Weave Structure--Cannele

Last year in the "Fab Four" workshop with Robyn Spady I was introduced to the weave structure "cannele". On four shafts it is a plain weave fabric with warp and weft floats, much like the photo to the left. This year, in Charka 201 with Eileen Hallman, Eileen suggested trying a cannele weave structure with a twill background (for improved drape). My hope is to use some of my handspun cottons to weave a fabric that I can use for a top of some sort. Cannele is a reasonable option for showcasing a special yarn without having to use tons of it!

Eileen shared a 10 or 12 shaft cannele draft with me and I went to work to modify it for my 8 shaft loom. After lots of tweaking, I got a draft that I liked (after weaving my sample I can laugh at some of the mistakes in my draft...I should have done a short sampler earlier in the drafting process!) I finally put on a short and narrow warp--two yards long, 5-6" on loom. I used 10/2 cotton (unmercerized) as the main warp with a handspun 2-ply pinkish/red cotton as the warp float yarn.

Here are a few of the things I tried:
(at the top) 10/2 cotton weft with wool/tencel weft floats. I like the thicker yarn for the weft floats

After a while I discovered that I didn't have to weave the weft floats. Here is a piece with the pinkish/red warp float yarn used as weft. No weft floats.


I tried a couple of different colors of 10/2 cotton as weft. Then I tried some handspun cotton singles as weft. This single was from a two color roving that we used in Eileen's class to practice using our spinning to make color changes. The thin singles make the fabric seem so much softer than the commercial 10/2. I wonder if this will change after wet finishing?

June Quilt Block

Here's the quilt block for June. I love how quickly these smaller blocks with big sub-blocks can go together!

Six times 3 blocks down; six times 3 blocks to go!

Silk Hankies

I discovered some silk hankies at The Fiber Event this year and decided that it was time to learn to play with this amazing form of silk.

The hankies are roughly the size of a hankerchief--10"x10" and consist of many layers of silk cocoons that have been stretched on a frame.

Each gossamer layer of silk can be separated from the rest of the hankies, stretched and used as an unspun yarn or be spun.










To start, I peel off one layer of silk hanky, poke a hole in the center and then start to stretch the hole to make it larger.















Soon, I have a large circle of silk. These fiber can be pulled pretty fine. I pulled mine a little more than what I show in the photo.















After attenuating the fibers to the desired thickness, I break the circle open and wind the fibers into little nests that are ready to use for knitting or spinning.


I love the way the colors blend as the hankies are stretched!

May Quilt Block

Here's May's quilt block for my three Christmas quilts. All three are identical this time.

Dye Discharge

I saw some beautiful scarves last week that had been woven from a warp dipped in bleach. It lead to some experiments here at home to see if I could do some dye discharge with a cone of cotton yarn.

And the results are in.

Bleach, followed with a peroxide bath to neutralize the process, works great at removing the "mint" green dye from this yarn.

From left to right across the page the samples are:
(1) soaked in water --this was my standard. Soaking it in water let me know that the dye didn't bleed.

(2) soaked in a 50/50 bleach/water solution.
(3) soaked in a 75/25 bleach/water solution.
(4) soaked in a cream of tartar solution. This idea came up at our guild meeting. I used 1 tsp of cream of tartar in 120 mL of water.
(5) soaked in 3% hydrogen peroxide.

The only changes to the color were seen in the samples that were in the bleach. There was no perceptible difference in effectiveness between the two bleach solutions.

A note about neutralizing: While searching for information on dye discharging, I came across Paula Burch's site "All About Hand Dyeing". She has lots of great information there, including a bit about neutralizing bleach. From what Paula presents, bleach does not stop chewing on the textile with a water rinse. It needs something to stop the reaction. Hence the neutralizing dip in the hydrogen peroxide. I haven't done enough with bleach and textiles to know how critical it is to do this step. But, I don't want my textiles falling apart on me either!

Color and Beads

Working with Laura Bryant's "A Fiber Artist's Guide to Color" I need to work on sorting colors by weight. I tried this recently with sewing thread. Here is another take using perler beads. (What can you say when your little one wants you to play with her? You say "yes" and make the play an exercise with color! :)

To the left is my finished sorting. The heavy colors are on the left; the light colors on the right.

I must admit that I used the camera as a crutch for this exercise. I took black & white photos of my work at various stages, looking through the lens of the camera to see which bead colors were registering closer to black and therefore "heavier".




Here is the purple board with only black beads on it. There are some very dark beads on the lid/bead tray, but they are not black. I think they are mostly dark brown, grey, and dark purple.















Here is the purple board with lots of beads on it. At one point I discovered that I had too many "heavy" colors on the board and took out three rows of beads and scooted the lighter colors to the left. I don't remember if that was before or after this photo.















This arrangement of colors was just for play. The colors are still in a heavy (left edge) to light (right edge) order, but I have grouped them so that the beads of each hue are together. I like the colors all mixed together, as in my first photo, better.

I'm still not sure where I will take this color work. I'm unsure of how it translates to weaving. --It's nice to have more to learn! :)

Color!

My family got me some videos for Mother's Day. I've been contemplating purchasing Laura Bryant's video for some time now. It was easy to put it on the list of things I wanted for Mother's Day.

The Deb Menz video came out just a short time before Mother's Day. It was a complete and utter "drool! I'd like that!" entry on my list.

And now, they are both in my library.

I watched some of Laura Bryant's video for the second time today. She spends a lot of time explain how to group yarns by color "weight". This is similar to value with grey scale, but a little more involved. The trick is that I'm still trying to grasp how to use the weight-grouped yarns most effectively. Laura talks about this in the video, I just haven't gotten the key points clear in my head yet. One of the challenges seems to be whether the goal is a color effect or a structure effect. The two things require different uses of the yarns. (I think I need to go watch the video again!)



Color Works for Spinners is by Deb Menz and I loved it! I have had a copy of her book Color in Spinning for a few years and enjoy it. This video is like a live action addendum to the book. Deb is fun to listen to, she is encouraging, and she blends fiber to create amazing colors. It has been very hard to not drag out the drum carder! I want to blend colors! I want to make pretty batts!




I'm enjoying my new videos!

Handwoven Baby Blanket

A friend is expecting a baby any day now. I took some yardage that I had woven last year and sewed it into a blanket.

My fears of making mistakes with my handwoven fabric resurfaced. It took me a few days to decide that I really could piece my handwovens together!

There were a few new-to-me tricks--mostly flat felled seams--so I'll show you some pictures of the process.









First off, this is how I marked, sewed, and cut my yardage. The chalk line was the finished size of the piece. I sewed a small zig-zag stitch on each side of the chalk line, then cut the piece.

















The flat felled seams are a way of enclosing the raw edges. With right sides together, I sewed a ~5/8" seam. I trimmed the white side of the seam allowance to ~1/4", turned the brown side of the seam allowance under 1/4", then folded the brown (folded) edge over the white (trimmed) edge.













From the back side (where I could see the folded seam allowance) I stitched the folded edge of the brown seam allowance. No more raw edges!
















Just a note: I was uncomfortable using a new technique on my handwoven fabrics, so I made a mini blanket to test things out. I piece the nine sections into three strips of three, then connected the strips of three to make the nine square blanket. I discovered that the flat felled seams the the strips of three needed to be offset or else they got too bulky to turn. Check out the direction of the flat felled seams where the white square and the black square meet. The are folded opposite directions.

Also, I didn't like the way my binding worked. I tried to use the "fold it in half, sew to blanket, fold over and handsew to the other side of blanket" technique. (Can you tell I'm not really a sew-er? I'm just a wanna-be!) The binding (same fabric as the solid brown corner squares) was not wide enough to do that easily. It was feeling stiff like piping and was a bear to handle. I got brave. I turned on all my lights and made use of a sunny morning and ripped out the binding seam! It was a bit of a challenge. My brown thread matched the brown fabric really well! But, I succeeded and only needed the magnifying glass a few times. The final binding was machine sewn on one side, folded over, seam allowance tucked up and attached by hand.




The hand of the blanket is wonderful. It's just right for a simple summer cover for a new little one!

Rep Weave Sampler

My rep weave sampler has been off the loom and wet finished. Here is a collection of photos from the piece.

This section of the piece has a bumpy white yarn octupled (is that a word? Eight strands used together). Unfortunately, the bumps poke through the warp yarns. I've been calling this segment "patriotic"--red, white, & blue.






I wound the warp from multiple balls of knitting yarn and I didn't stop to check the dye lots. Can you see the dark-light-dark-light stripes of blue? I am used to using large cones of yarn for my weaving. I forgot that smaller balls of yarn have dye lots. I hope this will help me remember to check next time!








This is a similar pattern to the first photo. The red side is up (as opposed to the blue in the first photo). The thick weft in this section is four strands of the dark blue warp yarn. The thin weft in all of the piece is a fine (20/2 ish) dark blue mystery yarn.


For a first piece in a new structure, this one worked just fine, even with all its challenges!

Silk Spinning

It all started with a trip to visit family in Bloomington. Of course, it's not wise to go on a trip without checking to see if there will be fiber shops in the vicinity! Yarns Unlimited had fibers dyed by Robin Edmundson in both silk and cotton. This is the silk roving I purchased. The colors are brilliant. The fiber was so soft.












The colors spun up beautifully! I don't usually spin silk--cotton & Romney wool are my staples--but it was easy to adjust to my spinning to work with the silk. When I first learned to spin, tussah silk was recommended as having more tooth than other silks and being easier to spin. I didn't notice this silk as being particularly slippery. I don't know what variety of silk it is, but it was great to spin!









Here's the final three-ply yarn. I used the "Navajo"/chain plying method to keep the colors as distinct as possible.

Now the hard part: how am I going to use this pretty yarn?

Rep Warp Challenges

This poor photograph is of the page in my notebook that was the start of my errors in my first ever bit of rep weaving. I was planning on doing a simple 4-shaft sampler by Rosalie Neilson. I calculated the number of ends necessary and then the warp yardage required for a three yard warp.

Then I turned the page, did some more work, and that night returned to wind my warp.

Unfortunately, I used the "warp yardage required" number and wound 3x the number of ends I needed! Arrgh! It only goes to show you that late at night is NOT a good time for me to work! Arrgh!

On the positive side, making mistakes like this is good. I spent more time in weaving texts and online to figure out how rep works, and now I'm weaving a pretty piece that I wouldn't have tried otherwise!

This is a rep pattern from Strickler (#309) with a modification to the borders. My heavy weft is an 8-ply yarn that I wound together from a yarn in my stash. It's an odd, boucle-esq yarn and some of the loops poke up through the warp. I'm pretending that it's ok and am calling the piece "red, white, & blue". My next sample on this warp will be with smooth yarns.

















And just so I don't forget: There were challenges getting this warp wound on the back beam. The warp advanced so slowly through the lease sticks! At first I thought it was due to the high density of threads since this is a rep warp (24 epi....the yarn measured 14 wpi).

However, that wasn't the case. Check out the angle of the lease sticks relative to each other. I tied the lease sticks to the loom by wrapping the tie around both sticks. The right side of the sticks are close together and slightly pinching the warp threads. I'm calling it the "chopsticks effect". Deep sigh. I have learned another thing to avoid!

Basket Weaving & Quilting Progress

My husband made a "shakuhachi" for his instrument building class (it's a recorder-like flute...in the photo he's playing an tenor recorder). Two days before he presented his instrument to the class, he commented that the shakuhachi is traditionally played with a basket over the head, effectively isolating the player from the outside world. He then suggested that a pillow case would be an ok substitute, and I cringed. So, I offered to make him a basket instead.

I have made two baskets in my life (previous to this). Both of them are a modification of a pattern by Elaine Webbeking from the March/April 1994 issue of Handwoven. For my first attempt at this big basket, I used 3.5" wide strips of paper grocery bags. The basket turned out to be too small for the end use.

The second attempt at a big basket was done with 3.5" wide strips of unprinted newsprint. The strips were 1.5x as long as the paper bag strips and we used 8 strips per side. My husband cut and folded all the strips. I didn't have enough hand strength to fold a second basket worth of strips in one day! (It's tiring!) Once the strips were all folded we wove the basket together and viola! One shakuhachi basket ready for use. (And he apparently stole the show when he did his presentation! The basket and instrument are on display this week at Wabash College along with all the other instruments created for the course.)


Here's a shot of the weaving in process. The newsprint does not have as much structural strength as the brown paper bags. The finished basket does stand like a basket should and is able to support its own weight, it's just more floppy than the brown paper bag version.

















Here's the brown paper bag version. It's big enough to fit over my head. Right now it is holding the next warp for my loom.














And, last, but not least, the April installment of my quilt project. This square is called "Churn Dash" and I did three variations on the simple pattern--one all green, one all red, and one red & green. This simple nine square block, where each square is made of a maximum of two pieces, went together so much faster than last month's blocks where there were 16 'half-square triangle' squares per block.

On and Off Again

I have a trio of items that have been "on" and "off" again. Two have been on and off the loom; one has been on and off the spindle.

The spindle project was an ounce of shetland wool from Fall Creek Farm. It was easy to spin and even easier to ply. Now I have to decide how I am going to use~60 yards of shetland wool 2-ply.

The two weaving projects are in preparation for a presentation that I will be doing for the Weaving Indiana Guild in November. Donna H. and I are going to focus on cotton for our "fiber intensive". The top collection (dark blue with light blue stripes) is 10/2 cotton in a balanced plain weave. I wove three pieces and then did different finishing treatments on them. It is easy for me to distinguish between the unwashed sample and the other two, but the difference between the handwashed and the machine washed piece is not so obvious.

The second woven set is a collection of pieces woven with Sugar 'n Cream, a 4-ply worsted weight knitting yarn. The yarn was a "hand-me-over" from my great aunt (great story here...my craft room is full and overflowing. Why does it never get emptied out? Because my friends and relatives all know that I use "stuff". I do occasionally say "no", but more often than not, I encourage the odd & random replenishing of my stash!) . I hadn't used this yarn for weaving before, but it was just the right sort of thing to try! I started by measuring the wraps per inch, then divided by 2 to get an estimate of the "ideal" sett (7 epi) for tabby. Then I ran through a series of calculations to determine the size of the final piece if I sett it wider (4 epi) and closer (9 epi). I warped the loom and rethreaded the reed for each sett. The changes in the fabric are phenomenal!


Here are two of the pieces: 4 epi & 6 epi. Can you guess which is which?










(6 epi)













(4 epi)














And, just because I played around with the twill, here is a two color twill (left edge of photo), a single color twill (middle), and a tabby with a fine weft all at 9 epi. The warp is the same two color warp from above.

When the student is ready...

My children aren't much interested in my fiber pursuits. It's just one of those things that "mom does". So this week when we stopped in at a friends' weaving classroom, I was not at all surprised that my two youngest asked to go play outside the room.

The oldest (10) chose to hang out with me and my friend. She is growing up....it was fun to see her hanging out with the grownups!

And, as a result of the conversation of the grownups, my ten year old chose to weave a placemat! I was thrilled!

She helped me warp the Emilia rigid heddle loom ("This takes a long time, Mom"); she helped tear the fabric into strips; and she wove the entire placemat ("My arms are tired."). Afterwards, she helped me wet finish the piece and sew the headers.

And, you should have seen my friend's face when she received the placemat! It was a sweet moment.

[And the rest of the quote from the title..."When the student is ready, a teacher will appear."]

Color Exercises

Interweave Press recently release the DVD "A Fiber Artist's Guide to Color" with Laura Bryant. They've posted a teaser on their site (http://www.interweavestore.com/Weaving/DVDs-Videos/A-Fiber-Artists-Guide-to-Color-DVD.html).

It's a good teaser. I watched it and was really excited about it. But, I'm not sure yet about fiber art instruction via videos. It turns out I love books. I devour books. I slurp them up and then go back and nibble on the good parts. And the good parts change from day to day or month to month.

After I got excited about this video, I started some research. Who is Laura Bryant? What else has she made/produced/written? It turns out that she is a fiber artist--she weaves & knits & dyes--and one of her specialties is color. My library is part of a fantastic interlibrary loan system. Today I picked up two of Laura's books "The Yarn Stash Workbook" and "Knitting with Novelty Yarns" (by Laura & Barry Klein). Page 6 of the workbook has photos similar to the dvd trailer. She discusses taking a crazy mix of color and making some order out of it.

So, I tried it.

I have a collection of my grandmother's sewing thread (I use it...slowly, but I use it). Here is a random tray of yarns:















Then, I tried getting all the light colors to the left and all the "heavy" (dark) colors to the right:














I realized that I was tending to group the threads by color as well as light/heavy, so I intentionally tried to group them in lines of color.
















It was a good exercise. Laura comments, "Artists spend years training their eyes to detect fine nuances in weight between colors..." I'm not trained yet, but I'm getting started! :)

Seed Paper

In the middle of this paper making project, the phone rang. It was my great-aunt. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Making paper" was my reply. There was a pause at the other end of the line. "I'm crazy...I know" I commented, and we both laughed.

The closeup photo of blue-grey paper shows the little specks of seeds, parsley seeds, that I've put in the paper.

Assuming that the paper dries well (and the seeds don't sprout prematurely), I'll use it for thank you notes for the Master Gardeners' Garden Show that just finished.





Here are shots of the tools and results from my first foray into papermaking:
(tutorial from Gracious Rain)

I filled the blender ~2/3 full with paper from my shredder basket, added a bit (~1/4 C.) of blue lint from my drier, and filled the blender with water.

I poured the resulting oatmeal-like slurry into a rectangular plastic tub and used the plastic needlepoint canvas as a screen to create the paper. One screen was used to collect the pulp; the other was placed on top to help squeeze out some of the water.

The wet paper was laid on a hand towel, the canvas screen removed, and was allowed to dry. Technically, it is still drying. Maybe by bedtime I can take flip the papers over to allow the bottom side to dry better...maybe I can get them off the wet towel too.

Finishing

Well, some of my things are done. The hankerchiefs have all been hemmed and pressed. They are very pretty. A friend thought they were dinner napkins...so , perhaps they are a bit heavy for "real" hankies, but I still like them.















Here's some of the detail from the center.













And, it took me a few days, but I finally wound the plied dusty rose yarns off the bobbins for storage. I don't know what I'm going to do with them (any suggestions?). The recent Spin-Off magazine had a ruffled scarf in it that looked easy to knit. I could do a scarf in each color and have them be "sister scarves". Don't hold your breath on that!

The dark and medium shades are barely distinguishable (dark is the outer 1/2" of the top ball; medium the inner portion of the top ball. The bottom ball is all light.).

Spoiled (or Multi-Shuttle Weaves are Slow)

I'm spoiled. I've been weaving lots of single shuttle plainweave recently and I love how fast it weaves.

Now, I'm weaving multi-shuttle weaves. Progress. Is. Very. Slow.

My crackle scarf (oh, dear! I didn't get the test warp samples posted!...Well, I'm weaving a scarf with 8/2 tencel for a Weaving Indiana guild project. Crackle is a new weaving structure for me. It is a cousin to overshot and summer & winter. It uses both a pattern and a tabby weft.)

I am pleased with the way the scarf turned out. In fact, it is not only visually pleasing, but texturally as well. The crackle gives the fabric areas of plain weave plus blocks of various twills. The different areas feel different! I love it!

Unfortunately, I find two shuttle weaving a bit slow. It's not horrible, but slow, and I had to pay attention to keep track of my place in the pattern and the need to use the tabby picks.


Now for the really slow part. My plan is to do another scarf in the same yarns with a clasped weft technique using three colors. This may technically be tapestry weaving, but I still think of it as clasped weft. I tried it on my test warp. I know it can be done.

But, it takes so long!!!

I'm not sure if I can use this technique for a 60" scarf!

The mid-section of this photo show the "clasped weft" weaving (teal on the left, pale green in the middle, black on the right).

The upper section is a plain weave inlay technique where the pale green weft is laid in on top of the background tabby shot (I'm alternating black & teal). The good news is that the green can be seen from both sides of the piece. The bad news is that the black weft really tones down the green.

I may be un-weaving all this by tomorrow morning and doing something else! I can't go this slow--not today!