6 for June

I’ve gotten six silk scarves woven and finished so far for June. I still intend to warp my loom with that lovely blue-green tencel I hand painted, and believe I can get it woven off pretty easily before the end of the month.

First I put on a warp of plain blue silk, threading the loom in a huck lace pattern I’ve used before. I used a slightly lighter shade o blue silk for the weft, and wove away.

After it came off the loom I decided that this was the scarf to add beads to in the fringe, and luckily found some that were perfec for it in my stash.

After this all blue scarf I decided to try and achieve some iridescence by using a red weft. I decided on a burgundy cashmere-silk blend, one that is so fine I had to use 2 strands together to approximately equal the weight of the 30/2 silk warp. It isn’t personal my favorite piece, but I hope it will call to someone else.

In this closeup you can see the lace design, and how light and airy it is, better than in the all-blue version. You can also see a bi of not-so-nice selvedge.

I obviously did something wrong in my calculations, because I thought I could get a short cowl out of this warp, too, but nope. I was at the end. So be it.

So then I put on that hand painted silk warp, the one that turned out very differently than expected.

As an aside, I asked my dye teacher about the difference in colors between the tencel and the silk, and she concurred, the two fibers dye very differently. It’s the difference between a plant fiber (tencel) and a protein fiber (silk). Still, when I showed her the photos of the two, she was shocked at just how dramatically different they were. She told me that cotton will turn out similar to tencel, as they are both cellulose based, but not the same. So, from here on, whenever I paint any fibers, I’ll make little butterflie of yarn of the other two fibers and paint them, too, to see the results. At least I’ll try to remember to do so.

I decided to thread the loom with a huck lace draft that I spent HOURS working out a few months ago. I may have blogged abou it; I can’t remember. Anyway, I had a few threading errors, which isn’t overly common for me, and had to tie some replacement heddles to fix them. I dislike tying those heddles and am far from quick at it, but it beats doing a ton of unthreading to correct errors in the middle of a piece, even when we’re only looking at about 240 threads.

I tried a medium purple silk weft that I hoped would bring out the purples I’d intended when I dyed the yarn. I had to weave several inches and then walk away from the loom to be certain, but when I came back a few hours later – YUCK! I really hated i It made what I thought were garish colors even more so, adding to the overall unpleasant look with the dark weft. Since the weft and warp were both silk, I didn’t want to waste either, so I unwove those several inches to start again. I went with the rule: black brightens other colors, gray muddies them, and white mutes them. Muting what what I wanted, so I picked a natural cashmere- silk weft, again doubled to approximate the 30/2 silk warp. I was very pleased with it as I was weaving, and with the final result.

In fact, I like the scarf well enough that I decided to spend the extra time to add a bit of pizzaz to the fringe, this time twisting tiny pearlized seed beads into each bundle of fringe.

I thought I’d planned enough warp length for one fringed scarf, one short cowl, and one long cowl. However after my experience with the blue warp (above), I figured I’d better approach the project a bit differently than usual. I wove the fringed scarf, then the short cowl so that the third piece would be as long as it could, whether that was a long or short cowl.

In my continuing desire to use up my stash, I only had a small amount of lavender cashmere-silk so decided to use that for the short cowl. This isn’t a great photo, but I’m happy with the piece.

Time for the long cowl. I decided to stick with pale wefts, and chose some 60/2 pink silk. I knew I’d need to use it doubled, and the 2 partial cones of pink I had were different shades, but I figured they’d work fine together, 1 of each. And they do.

Surprisingly, I had enough warp left for another short cowl. This time I picked baby blue 60/2 silk. I only had one partial cone of i so had to wind some onto a tube first so I could double it for weft. I really like this one, too, although again it’s not a great photo.

I just realized that none of those photos shows off the huck trellis pattern I am proud of, so here it is. Need a wif? Let me know.

So six down, three to go by the end of the month. I’ll be ahead of the game.

June 15th, 2018 | 

I love portable projects

Last week I had to spend 8 hours at the Weaving & Fiber Arts Center so that HVAC techs could fix a problem with our heating and cooling. I brought lots of things to do, some for the Center, some for me. As always, I didn’t get them all done — one of them was writing a blog post.

I did bring lots of clean pillowcases and my sewing machine to make bags for the upcoming season. Got them all cut, but only about half of them sewn. So when we had a stunningly beautiful day on Thursday, moderate temperatures, pleasant breeze, I brought my things outside and finished the sewing in the shade in my backyard.

I was wishing my looms were so easy to move. Only the rigid heddle and the tapestry loom are. I generally only use the rigid heddle to demo at shows, and the tapestry thing is new to me and will likely never be for sale, so I am tied to my floor looms in my studio. Gorgeous though it is, isn’t not outside.

Several days ago, while I had a warp on the loom, I decided it was the perfect opportunity to dye two warps that would be wove in June – probably my last before the show season starts. So I prepared and dyed one warp in tencel and one in silk. The last few times I’ve dyed I not only made careful notes about the formulas I used to mix my colors, but also saved actual samples of the dyed yarn. It assured that I got what I’d planned for in my blue and green tencel warp.

The silk? Not so much. I wanted blue-violet, red-violet, and periwinkle. Like the purple-blue half of the tencel in this photo (this is two chains wound together).

What I got is COMPLETELY different! Not. Even. Close.

It started in the basement. I’d made note that when I painted on the blue-violet and red-violet on the tencel that they both looked quite gray. Not so on the silk; they both looked bright. But then after they were batched, rinsed and dried, there wasn’t a bit of blue in the violets, only fuschia, and the supposed periwinkle was a pale blue. Sigh.

Honestly, I think it’s as straightforward as the difference in the fibers, but only future dyeing will confirm that or blow holes throug it. Double sigh.

So what did I have on the loom while I did the dyeing? A silk warp, transitioning from solid blue at one selvedge to solid green at the other. I threaded and tied up the loom for one of my favorite patterns, that I’ve called feathers. I also mix it up by treadling as zigs instead of feathers. That’s what I did for the first scarf, with a black warp.

When I started weaving this scarf, I thought I was using black silk, but after I got several inches woven I realized it was tencel on my bobbin. Rather than unweave those several inches, I shrugged my shoulders and continued with the tencel, which is a bit heavier than the silk warp.

Interesting how the colors play differently with the pattern on the two sides of this scarf, isn’t it?

For the second scarf I wove with a very fine purple cashmere-silk blend. This scarf is SOOOOO lightweight.

It is, as Mary Poppins would say, practically perfect in every way.

Finally I wove a long cowl with a medium blue silk in the same weight as the warp.

I’ve gotten 2 more silk scarves woven, but am still working on finishing, so you’ll see them next time.

June 9th, 2018 | 

Diamonds & silk

Once I got that silk from my last post threaded, weaving went smoothly. Although as I noted, it was 20/2 silk, not the 30/2 silk I’d planned on. So the sett was closer than I’d have made it; as a result, the motif was substantially elongated instead of square. I figured as long as I was consistent, it was fine.

First up was a medium blue weft. It is my favorite of the three.

I’d planned on 1 fringed scarf, 1 long cowl, and 1 short cowl. The long cowl was the next up, and I used a red-violet weft.

For the short cowl I considered several weft options, finally settling on a burgundy weft. The warp color made the overall look much more brown than the burgundy on the cone, but I was okay with that. Because of the elongated design pattern and the fac that this cowl would be short, I changed the treadling. The only way I could show that pattern was with the cowl lying flat.

I used this weaving draft, my modification of a draft from Handweaving.net, last summer, but apparently never posted either the draft or the finished scarves. So here’s the draft; if you have weaving software and would like a .wif file, let me know and I’ll happily email it to you.

Next up – one of my recently painted warps.

April 22nd, 2018 | 

Dungeon but no dragon

I spent 5+ hours in my basement today. With its concrete floor and unfinished nature, my basement is a very functional space, especially for dyeing. But comfortable, bright, or cheery it is not. Rather dungeon-like, actually.

Warp painting is a many-day process for me. On Monday spent several hours planning warps for 3 runs of 3 scarves each, all in 8/2 Tencel. I had to decide on a weave structure for each, and if I would make fringed scarves, long or short cowls, or some combination of the three for each warp. Then I had to determine sett (threads per inch in the warp) and decide if I would wind al the threads in one bout (group of warp threads; winding more than one bout allows for more variety in the painting of the colors, but also takes more time to both make the bouts and paint them).

Next is to actually wind those warps. For me that was 7 bouts for the 3 warps (2 bouts for 2 warps, 3 bouts for the other). Each warp was a different length based on what I plan to weave, and each had a different number of threads. So I had to use a system to know which bout was which. I used different sizes, fibers, and textures of threads for my ties so I could differentiate them at every step of the process.

I wound 2 warps Monday night, the other 5 this morning. Then I had to scour and presoak the warps while I mixed dyes and prepared the work surface. (I forgot to take photos of some of the warps after painting.)

After carefully laying out each prepared warp I had to paint on the dyes, being sure to get all of the threads without wasting lots of dye by using too much. Then wrap them up in saran wrap like snakes, and steam each of the 7 bouts individually for 1/2 hour while I was painting the next warp.

The 7 bouts are now sitting in my oven, with the oven light on for a bit of warmth. They’ll sit there overnight. Tomorrow morning, after my Guild meeting, I’ll carefully unwrap each bout and set it to soak in a basin of water until Thursday morning. This helps minimize both water usage and time in rinsing. On Thursday morning I’ll rinse each bout separately until the rinse water is clear.

Then I’ll hang up the bouts to dry. Given our cold spring, they’ll be hanging in my house – maybe in the basement, and will likely take more than 24 hours to dry. During that time I’ll need to fondle each bout some to make sure it’s spread apart enough so tha it dries completely, and give it a good snap at several places along its length to separate and straighten the threads.

So perhaps sometime this weekend I can actually put the first warp on my loom – a whole week from the beginning of this process. Meanwhile I’ll wet finish those ‘springtime’ scarves from the last post, and put another warp on the loom to weave with commercially-dyed yarn. Maybe it’ll be silk. Maybe not.

April 10th, 2018 | 

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 |