Making presents - and progress

We had our first Christmas celebration yesterday. Included were my two kids, son-in-law, grandson, both sisters, brother-in-law, niece, nephew, my nephew’s new fiance. It was a wonderful afternoon. The only thing that could have made it better was severa more hours. I most certainly did not have enough time to visit with my niece, nephew, or to-be niece-in-law. And it will unfortunately be many months before we’re all together again.

Since we did Christmas yesterday, I can now show you my latest weaving efforts. I made everyone bookmarks, but not my ordinary bookmarks, which are woven using a 5/2 cotton warp and similar sized wefts, all woven on four shafts. I like them, but wanted something more special for Christmas gifts. So I went to Carol Strickler’s A Weaver’s Book of 8 Shaft Patterns and decided on several of the border patterns on pages 31-33. I made a few minor modifications to make sure that the back wouldn have floats more than 7 threads long, preferably 5, since the purpose was bookmarks. I needed to make 9 in all; 6 for yesterday and 3 for presents yet-to-be-given (to people who don’t read my blog, so no present-spoilers here), plus 1 extra just in case. Firs a shot of all 10.

I threaded the Mac in a simple rosepath design – 4 repeats – using 12/2 cotton sett at 36 ends per inch. Each of the designs used a different tie-up, so several trips under the loom.

Now for some close ups.
First I wove some snowflakes.

My oldest sister, who used to knit lots of mittens, often using a traditional snowflake design, got the dark blue one of these. Then I wove a design that looked to me like a Star of David while in draft form, but more like a flower in real life.

The new fiance got the light wedgewood blue bookmark. Next I wove some trees. I really like these lovely evergreens.

For obvious reasons, I made them both a nice rich green. My brother-in-law, who spends hours outdoors each day, got one of these.

Then I tried another tree. It’s okay, but in comparison to the first one, not a winner.

I’m using this as my extra.
So I moved onto a more warm-weather design, weaving some butterflies.

My niece, who lives in South Carolina and has more summer than the rest of us, got a butterfly. For my last design I made flowers.

My other sister got the flowers. She’s got a lovely flower garden.

While I was weaving the bookmarks my son stopped by for a few hours (his purpose is still a secret). Being ever helpful, he graciously assisted me in replacing the cords on my Missouri loom.

I am SO glad I had his help. It took the two of us about an hour and a half, and would have taken me more than twice that long alone.

Once all the cables were hooked to the levers, we tested it all out, and everything seems to work smoothly.

The next day I stopped at JoAnn Fabrics and bought some webbing to make the missing apron straps. Today I got them sewn to length and stapled in place on both the front & back beams.

Over the next few days I hope to have the time to put on a short warp and test it out. Will the reed, which my son sandblasted to remove the rust and I subsequently sprayed with clear rustoleum in an attempt to make smoother, be sufficient or will it abrade the threads? Have I sufficiently cleaned the heddles (not rusty) by blowing them with compressed air, or do I need to individually wipe each one? Will the brakes hold, the levers work smoothly, the shed be clean? Only time will tell.

I’m still working on needed modifications to be able to hook up the treadles. I need the loom to be functioning, at least as a table loom, by mid-January, when I’ll be away from home for a week.

Just a few more days & I’ll spend more time with family on Christmas Eve & Christmas day. Yippee!! Wishing you a wonderful Christmas, too!!

December 21st, 2012 | Tags: bookmarks, Christmas, Missouri loom | Category: Life - As I See It, Weaving | Edit this post 1 comment to Making presents – and progress

New Year Loom « Weaving A Gem Of A Life

January 1, 2013 at 10:27 am · Reply · Edit

[...] Macomber (above) still has leftover cotton on it from my special bookmarks woven as Christmas presents. Plus the back beam is a great place to hold many things, from my ball [...]

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Little things

When I left the Letchworth Arts & Crafts show last year I decided I had to have more small items to sell this year. Way back in December I started some pick up weaving on my rigid heddle loom specifically for this purpose. I finally finished the weaving i May.

Now, I’ve really finished the pieces. Here are some little magnets.

They’re quite small. The interior dimensions are about 1.75′′ x 2.2′′. Trust me when I tell you that it was quite a challenge to get the weaving into the magnet straight. Or even to get it into the frame, period. Weaving is a lot thicker than a photo, which is wha the frames were designed for. I don’t know that I’ll do this again. Nor do I know what happened to the 12th frame I bought. So there are 11 of these little guys. Perhaps for all time.

Now the cards are a different story. I’m not overjoyed with some of the weaving, but it was really easy to machine stitch the raw edges to an appropriate size and make the cards. They came with heavy duty double-sided tape in 4 places, and the end result is a finished piece.

I definitely like the white card stock better than the ivory, and I probably won’t do all pick up next time I make cards, but if these sell I think I’ll make some more of these.

Then I wove another two dozen bookmarks. My customers love the ones made with variegated yarns, so I used left overs of Tammy’s hand painted yarns for all of them. This makes 112 that I’ve woven so far this year. Sounds like a lot to me, till I remember that Amanda made 2,000!

I figured I’d round out the small items with some mug rugs. I haven’t had any of them available in quite a while. I used a cotton/rayon/flax blend for the warp & wool or blends for the weft. I wove a total of 22 mug rugs.

It’s impossible to tell the colors in the photo, but from top left the warp is black wool, burgundy wool, variegated wool/acrylic blend, and variegated sock yarn.

I managed to weave & finish three more rayon chenille scarves. Tammy’s Magic Kingdom colorway is the warp. Two had her azure weft, the last had a navy weft. I like them all.

October 2nd, 2012 | 

11 more handwoven scarves

I’m doing a bit of playing catch up here. I’ve been weaving as fast as I can, and now that I don’t need to try out a new loom, mak decisions about which loom is staying, or do the work to sell the Varpa, I can get much more accomplished.

The first thing I did was warp for 2 rayon scarves on the Mac, to be sure that the hints the weavers on Weavolution had given m would work well. To start, I sanded the breast beam with increasingly fine grades of sandpaper, starting with 80 grit and working my way to 600. Then I finished it with Danish Oil. An interesting product – that. Before I bought it I assumed it was, as the name implies, an oil. Not so. It’s a product that has some plastic polymers in it, so dries hard – no residue to rub off on fabric.

Anyway, as I continued to read the hints I was given, I realized that one weaver had hit the nail on the head with my problem. I was advancing the cloth beam too far, so the bottom of the beater was hitting on the finished fabric and pulling that weft apart. Here are a few pictures so you can see what I mean.

In the first one the cloth beam is advanced correctly. You can see the space between the bottom of the beater bar and the wove fabric.

In the second (sorry for the quality), I advanced the warp too far, and the bottom of the beater bar hits that woven cloth. With a fine and/or loosely sett warp, this will be deadly.

Now that I know exactly what causes that problem on the Macomber loom, I can avoid it. I’ll probably try to come up with some type of ‘stop’ so that I can’t advance it too far. IMHO, while there are many great design features on the Mac, this is a design error. It was impossible to do this on the Varpa, and is also impossible to do on my counterbalance. I know there are very good reasons not to advance your warp too far at once, but this shouldn’t be one of them.

My test warp for this new attention/technique on the Mac was a lavender rayon threaded in an 8 harness Ms & Ws pattern. I used a red-violet weft in this first scarf.

The second weft was a navy rayon. I can’t show it to you because it’s one of the nine pieces I dropped off at a professional photographer’s today so he can shoot them for my show applications for next year. I wanted to get the weaving to him so he can take his great pictures & I can get them back to sell at my fall shows. I forgot to take a photo of this one before I took it to Tim Fuss.

Then, because I knew I could go faster, I went back to my trusty counterbalance loom for everything else you’ll see here.

First some of Tammy’s hand painted rayon chenille in Blue Violets. I put a stripe of some of her purple yarn in just for a bit of contrast.

Because rayon chenille is a slow fiber to beam, I moved to a lovely lilac silk-cotton blend, making some huck lace blocks. The second picture, the close up, is much more accurate in color.

Then, because I was on a lace blocks roll, I decided to weave with some of the lovely orange cashmere-silk I’ve used before. I’v been out of this color of scarves for months, and although I haven’t sold many cashmere-silk scarves this year, I thought people might like the orange.

Hmmmmm. Problemmatic. I like the lace pattern,

...but the yarn was much more challenging than it should have been. Especially along the selvedges. Absolutely none of the techniques I tried made smooth selvedges. They looked bad on the loom, they looked bad after wet finishing.

I’m sure I’ll be more critical than most of my customers, but needless to say I am really disappointed in these scarves. I had planned to take them to Tim for photos; obviously I didn’t do that. Sure don’t want a jury to think this is typical of my work!

I’ve woven a few other pieces I still need to finish, and I’m getting more on the loom tomorrow morning. Some more of Tammy’s hand painted lovelies. In 12 days I’ll be loading the van for the next show, and I still have to weave more bookmarks, warp the rigid heddle, and finish the magnets & cards I started last winter — specifically for this upcoming show. I have other ideas for things I think will sell, but there’s not enough time to make more new products. Better to have more ideas than time than the reverse.

The hillsides here are starting to be works of art. I love the beauty of autumn in western New York!

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September 23rd, 2012 | Tags: cashmere, cotton, counterbalance loom, handwoven lace, handwoven scarves, Macomber, rayon, rayon chenille, silk | Category: Weaving | Edit this post

Weaving with silk...and cotton

After warping up the Varpa and getting everything all tied up correctly, I decided I’d change the treadling for each of the three handwoven silk scarves, as well as the weft color.

For the burgundy scarf I used ‘tromp as writ’ — meaning I danced across the treadles in exact same pattern as I’d threaded th harnesses.

For the next one I decided to treadle basically a straight and point twill, eliminating the advancing twill sections.

Here’s what it looked on the loom like with a Pacific Blue weft.

That one was a bit harsh for me, I think because of the combination of the sharp angles in the weaving pattern and the dramatic difference in the warp and weft colors. So for the third I softened everything up. I treadled only the advancing twill with just a small point between each pattern.

Then I used a light coffee weft, which also softened the look. Again, here it is on the loom.

These scarves were not quick to weave. I had to get used to treadling the Varpa, and had to pay attention to 360 threads to make sure I wasn’t making weaving errors. After that, I really needed to get a quick, easy warp onto the counterbalance loom so could feel reasonably productive in preparation for the upcoming show. So I decided on bookmarks. I threaded in a rosepath pattern, treadled in a variety of patterns, and got 32 booksmarks woven.

That made me feel good.

So now I’ve wound a warp of 170 ends of natural 8/2 tencel and have beamed it on the counterbalance. (By the way, I’m a complete warping valet convert.) I’m going to thread in a modified Ms & Ws pattern treadle in a variety of ways, and use a different weft color for each of the four scarves. Gotta keep moving!

August 17th, 2012 |

Silk lace handwoven scarves

Back in May I wove some lace ‘checkerboard’ scarves in bamboo. Although I called it huck at the time, it’s not really. It’s a Swedish lace. I’m certain that’s neither important nor meaningful to anyone but a weaver.

Anyway, I liked the way the scarves looked even if the checkerboard pattern only showed up if you caught the light just right. I only had three handwoven silk scarves for my July show, and since I had some lovely 20/2 undyed spun silk I decided I’d repea that weaving pattern.

This time I remembered to snap a few pix while it was on the loom, since the checkerboard pattern shows up well while I’m weaving. Thank goodness, or I’m sure I’d make lots of treadling errors!

Even here, the design isn’t as pronounced as I might like. So I enhanced the next picture to show the lines clearly.

With the scarf wet finished & pressed, I think these silk scarves are elegant, even if the design is somewhat subtle.

Interestingly, although my July show was really wonderful, I didn’t sell any of these silk scarves. Nor did I sell my ice green silk lace. You just never know what people will buy. Or at least I don’t.

I’m sure not complaining — I sold 6 shawls and 47 scarves at that show!!!! So now I’m weaving like mad again. Fortunately, I lef myself almost seven weeks between the July & August shows, so I’m not making myself crazy.

For you weavers, here’s the draft of the checkerboard lace if you’re interested.

July 26th, 2012 | Tags: handwoven lace, handwoven scarves, silk | Category: Weaving | Edit this post 4 comments to 

Lemon Chiffon handwoven scarves

 Like most weavers, I have quite a stash of yarns.

When I’m at a show (not very common for me) and I see yarn I like at a good price, I buy it. Then I come home and have to put away, and sometimes forget about it. Months later I’m looking in one of my boxes for something, and get a pleasant surprise at finding a yarn I’d forgotten about, particularly when the color & fiber still make me smile.

That was the case when I found 2 cones of 10/2 cotton in a color I was calling buttercream. After the scarves were woven I had to change the name – the color was richer yellow than what I think of as buttercream. I opted for lemon chiffon. (The color is much more yellow than it appears in the photos. I’d still call the color in the photos buttercream.)

I decided to weave some huck lace scarves from it. I love weaving lace, both huck and a variety of Swedish laces. I like the way they look on the loom, the way they wet finish, and the way they please and amaze my customers when they see them hanging at a show.

I decided on an overall huck threading for this cotton, warped up my little counterbalance loom, and set to weaving. The first two scarves were woven in what I think of as typical huck. (I know I don’t use the correct terms for these lace weaves. Unfortunately I didn’t know that when I started calling them by ‘my’ names, and somehow can’t seem to get the correct names planted in my brain.)

I’ve woven this pattern in 10/2, 8/2 and 5/2 cotton, cobweb weight cashmere-silk, 100% silk, and rayon. It never fails to please. think the cottons work best, but it’s pretty much always a winner.

This time I opted to weave the third scarf in what I call ‘windowpane’ huck. Same threading & treadling, just a different tie up.

For some reason (I don’t know why) I haven’t used this option in a while. It does seem a bit more fragile, more prone to snaggin a thread while wearing it, but it’s so lovely that people like it anyway.

The two scarves look so different, it really is magic that they’re so close in structure.

I took all three scarves to my show at Chautauqua Institute in July, and sold all three, bing, bang, boom. Shoulda bought more o that yarn when I saw it – buyer’s remorse in reverse.

Parting shot:
Mama Phoebe built her nest in the rafters underneath my porch. She’d just fed her babies and told them to be quiet since I was nearby.

July 24th, 2012 | 

I wove the lemon chiffon scarves with a 10/2 mercerized cotton. My notes tell me I sett the threads at 20 ends per inch (EPI). I generally use 12 EPI when I’m weaving lace with 5/2 cotton. I also looked up my records for what I’ve sett 8/2 at for cotton (or rayon) lace, and I generally use 18 EPI. I did just weave some 10/2 cotton lace (it’ll be my next post) at 18EPI because I hadn’t checked my records (hah!). It’s fine, too.

I don’t change the sett with the different treadlings – that is, whether I'm weaving traditional huck, huck lace (what I called huck windowpanes), huck bars, I use the same setts. 

Neck warmers

Trust me, I know it’s important to be consistent with my blogging. Important to my readers, important to my business, important t my structured-ness.

I try to be. I really do. Then I get so busy I barely have time to go to the bathroom, much less blog. And if that’s not bad enough, my sweet kids got me a Kindle for my birthday. Before I’d figured out how to download library books, I’d downloaded two word games when I registered it. Now there are real time thieves!

Like most people, I pop around the web. Most of my popping is related to weaving — looking for ‘the ideal’ loom, checking out my favorite weaving bloggers and sometimes looking at their favorite bloggers, etc. In doing so recently I stumbled on an idea that I thought I’d turn into a product in my inventory – on a small, trial basis – and see how my customers responded.

Introducing the neck cuff

These are 5/2 cotton & all have vintage buttons. I thought this new product was a great time to try a warping technique I’d read about but not tried – using multiple color threads without a warping paddle or other method to attempt to keep them in order. Instead, simply wind them as a group, then take them as they come rather randomly off the lease sticks.

I liked the ease of winding the warp, and the finished look, but I would not recommend this method for a warp any longer than a few yards. Those unorganized threads do a great amount of twisting themselves into tight, little bundles that require often tediou hand work to untwist in order to advance the warp. Maybe this would work better if I was a front-to-back warper and had spread the threads out in the reed as I warped, but I’m a back-to-front warper.

Anyway, I liked the way I could use multiple weft colors to achieve different looks. These two have a cranberry weft. Interesting how different a tabby/plain weave and a simple twill look, isn’t it?

I did leno with an E bead on one of the the cuffs with a lavender weft.

I for sure liked the final result of that beading, and for sure disliked the process of getting it beaded. Putting lots of beads on the yarn after I had it wound it on the shuttle, and then constantly pushing those beads back out of my way as I wove the areas of plain weave was a slow, tedious process. I only wove with beads one other time, inserting them rather randomly throughout the plain-weave scarf. I both loved the outcome & hated the process that time, too. This one used so many fewer beads and was so small, I thought it’d be fine, perhaps even fun. HAH!

I closed out the set with a 10/2 cotton in a sweet lemon chiffon color, with leno (no beads) along it’s length.

I’ve had the cuffs at two shows now, and have sold both lavenders. I don’t know how many more I’ll make, but a few, anyway. I’l do some more experimenting with colors, sizes, & buttons or other closures.

Parting shot...”Quit blogging and let’s go for a walk already!”

July 11th, 2012 |