Repeating my mistakes

Well, well, well. I’ve done it again. Made the same mistake – twice – that I’ve made before and swore I wouldn’t do again. HAH!

What is that mistake? It’s forgetting to allow for take-up in my warp calculations. That’s why I didn’t have enough warp for 10 towels. If only I’d realized it before I planned and beamed the next warp, which was intended to be for 3 scarves. Fortunately I DID realize my error after that scarf warp was threaded. So I adjusted my calculations, working backwards from the length I actually had, and realized that I could weave 1 fringed scarf, 1 long cowl, and 1 short cowl. Better to know then than later. But still.......how many times will I make this mistake?!?!?!?

Anyway, here are the towels. The first photo shows the three that were special ordered. I’m not sure if she’ll want them, especially the one on the left. The woman wanted it to match exactly a towel she had from me, but I didn’t have enough of the weft yarn left, and since it was a custom hand painting job from several years ago, I’m sure I couldn’t have gotten more. So I did the best I could to make it coordinate, since it couldn’t match.

Here’s the original towel I was to match.

Then I had a friend tell me that he was looking for 3 towels that looked like they went together. So I tried to weave 3 or 4 coordinating in yellow and orange, since the colors looked cheery to me.

The one on the top is one of the shorties – only 21′′ long. He’ll see these towels, and 3 bumberet towels, plus the yellow towel from the last warp, on Friday. He may choose something – or not.

Here are the last 2 towels.

The one that you saw at the end of the warp while on the loom will go to my daughter. In addition to being short, the weft yarn has some looping at one of the selvedges, so I’d never sell it. She can wipe her hands on it. Or whatever.

Not that I’m OCD or anything, but that scarf warp I mentioned earlier was essential if I was to meet my March goal. I used the lace draft I’d created last month, modifying it to be scarf width. Warped the loom with a silver-gray 8/2 tencel and wove the first scarf with that as weft, too. The lovely lace pattern doesn’t show up much in this photo, but you can see it nicely in the next one

I wanted to ‘fancy it up’ a bit, so worked glass beads into the fringe. I really like it. Just enough glitz.

The long cowl got a medium blue weft.

The short cowl got a charcoal weft. I like the scarf and both cowls.

Now, if my friend buys 3 towels on Friday I need to weave more towels. Even if he doesn’t I need to weave more towels. I also need to weave more scarves. Which should I do next? Which will I do next? What yarns will call to me? What weave structure? Will the dyes in the basement start pulling on me? Decisions, decisions.

March 28th, 2018 | 

I am not old

 I saw that posted on Facebook and just love it – the photo and the poem.

On the weaving front, I’ve finished 4 pieces for March from my Happy warp. First I wove a flat shawl in what I call ‘huck-ish’ – weaving just half of a huck pattern. This is an example of necessity causing a design element that I like a lot. I started weaving with magenta Tencel, believing I had 2 tubes of it. I was about 8′′ from the second end when I ran out on the first tube and went get the other.

Uh oh. It wasn’t magenta. It was bordeaux. They looked the same in the darkness of the shelves, but not once they were out in the daylight.

After consideration I unwove several inches so that I could do some weft striping. I added three stripes – coral and pink – separated by thin stripes of the magenta, and finished the shawl with the end of the magenta yarn. Whew!

I liked the way that coral looked so well that I decided I’d use it for weft for the next piece. The coral is Bambu 7. which is substantially thicker than the 8/2 cotton of the weft. It’s also very loosely spun. So I chose to stick with the ‘huck-ish’ treadling to minimize floats. As planned, this piece is a mobius. Here it is on Dolly so you can see how it sits.

So easy to wear. And the bamboo gives it such a wonderful hand.

I chose an azure Tencel for the third piece, also a mobius. For this one I did a full huck treadling. I also like this one a lot.

It was clear I had enough warp left to weave a cowl. I picked a navy Bambu 7, and since the piece would be short I opted to do the full huck treadling again. This is far and away my least favorite.

Amazing how different they look with the different colored wefts, isn’t it?

There’s 4. I’m counting this next one as 5 for the month, even though it’s sort of cheating. I actually finished this piece in September, but it was never right. I didn’t know how to do the mobius at that time, and sewed it end-to-end. It was just a mess.

So once I knew how to do the mobius I took it apart and fixed it. It’s a bit shorter than my typical, but it’s totally fine.

So. With actual garments, simple as they may be, I needed a cloth label. I’d looked at several designs online and planned to order some.

Then the lightbulb went off in my brain. Wait! I had cloth labels that I’d designed for my baby wraps. I’d ordered something like 300 of them, so I had roughly 250 left.

They had info that I didn’t need or want on the clothing, so I had to get rid of that. A serger would have done the perfect job, but my machine with a narrow and tight zigzag stitch worked, and I could sew a string of them, one right after the other.

The color is correct in the photo above, not in the one below.

On the left is the full label, created for my baby wraps. I use them for my towels – at least most of them. Some of my towels hav some bamboo in them.

In the center are labels I can use for things like the 100% cotton mobius – I don’t want them machine washed & dried. On the left I can use for my other mobius and the center-seam shawls.

March 16th, 2018 | 

Finishing February

 Yep. Today is March 10 and I’m just getting around to the post for the 3 shawls I mentioned in my last post that just needed wet finishing. I am definitely compulsive enough that I made it a point to finish them on February 28 so I could count them for last month’s tally.

I really do like weaving lace. A lot. Since I haven’t woven lace in a while I was eager to get back to it.

I’m very happy with the lace design. Not only do I find it visually pleasing, it’s one of the first (maybe the very first) time that I wa able to look at a photo of a fabric I saw online and turn it into a weaving draft! This is a skill I’ve wanted to learn for a few years, so I was thrilled that I made it work this time. It only took several hours. I spent hours with Fiberworks one evening, not gettin anywhere, and around 11PM decided I had to go to bed as I needed to get up early the next morning. Of course, simply getting myself horizontal had no impact on shutting off the brain. All of a sudden the lightbulb went off! I got a brainstorm, got out of bed spent about 15 minutes at the computer and voila – there it was! I could then fall asleep.

I warped for 2 regular shawls and a mobius with a natural 5/2 pearl cotton from my stash.

I’m a person who almost always prefers lace with the same or very similar color in both warp and weft. So the all-cream piece is my favorite. But I didn’t have enough of the cream yarn for another, so had to choose among my limited range of other 5/2 cottons. Using up more stash – yeah!

The other flat shawl uses a red earth colored weft. Here you can see both sides of the lace.

For the last piece, the mobius, I used a spring green.

In addition to working on that Happy warp I showed you last time, I started March by doing a little sewing. Cindie over at Eweniquely Ewe made some, and put a link to a YouTube video with the instructions. I’m happy to share it here, too.

I had some cute cotton fabric ready to go to the craft thrift store, and a broken tape measure from my son, so made these 3 bags. Easy peasy. Especially after the first one.

I’m giving the middle one as a birthday gift to a friend, using the hot pepper one in my purse to replace a worn out little bag, and so far not sure what I’ll do with the third. I’m thinking that if I weave some scraps at the ends of future warps I can make some with my handwoven fabric, at least for the outside fabric, and then I can sell them in my booth. We’ll see.

March 10th, 2018 |