Clasping rainbows

 At this time of year I am thinking about 2014, about the shows I’ll apply to and the work I’ll submit with my applications. Most shows want images from the last two years, so I don’t HAVE to take new photos this year for most shows, but I still want to get some new ones.

To retain my status as a Roycroft Artisan, I do have to submit new photos annually, and to have actual work juried, too. Last year I didn’t give enough consideration to the work I’d submit for hands-on jurying, and I don’t want to make that mistake again.

So I’ve been thinking about what I will submit...all of which needs to have been created within the past year, and which must show that I continue to grow in my skills. I’ve decided that I want to submit a clasped weft piece, and that I wanted to do a take- off of my rainbow shawls, something that was reminiscent of them, but in a scarf and using clasped weft.

I prepared a warp for three black rayon chenille scarves.

For the first scarf, I used the same technique as I had for those last clasped weft scarves, throwing two picks of black between every clasped weft pick. I used 10 colors, with 7-9′′ of each color.

It turned out well, but I thought I wanted more color, so I wove the second with every pick being clasped weft and the picks ‘connecting’ to form graph-like shapes.

This one turned out well, too, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to repeat it for the third scarf, so I did a morph of the two. I did clasped weft every pick, but used more of a ‘line’ technique for the adjacent picks instead of the ‘graph-like’ technique. I also did a doubl rainbow, with about 4.25′′ of each color up to purple in the middle and then reversing the colors.

I like this one, too.

Here’s the thing...for wearing, I like the middle one best — the colors show up the most. For looking at for jurying, I like the last one best – EXCEPT there’s a problem with it. The pale green I used in the first half ran out about 3/4 of the way through that section of the second half. DAMN!! I unwove those 3+ inches and used the closest color I had, but it’s not identical. I think that will be noticeable enough to the RALA jury that I shouldn’t submit it; I should weave another one with this pattern. DOUBLE DAMN!!

I also am inspired to try a black & white scarf, weaving in what I’ll call a cityscape scene. The buildings won’t be able to have an windows in them (they’ll be solid black or solid white) but I think it will look good. I never know until I sit at my loom & try. Watch with me as this clasped weft adventure proceeds.

November 8th, 2013 | 

More of this and more of that

I’m still weaving with rayon chenille. I love it for the wintertime, and so do my customers. Since all the rest of my shows will be in the cool or cold weather, I thought I really needed to beef up my stock in this area.

I used Tammy’s gorgeous Ocean Waves to weave three scarves. This colorway is always popular, regardless of the fiber.

Then I wove the scarves that my maple tree inspired. On the left is a butterscotch weft and on the right a brown weft.

Next I really wanted to try another clasped weft that would show off the technique. I googled the term to see what I could see from other weavers that might inspire me. I’m definitely going to do my own take on some of the other things I saw, but this warp of two scarves was a direct take-off of work done over at Dust Bunnies.

I like this one — it’s black rayon chenille with the leftovers of one of Tammy’s balls of handpainted yarn – Dreamcatcher.

I like it just fine. But I LOVE the second one. Again with the end of a ball of Tammy’s yarn, this time in Seaweed.

THESE are the effects I wanted! I will DEFINITELY be doing more clasped weft, both in rayon chenille and in other fibers.

All that being said, I’ll be interested to see my customers’ reactions at next weekend’s show — often what I love isn’t the biggest hit with shoppers.

October 8th, 2013 | 

More Progress

After weaving and finishing those 11 scarves I went off to do a show. It’s one that I love doing – the crowd is always so interestin and so supportive, the volunteers are helpful, and I get to work with my sister.

This year was no exception – Buffalo turned out for the Elmwood Avenue Festival of the Arts and appreciated the work of the artists and crafters who were there. It was again a very good show for me.

I came home, went back to work at my paycheck job, and again set to weaving, this time in rayon chenille since my next show is in October. I do love the finished product, and the actual weaving is quick, but oh, beaming that warp! I blissfully forget from yea to year just how tedious and time consuming beaming rayon chenille is. It takes MUCH longer than beaming any other fiber I work with. Still, worth the effort to me.

On this four-day weekend I got two warps of three scarves each on and off the loom. Pretty good progress, if I do say so myself Didn’t vacuum, but I did do some shopping & cooking, plus some other high-priority tasks.

One of them was taking a trip back to Angelica because my community weaving project was finally hung! I think it looks great out in front of Stacy’s pottery studio.

When I did this project back in late July, no one anticipated it would take this long to get it in it’s sort of permanent location. I say sort of permanent, since none of us have a clue how long the weaving will last, and how much damage weather will wreak, particularly in the loosely woven areas.

I think it’s pretty amazing how different it looks from the front, with the building behind it, and from the back, standing on the doo stoop with the sky behind it.

I think it’s also cool just looking up at it.

After taking these shots I went to the farmer’s market and bought the biggest cauliflower I’ve ever seen – for only $3.00! I came home and made a terrific cauliflower curry from the first Moosewood Cookbook. YUM!

September 2nd, 2013 | 

Community Weaving Day

 Saturday was my community weaving project in Angelica. Although I will change some things next time around, the project was reasonably successful. This is a story told mostly in pictures, with just a few words.

As I expected, it took only about 5 minutes for me to complete the loom frame assembly.

What I didn’t expect was that the tent frame would be substantially lower than my tent, so the milk jug weights were resting on the ground. I should have made the weaving frame only 4′ high and wide instead of 5′, both to deal with this problem and accou for the time it took to do the weaving.

Regardless, I started warping the loom.

My guesstimate was right – it took me about an hour to get the loom all warped.

I put in just a bit of one color so people got the basic idea, then solicited my first weavers.

It didn’t take long before some younger weavers joined in.

They drew in others.

The frame is large, so it takes a lot of time to build up color.  

Time is passing really quickly and the crowd is thinning, so I work quickly trying to fill in around the shapes the community wove in. Wish there was more time, more people, and a smaller frame.

I asked people at the end to fill in sections, too. Kids were happy to oblige.

Just in time, the weaving is done.

I think it’s going to be about a week before it’s fully installed on Main Street. I’ll go back then and take a photo, too. All in all, it was fun. I plan to improve on this process and do more community weaving.

July 29th, 2013 |

Handwoven silk scarves

I’ve been weaving for six years. In weaverly terms, that’s really nothing. I read articles, blogs, and posts on Weavolution by women and men who’ve been at this craft/art for half a century. Heck, my first weaving class was taught by a man in his 80’s wh learned to weave rag rugs as a boy during the Depression to bring money into the house and never stopped. So six years is a drop in the bucket...one or two strands in a warp, a few throws of a shuttle...insert your favorite metaphor.

On the other hand, one common statement about how to get good at something is to do it for 5,000 hours. Many weeks I spend 30-40 hours researching, planning projects, sitting at the loom, or fringing and wet finishing. Even when I factor in the fact that some weeks that drops down to about 20 hours, my calculator tells me that I’ve worked at weaving for well over 5,000 hours in those six years.

However, in addition to weaving for only six years, I live in the sticks two hours from everywhere, so most of my weaving is very solitary and predominantly learned from books and the old trial-and-error method. While I may have woven miles of a particular weave structure, I may not have a clue about the correct terminology for that structure.

A case in point – drall. I’d seen it in print, read it on the net, attempted to have people explain it to me in words (unsuccessfully, might add). It wasn’t until I was finally pointed to a draft for it and accompanying weaving resources that I understood. OOOOHHHH. Drall is a classic Swedish term for a particular arrangement of what others (me included) call a 3/1 vs. 1/3 twill. Took me a good two years to figure that out.

Similarly the term gebrochene. My reaction is gebro-what? What is that? How do I even pronounce it? How many harnesses does it take? Again, gebro-what?

Then not too long ago I purchased some magazines from a weaver who was downsizing her stash. One of them, Weaver’s from winter, 1997, had an article on gebrochene. Ahhhh....based on some historical weaving, gebrochene is a German term for a modification of what I (and others) call Ms & Ws. I’ve woven Ms & Ws plenty of times, and some modifications of it, to date always on my 4 shaft counterbalance loom. This article whet my whistle for an 8 shaft pattern on my Mac. So I sat down with my computer software, drew in a threading that pleased me, figured out that I’d need to use fine threads to get enough pattern repeats to make me happy, and then played with a variety of tie ups. I ended up using the following draft.

I wound a warp of 260 ends of 20/2 undyed silk (about 8,000 yards of thread to the pound) and got it on the Mac. Threading we smoothly, I was set to weave. For the first scarf I used a black weft. Although I’m not usually a black & white gal, this is my favorite of the three scarves. For each photo I’ve shown you the ‘front’ and the ‘back’ of the scarf. I can’t decide which side I like better.

For the second scarf I picked a Pacific blue silk that makes me drool. It’s so richly colored and has such a terrific sheen that I paid top dollar for it when I saw it in a store. Woven in this scarf, the mix of the white and blue really tones that color down more than I would personally choose. I’d probably like a scarf woven with all the blue.

Based on my experience with the blue, I picked a deep burgundy for the third scarf. This is lovely. (Not as red as it looks in the photo.)

I think the scarves may be a bit heavier than people will be buying in the summer, but I do expect lots of admiring lookers. Time will tell...

June 26th, 2013 | 

Huck patterned shawls

I know I’m really short on shawls for the coming show season. I also know that shawls take more than twice as long to wind the warp, twice as long to thread the heddles and reed, twice as long to do the hemming. Still, I felt like I needed to weave more shawls. So I went back to one of my standbys – 5/2 eggshell mercerized cotton and huck lace. As shawls go, they’re quick & easy.

Because I’ve made friends with my Macomber loom, I decided to do an 8 harness lace pattern instead of my usual 4 harness patterns. I spent a bit of time on the computer playing with different tie ups and came up with one that I really like.

Look how much texture this pattern has while it’s under tension on the loom.

And here’s how the finished cloth looks after wet finishing.

For 5/2 lace I sett the threads at 12 EPI – experience has shown me that’s what I like for the finished piece. The cotton drapes nicely, and although the floats are a bit long, I think it’s not too fussy to be fully functional.

I’d wound a warp for 3 shawls, knowing I have a lot of 5/2 eggshell cotton in my stash. As I was weaving the second shawl I was getting to the end of a cone of cotton so pulled out a new cone. Uh oh. Different manufacturer, very different look. Can’t mix

those yarns in one piece, at least not if I want to achieve the effect – classy – that I’m looking for. As it was, I ran out of yarn 7 rows before I wanted to – my second end has only 11 rows of plain weave, where the beginning has 18 rows. Due to the length of a pattern repeat, in order to unweave enough pattern to get me 18 rows of plain weave, the shawl would have been almost 6 inches shorter than I wanted. So one shawl has a shorter end. Probably very few people would ever notice, but I know.

For the third shawl, instead of using that different eggshell yarn, I opted for an 8/2 barber-pole yarn in eggshell & light tan. It’s fine, too. To my eye looks a bit less formal.

I decided to do some beading on that first shawl, the one with 18 rows of plain weave at both ends.

Instead of doing dangling beads all the way across – which struck me as a bit too much – I did little 3-bead groups near the hem across much of the shawl width. I think it gives a nicer overall look.

Now I really need to be done with shawls for a while and produce more scarves. I have a show next weekend. I didn’t even get t weaving more other things that I’d contemplated for this year – like pillows, or wall hangings, or.....

June 24th, 2013 |

Oops

 Weaving is all about threads. Which threads go through which heddles. Which harnesses are tied to which treadles. Which harnesses are up and which are down. Make one little change, purposely or not, and the differences can be dramatic.

That’s what happened when I was weaving some cotton shawls. The results are fine, but not what I’d intended. I’ll start with my finished products. First, a shawl of 10/2 unmercerized cotton in huck boxes.

The second shawl on the warp was woven with a half-lace treadling, what I called huckish for my sunset shawls, and a variegated thick-thin unmercerized cotton weft.

In the sunset shawl post I showed you the draft I used. Here it is again, since it’s the same draft I used for these brown shawls.

Looks fine. But that’s not what the first shawl turned out like, is it? I didn’t get that all over traditional huck pattern, but instead huck boxes. I’ve woven enough huck that I should have realized it immediately as I wove, but I wasn’t paying enough attention – at least not the right kind of attention. I was attending to having the same number of warp & weft threads per inch, not to what th pattern itself looked like.

After the shawl came off the loom and I wet finished & pressed it I set out to find out what I had done differently that gave me an entirely different effect than what I wanted. It took me far too long to figure it out. Why? Because it was so simple, so little.

Here’s the draft I actually used, instead of the one above I meant to use.

It’s easy enough to see how different the fabric will be, but where’s the difference that created it? Look at the red square in this draft.

I SHOULD have tied that fourth treadle to harnesses 2, 3, & 4, but I inadvertently tied it to only 2 & 4, leaving 3 out of the mix.

As I said, the end result is fine, just not what I had intended. Next time I might not be so lucky. Then again, sometimes ‘mistakes can produce wonderful new weavings.

June 21st, 2013 |