I was very happy when these knots came back up over the back beam!  Whew!

And lastly, a very sad farewell to an old pair of potholders.  I got these through an exchange at the Wabash Weavers' Guild---years ago!  They were well used and well loved.  I've replaced them with some wool ones I made, also quite some time ago, but these old ones that I think were made by Helen will have a special place in my memories!

Butterflys and Other Things

It is officially butterfly season around my house.  The zinnias are in bloom and the butterflies love them.  This amazing butterfly has beautiful yellow and black tiger stripes on the other side of its wings and this amazing black and yellow pattern on this side.  I wasn't fast enough to catch a photo of the wings closed!

I follow Laura Fry's weaving blog. She is an experienced weaver and has lots of wonderful insights about weaving and the life of a weaver.  This week she had a post which included a phrase or two that sent me on a mission.  She said, "Now that I've twigged how to easily convert overshot patterns into twill block designs, I may explore that a bit more.  I like the large graphic nature of the the overshot translated into twill blocks."

So, I've started looking at using twill blocks to weave overshot patterns.  I think I understand the basic idea.  I've used twill blocks on 8-shafts before and like way  4-thread 1/3 twill vs. 3/1 twill shows up in a woven piece.  But, as I've been looking at this, I've wandered into an interesting bit of twill weaving knowledge.  

Crackle weave is just one of many advancing twills.

How's that for a random connection? I've done two presentations this year on crackle weave.   Thinking about twill blocks lead me to my copy of "The Best of Weaver's Twill Thrills" where I found articles by Bonnie Inouye (Fancy Twill Extravaganza on Four Shafts, p.102) and Ingrid Boesel (Advancing Twills, p. 38).  Bonnie presented the idea of non-independent twill blocks where "two blocks must always weave pattern together".  Ingrid's article included the line "twills can be straight or point or other twill orders..."  And she discussed the use of incidentals to allow for weaving plain weave.  My notes include the comment (in capital letters, no less!) Why is crackle not an advancing twill?"

What do you think?  
Why do we handle crackle weave separate from advancing twill?


I love how there is so much to learn in the weaving world! 

Projects--a collection

Blocking lace.  I love the effect of blocking pieces of knit lace.  The yarn over holes open up and the stockingette stitch areas become smooth...  I love it!

 Fixing mistakes.  Sooner or later I usually fix my mistakes.  It wasn't until I began to weave that I finally understood that if I could see a mistake then I would always be able to see the mistake.  More often then not, there is no effective cover-up for a mistake.  This one was a denting error, ten threads in from the edge on a warp that had already given me fits.  I tried to brush it off..."It will never show with the thick weft..."  It showed.  So, I stopped weaving, pulled out the weft, fixed the denting error and began to weave again.  It looks much better without the error!

Sewing.  My daughter decided that she needed a new dress.  She did some shopping and came home empty handed.  She went through my pattern books and found a dress design she liked.  I slowly began to work on it.  This pattern is from a collection by "The Golden Rule".  Each pattern is printed in miniature and the seamstress enlarges it based on the measurements of the wearer.  So I measured.  I drafted.  I made a muslin (I knew I would need it!  The pattern was older and I was sure the fit would be different from my daughter's preferred style....) I modified the pattern and finally made the dress.  I had to promise to not put her head in the final picture, but here it is.  The collar is gathered at the neck and comes down to a point at the center front and back.  The purple is amazing with her reddish-blond hair!

Knitting, frogging, and knitting again.  I would like to knit shawls.  I have a little "shawlette" that is wonderful to wear around the house.  It's just enough to warm my back and shoulders, but not enough to get in the way of doing things.  I have a new shawl book, so I found a pattern I liked and cast on.  Of course I modified it...and in the end, I didn't like it.  This is a traditional triangle shawl with a point at the center back.  I'm not fond of the style (why did I cast on?) and I didn't like how stiff the finished fabric felt.  I kept going, hoping that things would get better, but they didn't.  In this photo, the shawl is off the needles and on a string so I could wrap it around me and see how it worked.  It didn't.  It got to sit on the table for a few hours while I did some research and chose a new shawl design.  Then it got frogged.

This was one of the reasons I frogged the shawl.  I knit a sample with an extra ball of the same batch of yarn on bigger needles.  It was so much softer and had much better drape.  I tried one more needle size after this picture.  Swatching is really helpful!

In my research to save my shawl, I discovered a new webpage:  Laylock Knitwear Design.  The shawls are fun, but scroll down and look on the right hand side for the "Shawl Knitting Cheat Sheet".  Wow!  It's a single page pdf with instructions for make five different shapes of shawls all from the same three stitch cast-on!  I've decided to make a "heart-shaped" or crescent shawl because it will have longer ends for tying.  And, I made some swatches:

Neither of these have been blocked, but they are here anyway!  On the right is the pattern as written by Laylock Knitwear.  On the left is my modified version--no yarn-over holes and a three stitch garter edge.  The knitting is progressing.  I hope there will be another shawlette in my drawer soon!

Transparencies, Negative Space, and Learning Curves

 I wove a transparency the other day.  It's not my very first such creation, but maybe my second or third.  It's not really pretty.    Not long after I finished the piece I borrowed the book "Sheer Delight: Handwoven Transparencies" by Doramay Keasbey from my library's inter-library loan program.  On page 104 (or so) is an article by Terese Ridgeway discussing the way new artists typically place their art on the page.  Figure A at the far left is just like mine--a typical new artist's positioning of a flower on a page--right in the center with lots of empty space around it!  The figures show a progression:  B has the flower taking up more of the space on the page; C has repetition of the motif; D, the more advanced, uses negative space to frame the flowers.

Feeling very "young" in my artistic abilities, I went on-line and researched a bit about using "negative space".  It's an interesting concept--the idea is that the shapes around an object help define the object--and I made some sketches of the chairs in my basement.  One of the tutorials I found on-line at Drawspace.com suggested using a frame and  framing a still life and then sketching that.   Since sketching is not one of my strengths, I decided to try "sketching" in wool.

Here is my framed still-life:

And here is my needle felted interpretation of the still-life piece:

Some of the things I was working on were the angles of the table/grey foam interface and the curves of the shadows.  It still looks like a new artist's rendition of an apple on a mat, but it was fun to create and fun to look at the spaces around the apple that help me to see it's shape.

Pin Weaving/Needle Weaving

My weaving guild is working on a group project for MidWest Weavers Conference.  I'm working on weaving some flags.  I considered a number of different four harness weave structures for the flags and wasn't excited about any of them.  I almost put on a warp for monk's belt--it would have worked really well for the USA flag above, but not for the Union Jack that I still need to do!

So I turned to pin weaving.  I have Handwoven Magazine (Mar/April 1994) that has an article by Nancy Sutton on weaving a patch with a needle on a loom made from pins and cardboard.  I was out of cardboard, but happened to have a piece of foam, so I am learning to "needle weave", although I call it pin weaving.

One of the most interesting things I am learning is that I am not (yet?) a tapestry weaver.  The loom was a breeze to create!  I made a graph paper cartoon, added the pins, and some warp thread, and was ready to weave.  I started weaving.  And I wove.  And wove.  And wove.  The photo above took me the better part of a morning.  Argh!

From the standpoint of getting the flags I need, without a lot of loom waste and without having to either re-thread or rewarp the loom, this is working.  And I think they will look nice in the finished project.  It's just that they aren't done yet.  And I'm not very patient today!

Hanspun Wool--Bits and Pieces

 Summer is in full swing here at my house.  My kids are staying up late and getting up late and my quiet project time seems to have disappeared!

This bit of lace edging is one of my new projects.  I was able to knit during an episode of StarTrekVoyager last night (we've been watching them regularly as a family.  It's kind of fun to watch a show like this all together!).  I have to keep track of my progress row by row or else I get distracted and am lost.  I've also been using a "life-line" (it's the blue cord in the photo).  At the end of every complete pattern in the lace, I pull out the cord and thread it back into the new starting point.  So far I've only had to rip back to the life line once!

The edging pattern is from the book "The Best of Knitter's Magazine, Shawls and Scarves".  It was designed as part of a christening blanket by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts.  I'm using handspun, brownish-grey wool on Brittany 3.5 mm straight needles.  The lace is springy, stretchy, and as you can see in the photo, shows the lace stitches beautifully (even without blocking!).

The goal is to knit two forty inch long strips of the lace and use it as a blanket edging.  I wove two greens and a grey into some striped yardage recently and want to turn it into a throw blanket. 

The plan is to cut the yardage into two strips and to piece them together (dark green as the outer edges).  The knitted lace will help hide the raw warp ends at the top and bottom edges of the blanket.

We'll see how it turns out.  Right now they are just bits and pieces of a project in the works!

Loom Doctor--Sticking Shaft Repair

 I got to play loom doctor today--twice!  The second time was the bigger fix, so it get's to go first.

See that bolt there on the left?  The problem for the day is a rod, hidden underneath it that all the lams that lift the shafts use as a pivot point.

For a while now I have had problems with shaft #7 sticking on my Mighty Wolf.  I've checked the usual things--pushing in on the little pins that connect the wood to the metal--but really the problem seemed to be that the lams were all pushing together at the back of the loom on the right side.  I've messed around with this before and been able to shift all the lams back towards the front of the loom, but it never stayed properly positioned for long.

Today I finally got in the right position to see the hole.  Unfortunately, I took the photos after I fixed the problem (a working loom is more important than blog photos), but I can tell you where it was.  There, one inch under the back of the bolt, right where the rod should rest, was a hole.  I could see it!

A quick peek at the Schacht website let me know that my loom wouldn't fall apart if I undid the lock-nuts on these bolts (there are two of them).  I loosened the nuts, flexed the wood and pushed up on the  lams at that pivot point, and after a moment or two of wiggling, got the pivot rod reseated in the hole.

Boy does my loom weave better now!  Shaft #7 is no longer sticking and all the rest of the shafts seem happier with the right amount of wiggle room!  Hooray!

Here's a bigger picture view of the front of the loom with the bolt on the right side of center.

 Loom doctoring #1--although technically this was a warping issue and not a loom one.--One side of the scarf warp was looser than the other.  I tried a quick fix with a few bamboo skewers and some weights, but it didn't help much.  In fact, I realized as I looked at this, the fat warp threads probably increased the diameter of the wraps of the warp on the back beam making that side fatter than the other.  Translation?  I wound a bump into my warp and a "quick fix" wasn't likely to solve the issue.

The solution?  Re-wind the warp on the back beam.  I wound the warp onto the front beam, untied the fat warp threads from the back beam, then re-wound the warp onto the back beam without those fat threads.  The warp went on smoothly and I hung the fat ends on the raddle and provided a separate weight for them, ala suplementary warp threads.

I like weaving--especially when the loom and the warp work! :)

Ply, Spin, and Warp (All in one day!)

 A while ago I spun some naturally colored cotton on my Akha spindle.  Now I'd like to use it for one of the entries in the COE in Handspinning that I am working on.  Unfortunately, my skeins need to be 1 oz and the original sliver I purchased was 1 oz....which means that I probably had less than a full ounce of spun fiber. 

No problem!  I just pulled out another sliver that contained the same color (it happened to be a tri-colored sliver, so I pulled out the desired color) and started to spin.  Today as I got started plying I noticed something--the newly spun "red" is redder than the older spun "red".  Oh dear.  I went ahead and plyed the original red...0.93 oz.  Not enough!

I do have a back-up plan.  "Mocha" has a similar history--some already spun, some sliver picked out of a tri-colored one.  I'll try spinning some of the new mocha and see how it looks compared to the old.

 In other spinning news, I finished carding my yellow cotton into punis.  This is ginned cotton that I dyed.  There was a lot of vegetable matter in this cotton.  To remove it, I passed the ginned cotton through the drum carder which loosened the fibers and got some of the trash out.  Then I tore the batts into manageable strips and manually picked out the rest of the junk.  It was slow and tedious work, but it was easier to do that then to stop my spinning every few moments to pick out the rough and scratchy stuff!  The punis were made on my cotton hand cards.  The cotton was first carded, then rolled onto a dowel to make the punis.

 Here's a bobbin with the first few punis' worth of spinning.  I'm getting ~38 wpi which is considered a "fine" yarn.

And, I got my test warp on the loom and started today.  This is a fine cotton/poly yarn with some sportweight knitting yarn stripes.  The weave structure is from Strickler.  If this test works then I hope to repeat the scarf with a silk/yak yarn I bought a year or two ago.

Dyeing on Snow Days

This is what I do on snow days.




8+ ounces of olive green roving
















8+ ounces of what I'm calling "candy apple" red.



















A series of blue roving. The dark ones were the first in and out of the dye pot. The light blues were an attempt to make use of the leftover dye in the pot after the dark set came out.







And, this photo is the recycled chenille scarf. :)

--We got 1" of pellet ice by Tuesday morning. We had another 2-3" of pellet ice and snow by Wednesday afternoon. We never lost power--and I am so grateful for that! I couldn't have dyed so much without running water and heat!

Tactile Projects

This is one of those moments when I wish photos allowed for tactile experiences. This terry cloth/pile sample has been washed and I love how it feels!








And this is my latest, finished knitting project: "The Proverbial Cap" by Meg Swansen. It is an exercise in twisted stitch knitting where the knit stitches are knit backwards or twisted and there are many single stitch cable-type crossovers. I've wanted to try this for some time and finally got a copy of Interweave Knits Fall 2010 magazine which has the pattern for this cap and a number of different suggestions for working this type of knitting. The yarn is Cascade 220...I know, I know...it's a commercial yarn! However, I really wanted a solid color yarn to show off the texture of the patterns and I needed a yarn that I didn't care about ruining in case I had to rip it out multiple times. It took me about 10 rows to try a non-cable-needle assisted cable, but I did it and enjoyed it!

Slow Cloth--Terry cloth Pile

The November/December 2010 issue of Handwoven Magazine focused on "Slow Cloth" and included a piece by Rita Buchanan on weaving terry cloth. I got bit by the "I wanna try it" bug and decided to give it a go.

To the left is a piece of a sampler that is in progress. The ground warp (light blue) is 10/2 cotton, as is the pile warp (purple). The weft is a 100% cotton sewing thread that I had on hand. My "dowels" that I am using to raise the pile into loops are really bamboo skewers from my kitchen.


It took a bit of sampling to figure out how to get the pile dense enough to feel like a towel. My first few attempts looked like a forest with too few trees!


My husband helped me design and make a second back beam for my Baby Wolf. I wasn't willing to spend a lot of money on the nice second back beams that Schacht makes for this loom just to try terry cloth pile. I run into this fairly regularly...I want to try things, but I'm not sure that I will do them often, so it's hard to spend a lot of money on the equipment to try the technique. This back beam is held on with c-clamps, making it very temporary, and only cost $10 for wood. There is no brake on the beam and I'm using a live weight tension on it. I'm really pleased how it is working!