The End of an Era (sort of !)

My turn with the little structo loom has come to a close. I borrowed it months ago to do preparations for a presentation on double weave. The presentation is done, the sample warp- that was on the loom for the meeting-has been woven, and it's time to return the loom.

Here are some photos of the bag that the sample warp became. It's based on a tutorial by Doni, with double weave fabric. The long, thin strip of fabric is not cut to make the bag. It's wrapped in a coil (more or less) and seamed.

The pattern doesn't work very well on the bag--I expected the bag to be square/square column, showing just one width of the fabric. Instead it's more of a flat, 2-dimensional piece that is two fabric widths wide.



It would work better to have the pattern line continue across the seam. Doni's bags are all plain fabrics. That's probably a much better way to do this bag! :)

A Little Knowledge

I was sitting in a photography class with the 12-18 year old girls at church. The instructor provided two pages of notes dealing with f-stops, ISO, shutter speed... And all I could think of was, "But I just have a point and shoot digital camera!"

Well, I took the instructor's comments to heart, dug out my camera's manual, and learned that I have lots to learn about my camera!

I have a Cannon PowerShot A400. It's a little old. It's a little slow. But, wow! It can do things I didn't know about! Sepia, black and white, portraits, night scenes... There's even a way to adjust many of the settings the instructor focused on! Wow!

My three year old was a good sport and let me take many pictures of her. I like this "open composition" (see, Kelly! I was paying attention!) of her in sepia.

My asparagus let me play around with the rule of thirds. See how the tall spear in the back is on a (almost!) 1/3 line and the smaller spear in front is on another 1/3 line? Whoo-hoo!



And then, I do have fiber content! I pulled out a tub of spinning fiber to prepare for some drum carding...and discovered a Shetland wool sampler. Off came the spinning that has slowed down, and on went the dark wool. The old bobbin and roving snuggled up beautifully for this parting shot:

Overshot -Pleased as Punch!

Look at this bit of overshot! I am pleased as punch at how it is turning out!

The weave structure is Marguerite Porter Davison's 'A Handweaver's Pattern Book', pg 148 titled "Valley Forge Dogwood".

The warp and tabby weft are a two ply acrylic --about 25 wpi. The pattern weft is reclaimed yarn from a skirt & sweater set. It's mostly acrylic with a bit of metallic sparkle and some mohair.

More importantly, the warp/tabbyweft and pattern weft work beautifully together! I have been able to sit and weave without tweaking, without struggling to get the right number of picks per inch...it just works!

I am so pleased!

More Double Weave

I'm preparing to do a presentation to my weaving guild about double weave. As I wove and watched tv, I realized that I may finally have gotten bit by the doubleweave pick-up bug.

Previous attempts at doing doubleweave pick-up were slow, and tedious--cute (remember Fred the Fish?), but painfully slow.

My new set-up included nice, clean, hand-drawn graphs (patterns from a knitting book!)...and the trick seemed to be watching tv while weaving! Gone was the tedium of the 4-passes-per-square! Most of my brain was elsewhere, and a tiny bit of the brain and my hands were busy!



Here's the set-up:

the loom: 4-harness structo
the yarn: 5/2 mercerized cotton warp, 15 epi (doubled) sett
10/2 unmercerized cotton weft

The graphs are held onto a handle at the top of the loom with a binder clip.

Double Weave Shawl

This doll-sized shawl was woven as a double weave tube (5" wide, on-loom) based on the design in "The Magic of DoubleWeave" called "It's an 'L' of a shawl" by David Xenakis and Ruth Morrison.

Essentially it is a woven tube that has been fulled and cut at a 45 degree angle. The trick is that the angle is rotated by 90 degrees at the center of the shawl, to make an 'L'. (Come to the Wabash Weavers' guild meeting on Friday and I'll show you--visuals are very helpful for this one...but the book has good photos, if you can't join us at the meeting!)

My daughter's baby doll played the model for the finished shawl. :)

I Dyed

Oh, happy day! The school age kids are all well and back in school, the three year old was content to play, and I dyed.

And dyed.

And dyed.

I'm dead (tired, that is!)!

Today's techniques included vat dyeing (over half a pound of beautiful sunshine yellow!), over dyeing (the little bit of yellow and orange next to the yellow), crock pot dyeing (the blues & greens), and painting (the pink/purple combo).

Lessons learned? Hmm. Steaming cheap plastic wrapped wool in the oven melts the plastic wrap. I think I got it all off! Dooh! A dunk in the big pot and a chance to simmer helped even out the color from this particular crock pot batch. And, vat dyeing does a great job of completely dyeing the wool!

Dye Days are great!

Duvet Update

No photos here, just good news. I am much happier with my "Indiana Puzzle" duvet cover since I did some finishing work on it! Hooray!

Overshot Challenges

I've been working on some "overshot as doubleweave" samples for an upcoming guild meeting. I really like the one to the left. Unfortunately, I didn't weave it correctly. Check out the back side--all those floats aren't supposed to be there!















Yarn: warp- 10/2 unmercerized cotton in grey and variegated blue. Weft handspun cotton single.
Sett: 15 epi (doubled--ie. 30 epi)

The biggest problem with these samples--I think the sett is too close. With a smaller sett some of my challenges in getting these square would have gone away.

Things I like (and don't)

Things have been getting finished lately. It's such a lovely feeling! The sunny yarn is for a friend. It didn't need to be done until June, but it was such a pretty roving and it was so wonderful to have a reason to spin (other than adding to my already full containers!) that I went ahead and finished the job early! :)

I was a "good girl" and finished my douvet cover before I finished the yarn. Unfortunately, I'm only half pleased with the finished product. I love the colors. I really like the way the "Indiana Puzzle" star looks. I'd forgotten how this comforter sits on my bed. Do you see how the blankets show on the side? Yuck. It detracts from the prettiness of the cover. I'm not sure how to make it better. :(

It was "intentional"

I got my Christmas present this week....a new book by Judith MacKenzie McCuin titled "The Intentional Spinner". I've skimmed through it already, gone back and read some sections in detail, and...
spun some yarn!








This book is not the first place I've read about some of these spinning techniques, but it is the first time I've tried some of them! In the photo are a Turkish knot yarn (has the brown in it) and a cabled yarn. Both were made from some leftovers just sitting on my shelf and spindle plyed.

Remodeling

A friend gave me a denim wrap-around skirt. It didn't quite work for me to wear it, but I used it to make one of three new pairs of pants for my son.

The fabric for the other two pairs of pants are from his father's twill pants that got holes in the seat. I won't be able to use the pants much longer. My son is growing and soon will be too tall to use the recycled pants.

Planning Ahead

There is an old adage that "you have to be warped to weave". In order to be warped, you need to have an idea of what you will make, how long to make the warp, how close to sett the warp threads, etc.

These Weave-It squares are the first step in turning these yarns into warp and weft. The yarn at the top of the photo is a tan 40%/60% rayon/wool four-ply fingering weight yarn from my Grandma's stash. The yarn to the left is a reclaimed yarn from a knit skirt & sweater set that a friend sent my way. It's a five strand yarn (not plied). Two strands are a natural cream color acrylic/mohair blend. The other three strands are a gold metallic material.



The square on the right was woven with one strand of each yarn held together.

The square on the left was woven with the rayon/wool yarn as a warp and the 4strand gold yarn as weft. (Near the top I wove the weft closer together than the rest of the square.) For each of the yarns I used two strands together.



Results:

The colors of these two yarns blend well together. The tan of the wool yarn tones down the yellow of the gold.

I think these will make a nice shawl, scarf, hat, bag....or something! :)

Dye Challenge

My cousin inadvertently gave me a challenge. She sent me a link to a professional dyer's page and asked if I could reproduce two colorways.

The short answer is: probably not.
The medium answer is: I've never tried.
The longer answer is: Let me Dye!

The orange/yellow/pink roving was dyed in a crockpot. The blue/green/purple was oven dyed.




Neither of them turned out like the photos I was sent....but they both look interesting to me! They both need to dry, and then they will find their way to my etsy shop (fibertwist.etsy.com).

Halfway There

I'm working on the vest for my great aunt. This was woven in a huck lace pattern on 8-shafts in one piece from backwaist, over the shoulders, to the the front waists.



















The v-neck has a large number of warp ends that need to be woven into the fabric.



















I was worried that the bamboo ends would work their way out, so after weaving in the ends I added two rows of stitching to help keep them there (I hope!).


One side of the neck is now finished. Soon I'll tackle the other!

:)

Diamonds in the Rough

I am making a vest for my great aunt. Can you see the diamonds in the fabric? The yarn is a 10/2 bamboo (natural color). It is so soft!

The vest is woven in one piece from the back waist to the shoulders, then a second shuttle is introduced and the fronts are woven at the same time from the shoulders to the waist.

This is a new technique for me...in fact, weaving for clothing is a new thing too! ..The technique is based on some ideas from Paula Simmons in "Spinning for Softness & Speed".

The weave structure is a 8-harness huck lace pattern called "Eight-Shaft Huck Lace Diamonds" by Susan Harvey.

Christmas (again!)

This post might also have been titled "ME! I finally made something for ME!"...

This is the pair of fingerless mitts I made from the roving "Santa" left in my Christmas stocking. I spun the wool into a 3-ply yarn ( I was very pleased with myself....I read Abby's post about plied yarns and their uses and I intentionally made a 3-ply yarn to show off some cables--'cause I love cables!)

The pattern is by Carissa Browning and is available on Ravlery. I modified it slightly to work with the gauge of my yarn.

(For the record, I chose to make fingerless mitts so I can wear them and drive. I know that regular mittens are too slipery for me to use while driving. The mitts do leave my fingers a bit cold--I wore them on a road trip yesterday--but I think they might work for driving! :)

Mermaids in Winter

A number of years ago I received some of Amy King's Falkland wool (mermaid colorway) to spin. It spun beautifully! I separated the roving into chunks of color and ended up with three small skeins of green, blue, and purple/green. They have sat in my stash for a long time.

Over the holidays I found a project for these little skeins (~100 yards each)--"Striped Fringe", a scarf, by Amanda Blair Brown in "The Best of Interweave Knits". I modified it, of course!, but the over all look is just fun! I ran out of my green yarn, but added in a pink 2-ply that had green in it. The scarf is for my 8 year old daughter and she was really excited about the idea of adding pink to the scarf!

Each stripe is 12 stitches wide. The knitting was done in seed stitch on US 5 needles.


The ends were woven (good old "over under, over under) to make the decorative front for this photo. :)

Cheese-y Smiles!

I'm thrilled with this project! I wove two rayon scarves on a small Structo loom and I love how they turned out!

The yarns are a mix of stash yarns--a burgandy 6-ply rayon from WEBS, a tan 2-ply rayon, and a multi-colored rayon single. The structure is a M's & O's variant from "A Handweaver's Pattern Book" by Davison called "Forest Crook's Blanket Weave.

The little Structo loom (on loan from a friend in my weaving guild) had a miniature/toy-like feel. Maximum weaving width is 8 inches! But, the loom works great. I will be using it later on this year for a double weave demo for the Wabash Weavers Guild.


Two intersting points--I wove two scarves with two slightly different treadlings (is it ok to call it that even though it's a table loom? Should it be "lever-ings"?) The first one was ho-hum. It was just a scarf. The second one, more of a 2/2 twill, was stunning to me. Once off the loom and wet finished, the differences between them seem more subtile, but I'm still partial to the 2/2 twill weave structure.

Point number two: check out my drying rack. This is a wonderful, inexpensive, three arm rotating drying rack from a local store. It works great! However, it leaves a lovely crease in my scarves when I hang them to dry. The solution? Increase the diameter of the arm with an old, plastic cone. No more creases!

Happy 2009! May your year be full of moments of joy and peace!

In Memory

I always called her Grandma. I still remember her old phone number and the way to her house in Anaheim. I remember her stories. Sometimes she would tell me one I had already heard, stop and say, "But I've told you that one before." But she often added a tiny bit that wasn't in the original telling.

I am wearing the "last of the sweaters" that she knit for me. It's an acrylic/wool/camel yarn. The sleeves and back were knit on her knitting machine. The cabled fronts were done by hand. The sleeves can unbutton to turn the sweater into a vest. This sweater is...well, not new. I've tried to retire it many times now. It's slightly felted. It has a stain on the front. It still finds its way to the top of my sweater drawer.

Of all the things my Grandmother taught me, I think I'll always remember that she loved me.

Searching

Searching for the right weft!

This warp is based on Dianah Rose's "Sturdy Rag Totes" (a variation of warp rep) from Handwoven, Sept./Oct. 2007.

The plan was to use fabric strips as weft, but the patterns on the fabric made it hard to see the differences between the green and yellow sections of warp. So, I began the process of finding the right weft.

Three attempts are visible in the photo--at the top, pin drafted roving. This turned out to be a successful weft. The red is a strip of sweatshirt fleece. The white at the bottom is a boucle type yarn.

I like the feel of the boucle type weft--the piece is soft and flexible--but I can't see the yellow/green transitions unless I squint really hard, and that just won't work for this!

Ahh, the lessons we learn by doing something new! :)