16 Shaft Test Sample

This is the test warp for my new AVL 16 shaft loom.  Sett at10 epi, the yarns are mohair/acrylic blends that I used for Elena's cloak fabric a few years ago.  I have 8 ends in each color stripe.  The draft is a plain weave/2-2 twill that I modified from something I saw on Handweaving.net. 

I am learning to treadle without mistakes.  It is a bit of a challenge.  The pattern is only 16 bars (which is so small compared to my friend's 90 bar pattern!), but I have occasionally discovered errors in the patterning.  I'm not 100% sure what is happening.  Part may be not depressing the left, "release" treadle completely.  Part may be other factors that are causing the shafts to catch strangely.  I caught the mistake twice and fixed it while weaving the 6-10" above.

Check out the fabric at the sides of the weaving.  I went to a Weaving Indiana meeting on Saturday and mentioned the purchase of my loom.  After the meeting I got to talking with one of my friends, who also has recently acquired a 16 shaft AVL production dobby loom (her's is 60" wide).  It was fun to swap stories and tips.  Putting the fabric strips on the sandpaper beam was Mary Alice's suggestion.  It is a wonderful way to save my arms from getting scratched! 

Fiber Call Out!

In connection with "Grandma's Room", a teaching location here in town, I am helping with a Fiber Call Out for Montgomery County.  Knitters, crocheters, spinners, weavers, hookers, dyers of all levels (even wanna-be's!) are welcome to join us.  We will meet on Tuesday, Sept. 11th at Grandma's Room in Crawfordsville, IN at 6:30pm.  Hope to see you there!

Our demonstration for the evening is "Handling Wool".  We'll be playing with wool--looking at characteristics such as fiber length and crimp--and making hand felted balls to take home.  The wools in the photo, from right to left, are Cormo (pink), Shetland (copper), and unknown (dark brown).  Guess which one hand felts the best?  Yep!  The unknown wool.  I don't know it's breed.  I can take some guesses.  I can tell you what it's not...  But it rolled into beautiful felted balls with almost no work!  I can't wait to take it to the group on Tuesday!

Construction Season

 Construction has started on the addition to our home.  The crawl space has been dug, the footers poured, and the block work done.  The corresponding cement pad for the garage expansion has been poured.  So far, we are all still alive (me from tearing out my hair and stressing over the project; my husband from doing his part of the work)!  The roof trusses arrived today.  Here's to projects!



While all that is going on outside, I got a new construction project for inside:

Yep.  It's a new loom.  It's definitely not a table loom, but it is a 16 harness loom!  Good thing we're building that addition out back!  This is an AVL production dobby, 48" wide, 16H.  I'm almost finished getting it put together.  What should my first warp be???  Probably something in 10/2 cotton since I'm comfortable with that yarn.  Towels?  Yardage?  I wonder what the waste is going to be on this loom!  I'm excited!

Special Russian Spindles

I volunteer at the local art gallery.  One of the wood turners there was watching me spin and we got to talking.  I mentioned that I was interested in Russian spindles and he offered to turn some for me.

He turned the prototype at the end of the spring. (It's at the left in the upper photo.) I tweaked the sketch some and took it back to him.  He has since had a stroke, but he still turned out four new spindles for me to try.  I've sanded them to get a point at both ends.  My husband showed me how to use a brillo pad as the final round of "sandpaper" to make an almost polished piece.  Each spindle has been wiped with mineral oil.  They spin beautifully!  My favorites are on the outer two edges of the photo--the long, yellow-ish one on the left and the rosy-er wood on the right. Both of these are denser woods and spin longer than the others.





Here's an overview of the sanding I did to finish these:

Grape Juice and Jelly

Our neighbor brought these over!  We were so excited!  It didn't take long to rinse the grapes, pick them off the stems and get them on the stove. 

Once cooked, we passed the grapes through a food mill (it spits juice out one side and seeds out an end--great for processing apples, tomatoes, etc.  Here's a link to one similar to ours.) and then strained the juice through my jelly bags. The bags are hanging from our level.  It was the only thing long enough to reach from counter to counter and I needed something strong and sturdy!

After that, it was time to make jelly.  Yum!  Home made grape jelly is delicious!  We got two batches of jelly and a pitcher of juice from this batch of grapes. 

And then we had a knock on the door last night--a second box of grapes, even bigger than the first!  The kids were headed to bed, but Martin & I got the second box of grapes started right away!  Now we have another batch of jelly and some canned juice to put on the shelves!

Tree Removal Process

We are preparing for some work to be done on our house. The first step in the processes was the removal of two large maple trees--one on each side of the back yard.  I must have spent three or four hours outside watching and photographing the work.  Like so many forms of skilled labor, the tree removal was an art form.  From the man up in the air cutting the limbs, holding them so they would fall close to the trees, to the coordinated effort of the four-man ground crew protecting windows, removing limbs, and keeping the workspace clean.  It was amazing.

Here is the process in a nutshell:

The cherry picker squeezed in between the house and the tree that needed to come down.









After two hours, the foliage was gone and the trunk was all that was standing.

The stump grinder came a few days later.







And now, we are in the middle of cutting the wood, splitting it and stacking it for winter. 

Bobbin Lace Sample

 I'm slowly working on bobbin lace samples.  This one has plain weave diamonds with a torchon lace ground.  As you can see from the irregularities in the sample, I haven't got the technique right yet! 

The sample pattern and instructions are from Jo Edkin's Lace Website.

This is here just so I remember....  We moved some art from the back porch to the basement while we do some remodeling.  It looks good together!  The clay pieces were all done in art class in school by the kids.  The two square pieces are interchangeable collages of my handwoven fabrics.

COE Handspinning--Silk Noil

I am forging onward with my efforts to complete the COE in Handspinning.  This week's fiber is silk noil.  My goal is to spin a one ounce skein of singles that is "extra fine" or greater than 50 wraps per inch.  I've tested the fiber already.  Now it's time to prepare the fibers, spin the fibers, spin the fibers, spin the fibers ...  You get the idea. 

The silk noil is short--about 1-2" long.  It is very soft and spins up slightly fuzzy.  I'm using my cotton cards and doing a single pass of the silk noil on the carders, then rolling it off on a thin dowel to make a silk noil puni.  It took 20-30 minutes to make ten punis today.

I'll be spinning the singles on my Bosworth book charka. I have no idea how long it will take me to finish this project!  One ounce of fiber isn't a ton (literally), but when it is being spun very fine like this it can take a while.  My test puni (just like one of the ones in the photo) took about 30 minutes to spin.  I wonder how many punis it will take to fill a spindle from the charka.  (FYI, and just so I remember, I am starting with 36 grams of silk noil.  The finished skeins are to be 1 ounce or 28.35 grams.  The extra is for the wraps per inch card--every skein needs one--and in case I run into waste in the carding process.  So far, the waste has been minimal.)

Progress--Knitted Lace Blanket Edging

Remember this piece of handspun knitted lace?  It just got a new home--on the edge of the handspun, handwoven blanket I made! 







I machine stitched two rows of straight stitching across the top of the blanket, cut the fringe close and carefully turned it to the back and sewed it down.  Then I added the knitted lace and carefully sewed it to the seam, making sure to cover the trimmed warp ends.

The blanket is pinned to the ironing board cover and each of the tips of the lace have been stretched (2.5" from the blanket) to show the pattern.  I had sprayed the lace edge with water before I pinned it out and sprayed it again once I finished pinning.  Now it's back to knitting while the lace dries.  I have a bottom edge that needs covering too!

Color and Dye Class with Robin Edmundson

Shetland wool

 Robin Edmundson gave a class on color theory and acid dyeing last weekend at St. Mary of the Wood's White Violet Center.    I had a great time!

My favorite part of the class is the way my brain started to reel as I tried to grasp some of Albert Munsell's color theory.  The main idea is to imagine a sphere with the named colors (red, yellow, green, etc.) running around the equator.  At the top of the sphere the colors fade to white.  At the bottom, they fade to black.  From the skin of the sphere towards the center line the colors loose intensity, fading to greys.  I got most of that.  It was when they skewed the sphere that my brain started to hurt! (At some point I'll get a copy of "The New Munsell Student Color Set" and work on that skewing some more!

In the mean time, I have been merrily cutting photos out of magazines and pasting them onto color scheme pages.  Deciding what to do with the color schemes and my dyes is yet to come!

Cascade 220--not quite cardboard-esq

 This skein of yarn (cascade 220) and the shetland roving above were both dyed with stripes of intense color unevenly mixed with stripes of less intense color.  I was aiming to reproduce the shadow effects in a photograph of a stack of corrugated cardboard.  Both dye jobs failed.  Drat!

The shetland is a very orange, almost coppery.  It's actually a pretty color and I like it...it's just not cardboard-esq.  The skein of yarn suffered from an overfull dye pot.  It had to sit on the counter for 30 minutes or more and the colors wicked at different rates, breakin the brown into yellows and greens. Dooh!  It's a great chromatography experiment and maybe a bit like camouflage, but not cardboard colored.  I'll have to try again later!

firestar

 Robin gave each of the students a few extras to play with.  This is some firestar, a nylon fiber that shimmers.  I dyed it with red, orange and yellow.  It's pretty!  I also have some nylon ribbon that I dyed in the same colorway.  Yum!

Mohair/acrylic blend

This was a test dye job.  I have some leftover cones of acrylic/mohair yarn.  I wanted to see if they would take the dye.  They did!  The yellow in the center of the photo is the original color of the yarn.  The orange/red is the dyed mohair.  The black...well, that's dye from the dark blue sample I was trying to overdye.  Now I know that I can dye the mohair blend...and I should not trust the dark blue dye!

gradient in blues and greens

This last skein, also Cascade 220, was dyed twice.  In class I used green and blue green, a bit of yellow and a touch of light blue.  I also intentionally kept a section of the skein undyed.  After it came out of the dye pot, it looked awful!  There was such contrast between the deep greens and blue-greens and the natural yarn!  Yuck!

When I got home I set up a sun dye pot and added some dilute "brillant blue" and black.  The result was a lovely dusty blue on the natural section of the skein which is significantly less jarring that the natural was!

What a fun and informative class!  Many thanks to Robin and the folks at the White Violet Center!

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!

Odds and Ends

 I've taken up a new fiber-hobby:  bobbin lace.  Like my lace knitting, this is one that requires time and concentration.  So far I have made two tiny samples--they aren't even considered true lace!--but they were neat to weave!

Bobbin lace is essentially weaving that is tensioned by pulling the threads against pins.  The manipulations of the bobbins creates the woven sections.

I've made some new little bags.  These are based on a tutorial posted at Sew Together.  They have a zipper at the top and angled sides so the bottom sits flat.  The one with the bright yellow zipper was my test piece made with commercial fabrics.  The other three are made with handwoven fabric from a network drafting sampler I wove recently.    The zipper insertions are all slightly different on the purple bags.  I like the look of the bag at the back best.

Handspun Yellow Cotton

I've been spinning a yellow cotton for a while now.  It's some of the ginned cotton that my dad got that I dyed yellow.  I've drum carded it, picked out the seed bits and other unwanted waste, hand carded it into punis and spun it into yarn.  Whew!  The end results are a small woven piece for my collection of COE-handspinning work and a skein of fine (~40 wraps per inch) cotton.

The cotton was spun on my Matchless spinning wheel.  The woven piece was technically woven on my Might Wolf, but I was just using the loom as a tensioning device to hold the warp.  The threads went through the reed (to set the spacing of the warp), but weren't threaded through the heddles.  I tied  continuous string heddles (there's a great tutorial here at Laverne Waddington's site) over a knitting needle to make one of the sheds and used a wood shuttle to create the opposite one.

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.

Crackle Shawl

After I wove the black on black fabric for Martin's vest, I wove off this piece.  It's a black wool warp with a cream, thick & thin cotton/rayon (?) yarn for the pattern weft and the black warp yarn for the tabby weft.  It's a crackle pattern from Strickler's book (#494).  Sett was 28 epi and the finished piece is ~18" wide.

Things I like about the shawl:  the look.  I love the black/cream color combination.  It has the illusion of old lace.    The fringe.  I'm a sucker for twisted fringe.  I know it takes forever to twist, and yes, I twisted this all by hand, but I love the way it drapes at the ends of the shawl.

Things I don't like so much:  the wool.  Ack!  This is an unlabeled, hand-me-down wool and it isn't very soft.  I didn't get any scratches from my photo shoot, but it would be more comfortable over long sleeves.  And if you are already wearing long sleeves, do you really need a shawl?  The drape.  The drape is better than cardboard, but not as flowing as I prefer.  What's the best way to improve the drape in crackle?  Widen the sett?

And now, I have an empty loom.  I have a few projects percolating and hope to test some soon!

Quick and Easy Sushi Mat

I like sushi.  Fish, no fish, I like it.

A restaurant in town now has a sushi bar on Thursdays.  They make yummy sushi.  Having it brought back memories of growing up when  Dad would occasionally stop by a sushi take-out on his way home from work.  Delicious!

But, restaurants aren't cheap and I'm not super fond of having to go out to eat. 

So,  I found a grocery store (on my route home from Indy!) that stocks sushi rice and nori and purchased them.  However, I didn't have a bamboo mat to roll the sushi on.

Enter the empty rigid heddle loom.  Do you know how long it takes to dress the loom with six threads.  Yup.  About that long--a tiny bit longer if you have to do it twice because you over tensioned it and broke the first set of warp threads!  Still, it only took moments to warp the loom and weave in ~10" of bamboo skewers.  Add some knots at the ends and voila!  One sushi rolling mat--and it's a finished project to boot!

Now if you'll excuse me, it's time to eat my lunch!
 

Handspun Doll Hair

Here's a cute photo:

  My daughter saw this little doll body in my stash and asked if she could have it.  I said yes.  The face, including the two smiling "tattoos" on her cheeks were all drawn by my daughter.  The clothes are from a fashion doll and the hair is handspun yarn.  After the face was drawn, my daughter came downstairs and requested a particular color yarn for the hair.  Luckily, something close enough was available in the stash!

Washing & Spinning Hampshire Wool

A friend gave me some of a fleece from her Hampshire sheep.  I had been reading in the Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook which states that handspinners should try spinning Hampshire... and then I was offered some.  Woo-hoo!

The staple length is 4-5" as seen by this photo of the raw (unwashed) lock, but the tips didn't come clean after two washings and ended up breaking, so I cut them off, giving a final clean, trimmed fiber length of ~3-3.5".




My oldest daughter and I picked through the wool, cutting the tips and loosening the fibers, in preparation for drum carding.  It was the first time she has helped me with this and it was fun to see her interest in the process!  After a few evenings of picking, we were ready to card.







And look what the drum carder produced!  Aren't these batts beautiful!  My youngest called these rolled up batts "hotdogs" and after she grew tired of cranking the drum carder started playing with the scrap bits of wool to make her own "hotdogs".  All three kids came and helped me card.  I felt like Tom Sawyer getting paid to let his friends whitewash the fence!  Each of these batts required three passes on the drum carder to get them nice and even.  I don't think my elbows could have managed this one without my helpers!  Hooray for kids who like to help!








And, finally, here is a photo of the yarn.  I was aiming for a big and lofty yarn.  It's big, it's lofty....but it's not very even!  I spun this on my Louet S70.  The treadling action was different enough (and I probably sat in a chair at the wrong height) that my knee started complaining at the end.  I feel like my body is getting old! (My dad reminded my last night that old age isn't for sissies....dooh.  I may be in trouble over the next few years!)

 My take on spinning Hampshire wool?  It was wonderful!  The wool was springy, and reasonably soft, and a pleasure to use!  Hooray for new-to-me sheep breeds!

Tunis Preparations

 This bundle of fluff is some Tunis wool.  The tip ends were a bit matted, so I flick carded the locks (both the tip and the cut end) and then hand carded them into rolags for woolen spinning.

Here are my flick carded piles ready for hand carding into rolags.  Unfortunately, I forgot to snap a photo of the rolags.  I made two different types--the first was from the flick carded locks and they were very even and clean.  The second type was from the waste off the flick carder (see the messy pile at the lower left corner of the photo?).  The second type of rolag was more irregular, with odds and ends to pick out.

Here's the resulting yarn.  It is a fine (32-45 WPI) woolen single.  It's pretty and it is soft and cushy.  The white card at the top is information for the Handweavers Guild of America (HGA)'s Certificate of Excellence program.  I have 40 or so 1-ounce skeins to spin for the program.  I am learning "gobs" as I go.  My only hope at this point is that I don't get to the end, look back at my early work (like this skein) and say, "yuck! I can't turn that in!" and have to respin a bunch of these!