Still at home with rainbows

Although many people around the country are significantly expanding their worlds outside of their homes, I’m one of the people who isn’t doing much more now than I was in March. I’m still mostly staying home, finding things that make me happy here. Like weaving rainbows. Here’s my latest batch of towels...a different take on the Safe At Home towels and the Rainbow circle towels

As you can see, I’ve already sold 2 of them, so if you’re interested, let me know. I’ll be posting them on Facebook this morning and they tend to move quickly. Note that towel #1 is short – I ran out of warp. So that towel may remain with me unless someone wants a short towel, for a short price.

I also got that painted warp woven – 3 shawls, but the fringes will take me some time to twist, especially since I plan to include beads on two of them. But here’s a bit of a preview of the first one while I was weaving.

As usual, each piece is different, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

July 23rd, 2020 | 

It happened again

Once more, weeks have gone by without a post from me. And this time I can’t even claim to have posted things on Facebook; I haven’t.

Some days I feel remarkably unproductive. How did I ever get things done when I had a full time job? Other days I’m totally caught up in doing lots of mundane, routine tasks. But there it is. I can’t change the past. So here’s an update on what I have done in the past few weeks.

I took an online class through our Weaving Center on deflected doubleweave. I’d done a bit of it before but had limited experience with the structure. Plus I really wanted to see how it all worked, classes on Zoom, and how the Center might be able to support more of our teachers doing more online classes. I, for one, don’t see myself taking in-person classes for the rest of this year.

The class met once/week for 3 weeks. On our meeting days, we had 3 meetings, each an hour or more. And we were to be doing things in between meetings and weeks. So I spent a lot of time on that. I learned a lot, but I’m not sure how much of it I wi use. The instructor is a big fan of collapse weave, using yarns that will shrink differently – for instance a wool and a cotton – and that’s just not my bag. But here are a few shots of my samples, showing measurements before & after wet finishing. Note that the pink warp & weft was tencel, the dusty rose, when used, was rayon. Their shrinkage differentials were surprising.

Then, since I had enough warp on the loom, I decided to weave 2 scarves with these techniques. My opinion of them? Meh. If you would like one of them let me know & I’ll give you a screaming deal.

This one is woven partly with colcolastic thread/yarn. My intent was that the plain weave sections would really ‘pouf out’ from the colcolastic sections. The effect wasn’t as dramatic as I’d wanted.

I kind of liked the ‘bubble’ effect with the wool in the sample, so I dug out some baby lace-weight alpaca I had and wove the second scarf with that. I may have over-fulled the alpaca a bit; lack of experience. In any case, here’s that scarf.

Here’s a closeup of those bubbles. And what appears to be a treadling error I didn’t see until just now.

So with all of that it was taking forever to weave the next batch of Safe At Home towels. I finally have them off the loom, but haven’t begun to press or hem yet.

Unrelated to weaving...strike when the iron is hot, right? Well, it’s berry time. A woman who lives not too far from me has a cher tree. With her permission I picked quite a lot of fruit in 2018 and made jams and more. Last year almost no cherries developed. So this year when I saw her tree and again got her permission to pick, I did so. The cherries were mostly really high, much highe than I could reach with my ladder, and not so great. I only picked about four quarts of cherries, ended up throwing out about a quart of them, and got one batch of jam. One of those jar went to the tree owner, of course.

Then my son found some wild black raspberries near his house. He’s picked, I’ve picked, and we’ve picked together. Here’s the first of three batches of black raspberry jam I’ve made.

Then my second online fiber course started. This one is on painting two warps and using them in one project. I’ve done this before, too, but again wanted the experience of the Zoom structure. Working well ahead of the course plan, here are photos of my warps just after painting, and then when they’re steamed, rinsed, dried, and chained. It’s all 20/2 silk.

The first warp is purple, orange, burgundy, and reddish-fuchsia.

I had already partially wrapped this one before I took my photo. It’s gold, avocado, blue-green, and light indigo.

I’m very happy with the results and am looking forward to getting these on the loom.

I think I’m going to go outside my personal comfort zone and do random stripes, with a simple straight twill. (Random???? For someone with my control issues?? Oh my!!!)

July 15th, 2020 |

More colors, more towels

17 of the 19 colors of yarn I ordered arrived on Thursday.

When I saw it all, I gulped. I fear I overdid it. But it’s done.
This afternoon I wound the warp for another 8 Safe At Home towels (the squares within squares).

I’ve already decided (thanks to a suggestion from a friend) that after this warp I’m going to go back to circles for at least one wa of 8. When I wove circles before, my warp colors were limited – usually 5-6 warp colors for the run of 8 towels. I think I’m going make every circle (18 across the width) a different color. Although I may change my mind before then. Maybe I’ll limit it to 9 colors – 2 circles of each color.

Earlier today I took the photos of my crackle towels and posted them on Facebook. (Have you joined the Second Wind Fan Group?) I’m happy with them.

I wove each of the 6 towels with a different color weft. I also used 4 different treadlings.

Unlike the last 2 batches of towels, all the colored yarns here are commercially dyed.

The Midnight Multi towel has a variegated weft with navy, purple, medium blue, green, and red-orange. Contact me if you’re interested in purchasing any of my towels.

May 22nd, 2020 | 

Using stash - or not

 

For MANY months I’ve been saying ‘must use stash’ yet somehow I keep acquiring more yarn. I have an excuse/rationale, b still...

My handwoven towels have been a real hit. Especially those colorful squares of Safe at Home.

I only got 7 towels out of this warp, and each one is long for a towel – 33′′. I was counting weft stripes instead of measuring length, and apparently I wasn’t beating as firmly as I did for the first batch of these towels.

Regardless, I had requests for 2 of these towels – which turned into 3 – before the warp ever went on the loom. As soon as I posted this batch of 7 on Facebook I sold 3 more of them, so only 1 towel is left.

So I knew I’d need to weave more of these joyful and useful babies. And I didn’t have enough unmercerized cotton left to put another warp on the loom. (Ok, honestly, I do have some grays and taupes, but I don’t think that’s what people want right now. I may try that in the future.) So what to do? First I contacted a woman handling the sale of yarn from a local estate. I got a few unmercerized cottons but she didn’t have many. However I did also buy a few cones of light tints of cottolin and some mercerize cotton. And some undyed tencel. I couldn’t pass up the price. Sigh.

Not much for the Safe at Home towels, so I HAD to place an order. I had no choice, right? RIGHT?? I ordered 8oz. cones of 19 different colors. Sounds like a real lot, but honestly, that’ll only make about 3.5 batches of these towels.

While I’m waiting for the yarn to arrive, I put another batch of towels on the loom. For years I’ve said to myself, “I don’t like crackle weave.” And then I’d see something woven in crackle and say, “That’s beautiful.” Repeat the “I don’t like it – that’s beautiful” sequence several times, and I knew it was time for me to try it.

I doubted they’d sell as quickly as the Safe at Home towels, and knew I might not like treadling them (the treadling is all somewhat complex) so I only put on a warp for 6 towels. I have 4 woven so far, each with a different weft color and I’ve used 3 different treadling patterns. We’ll see how they go.

Meanwhile, I have way too much Tencel & rayon, chenille, and silk to use up. But that’s not what’s moving out of my house right now. So I will weave cotton towels.

May 19th, 2020 | 

Pandemic brain

 Let me just start by saying I am not sick. I do not have COVID-19 or any other disease. I feel fine, other my usual age-related aches and pains.

But...

I clearly have what I’m calling pandemic brain. IMHO it’s related to pregnancy brain for women going through that. One’s norma mental processes are not functioning properly. Thinking isn’t always rational. Counting skills go out the window.

I would never want to imply that I don’t make mistakes. I sure do. But it’s highly unusual that I’ll make mistakes 4 out of 5 projects in a row. And that is what has happened.

It started in mid-March. I planned a beautiful skein-painted project, intending to make one shawl and weave yardage to make something else – a vest, perhaps. The weaving went fine, but I hadn’t done my calculations correctly, not wound enough warp ends, so the fabric isn’t as wide as I’d intended. Fine for the shawl, but for the yardage? I’ll have to find a different pattern than the one I had planned on. I’m confident I can do that at some point, but not yet inspired to do so.

Next up was my Safe At Home towels. I do love them, and the mistake wasn’t a big one – winding 62 turquoise ends instead of 72 as I was winding the warp. So I had to hang 10 ends over the warp beam and hope I could maintain tension. It all worked ou fine but caused me a small amount of anxiety as I wove.

After that was my Comfort At Home towels. They went off without a hitch.

Then my Spring At Home towels. As noted, I didn’t pay attention to my math and initially wound skeins only half the size I needed for my wefts. Again, a problem fixed easily enough by winding and dyeing more skeins, but a silly, if simple, mistake.

Now I’m working on another batch of Safe At Home towels. I looked through my stash and found colors that I thought worked well together.

The turquoise is obviously a commercially dyed yarn. The magenta and green are skeins I dyed back in 2016 for a project but didn’t use. I dyed the yellow and orange skeins specifically for this project. The dark blue-violet is some hand dyed yarn I’ve had for years, dyed by someone else, that I thought was just what this warp needed. In fact, I have 2 of the towels on this warp already spoken for, just from those warp colors and the Safe At Home weaving plan.

I got the threads measured out and beamed.

All heddles and reed threaded, time to tie on to the front apron. I had some difficulty in the beginning, and ended up doing my lashing on twice to get my tension right. Ok, that’s a pain in the butt, but whatever.

Then I started weaving. I was having difficulty maintaining tension and couldn’t figure out why, but said to myself, you just need to keep going. It will get better. But it wasn’t getting better; it was getting worse. All of sudden the lightbulb went off. I got up, looked at my yarn labels, and closed my eyes and moaned. That lovely dark blue-violet wasn’t an 8/2 yarn – 3,360 yards per pound. It was twice as thick – only 1,680 yards per pound. I thought it felt a bit different when I was measuring it, but as this yarn is also more loosely spun, I attributed it to that and kept going. BIG MISTAKE!

There’s only one way to fix this. Start by removing the weft.

Here I’ve got half of that done.

Next insert lease sticks to retain the cross.

Go back through the stash and see if I have something else that will look good for warp. Nope. Tomorrow I will wind another skein and dye it, hoping for something similar to that blue-violet.

Then I will go back to the loom. I will carefully unwind all of the warp, pulling it back through the reed and heddles so that it’s all at the front of the loom. (If needed, I will unthread the reed and the heddles, but I’m hoping I don’t have to.) I will attempt to save the 84 ends of the blue-violet yarn, as it is a lovely color and is almost 9 yards long, but if I have to toss it, I do.

Once the newly-dyed skein is dry, I’ll measure that out, put it on the lease sticks, and beam it along with the other 5 colors. Sigh I just HOPE that I DO NOT keep making mistakes. This is a royal pain. And not like me.

May 3rd, 2020 | 

Spring at home towels

The reaction to my Safe At Home towels was so strong and so swift, I knew I needed to weave at least one more warp of colorfu towels. I planned and prepared for this batch, Spring At Home, while I was weaving the Comfort At Home towels.

To start, I had to measure out the warp so I could weave eight towels. I’d recently gotten a big cone of undyed yarn that was 55% hemp and 45% organic cotton and wanted to use that. Although I would usually wind this warp in two bouts, I decided to wind this in three bouts because odd numbers are usually more pleasing to our eyes.

Once the warps were scoured and soaked I mixed up chartreuse, fuchsia, lavender, and ice blue dyes and set to work. I had a written plan about how to dye each bout, with each color only used twice.

Hmmmm. Ice blue and lavender dyes look remarkably similar, at least wet. Will they look the same dry? I don’t know. So I changed the plan somewhat.

I also wanted to dye the wefts for this batch of towels, so I wound skeins and prepared dyes for them, too: golden yellow, grape, avocado, and turquoise. But at the last minute I decided to dump the leftover ice blue, lavender, and fuschia dyes into the turquoise bucket.

Here are the final warps and my planned wefts.

I beamed the warp, and as long-time readers know, one of my favorite shots is a painted warp going around the back beam.

I started weaving with the yellow weft and loved it. But wait...why am I going through the weft faster than planned?

Back to my notes and Geez! Once again I hadn’t paid enough attention to the numbers. My math told me I needed about 2.5 ounces of yarn for weft per towel. So although I wanted to weave two towels of each weft color, I only made my skeins about 2.5 ounces each!

So I only had enough weft for four towels, not eight. I had to dye more yarn. And I didn’t have enough of that hemp-cotton blend so had to go in my stash for more undyed 8/2 unmercerized cotton, and fortunately had some. Wind more skeins and go back down to the basement to dye them. I decided as long as I was dyeing more yarn, I’d make each towel a slightly different color. This time I mixed up tangerine, celery, turquoise (with no additions), and red-violet. Here are the 8 wefts all together.

Back to the loom. Weave all eight towels, wet finish, and hem them, and here you go.

I divided the towels into two batches for the photos, and decided to label them for posting both here and on Facebook. The first four have that hemp-cotton yarn for both warp and weft.

And the next four have the same warp, but 100% cotton weft.

I won’t post on Facebook for sale until tomorrow, and I anticipate they’ll go quickly. So if you want one of these Spring At Home towels, contact me to make purchase and delivery arrangements.

April 30th, 2020 | 

Comfort at home

We all need to do things that bring us comfort while we’re staying home. For me, too often that’s baking. Here’s today effort – a luscious lemon cornmeal pound cake. Made with 1 bowl.

I ate a few slices, then sliced up the rest and put it in the freezer. Safer there.

On the weaving front, this is my next batch of towels. I’m calling them Comfort At Home. Why? Because these towels are so oatmeal-like. And what’s more comforting than oatmeal? (Readers of a certain age will remember the Wilford Brimley commercials.) Add the soft wave structure, and you’ve got a comforting towel.

In fact, although the warp of 7 towels is called Comfort At Home, each towel (or pair of towels) has an oatmeal name. Here you go, along with the info about each weft. The warp is a softly plied 8/2 barber pole cotton.

The first two towels below are Oatmeal & Brown Sugar. The weft is a 3/2 organic colorgrown FoxFibre in khaki. Since this is a fairly heavy and loosely plied weft, the towels are a bit thicker and rougher than some of the others below. If you look closely, yo can see that my hemming has shown one towel ‘right side up’ and the other ‘upside down.’ It’s not uncommon that I can’t decide which side should be up when I hem.

The next towels, Plain Oatmeal, are also 3/2 organic colorgrown FoxFibre cotton, this time in oatmeal. (How fitting a yarn color name!)

Next up are Oatmeal & Honey. This is an 8/2 Brassard cotton, color name...you guessed it...honey. It adds a soft golden glow to the towels.

The last towel, Oatmeal & Cream, has an undyed 7/2 hemp-cotton weft. The yarn is 55% hemp, 45% organic cotton. An unusua size, it’s really not noticeably different from 8/2. Only one of these.

This is an 8-shaft draft. I originally got it from Handweaving.net, but it wasn’t quite symmetrical so I made some adjustments to both threading and treadling. Then I centered it for the width of my towels.

I’m going to post these on Facebook tomorrow. The last batch of towels I posted sold in a few days, so if you want one of these, contact me and we’ll arrange payment and shipping.

I also did a bit of dyeing. Back in February of 2019 I snow dyed some cotton leggings. But I got carried away with colors and the ended up like a cross between the 1960s and a clown.

I knew I wouldn’t wear them like that, so I overdyed, again a snow dye technique, with just red.

They were much better, but I only wore them a few times as they were still too flashy for me.

Yesterday I put them on and said, “Nope.” Even though I’m not going anywhere, I wasn’t happy with them. It was time to do something about that. Overdye again, this time in a dark color and immersion dyeing.

Yes. I can wear these out in public without attracting stares of disbelief.
I have another warp of towels on the loom now, but I’m going to take a few days off weaving to make face masks to donate.

April 20th, 2020 |