Happy New Year!!!

Meg at Unravelling has a New Year's tradition of posting photos of her looms to get the year off to a good start.....plus inviting weavers around the world to join her.


So here's my Toika, poised for me to get these towels woven!!


My baby wolf (temporarily naked) has been pushed aside so that we can try to snap a quick photo of a fox that has been frequenting our yard.

Don't worry....the loom will win out in 2012!!!

Wishing you all the 2012 of your dreams!! Happy New Year!

Happy Valentine's Day

Doubleweave Pick Up
Finished, but not blogged yet!

Wishing you and yours a happy Valentine's Day!

Cool Upholstery

Perhaps I was a little too interested in the upholstery at Blue Moon Evolution in Exeter, NH when I had lunch there on Monday.

The Blue Moon Cafe has evolved into a restaurant open for lunch and dinner. The market is no more.



You can check it out yourself if you go to the Winter Fuzz Fest in Exeter on Saturday, January 29. (Unfortunately, I can't make it to the Fuzz Fest this time.)

Day in the Life of Looms 2011

Love Meg's tradition of candid loom shots on the first of the year!!

You can join in too if you have a loom.


On the Toika, cut-off grey cottolin warp that will become towels...after I unravel the mystery of the vertical lines that appeared when I wet-finished the sample.


On the baby wolf, a cut off white tencel warp. I'm changing from a summer and winter threading from a Susan Wilson workshop to an overshot threading for the remainder of my samples.

Hopefully "dully-colored cut-off warps" is just a snapshot in time, not a theme for 2011 for me!

Here's to a great year for all of us!

Things that Make You Go Hmmmm: Part I

It might be a bad sign when I wake up thinking, "What do I want to blog about today?".

Nothing immediately sprung to mind (although I have unblogged-about projects and trips and adventures that I still want to share).

Then, I did the tiniest of babysteps toward getting my weaving inertia to be weaving in motion (rather than the weaving at a standstill that has been the story of November and December at my house.)

Thanks Theresa for the great idea of cutting samples in half!

I cut off a sample to wet finish it. (I know this sample looks a little crazy. I'm trying out different wefts and different treadlings to decide which four are my favorite for a run of towels.)

The results of the wet finishing were so surprising to me, that I have to share them with you!! I'm just not sure what to make of it, although my ever-supportive DH says he thinks the changes to the fabric enhance rather than detract.

I'm still saying Hmmmmmm.......

Unwashed version

Washed version
Look at all those vertical lines!

I really wasn't expecting vertical lines to appear like that. They are at consistent points across the entire sample.

I'm not sure that I like them. Mr. LifeLoomsLarge says he thinks they make the fabric make more sense....containing it and making it seem less "all over the place".

The only vertical lines I know about are reed marks....and I thought those are something that can disappear with washing, rather than something that appears.

So what do you think? Are these lines an intended part of the fabric? Are they a feature (or a bug)? Is there something I can do to prevent them?

They are even more noticeable and textural in person.

Related posts:
Folding the warp in half
Ordering more yarn for warp
Getting started

Weaving Events in New England

November offers plenty of exhibits, shows and sales throughout New England related to weaving.

Weavers' Guild of Boston Annual Exhibit and Sale, Weston, MA, Nov 4 - 7 2010

Fiber Festival of New England, Springfield, MA, Nov. 6-7, 2010

Focus on Fiber, Northfield, MA Nov 4 - 28, 2010
Exhibit features work of 7 weavers who recently studied at the Hill Institute

Hudson-Mohawk Weavers' Guild 32nd Annual Show & Sale, Newtonville, NY, Nov 18 - 21, 2010

Thread by Thread, Exhibit by Sarah Haskell, Topsham, Maine, Through Nov. 30, 2010

Winter Fuzz Fest, Jan. 29, 2011, Exeter Congregational Church, Exeter, NH

What else have you heard about?

Designing Double Weave Pickup

As part of my double weave sampler, I really wanted to try double weave pickup.

One of my local weaving friends has a reversible piece that her mother wove using this technique. I find it fascinating.

My first step was to design the chart that I'll use to create the reversible, decorative section of my sampler.

Since my yarn is red and white, the two ideas that pop into my head are the Japanese flag, or some hearts.

Since I have heart-shaped cookie cutters, the hearts win! (Plus, then I don't have to try to achieve a perfect circle!)



When it's time to turn the heart shapes into a grid, the book I'm following (Double Weave by Palmy Weigle) suggests graph paper.

At first I like that idea, but then I think about erasing, mistakes, wanting extra copies and my laptop beckons, as usual.

I remember that Deanna and I had a conversation in her blog about different ways to design grids on the computer. She had lots of great suggestions including:

Using Fiberworks PCW (Levels above bronze)
Drawing a grid with Adobe Photoshop
Creating a design grid in Microsoft Excel

After I poke around and these ideas, I make a mental note to look into upgrading to the Silver version of Fiberworks PCW after my deadline madness is over.

I'll give graph paper a shot.

Surprisingly, it isn't that bad. I just trace the cookie cutters onto the paper with yellow pencil. Then make my outlines more grid-like using a regular pencil.

I had imagined tons of erasing and messiness. But after the first heart was worked out, the others were smooth sailing.


In the end, I scanned my design into the computer. That way I can print it out and change it, or mark it up without losing my original.

Sometimes, graph paper isn't so bad!!

When you design double weave pickup, what method do you like the best?

Related posts:
Double Weave Question
Start of this sampler

HUGE thanks to all of the folks who responded so quickly to my plea for help!! Thanks to you I did complete the sampler in time for my deadline this week. Now I want to get my blog caught up too!

Double Weave Question (Please Help!!)

I know Friday afternoon, especially in the US before a holiday weekend, is not a great time to ask a question.

But, I'm hoping to finish my double weave sample tomorrow, since I'm in deadline mode.

So I'm going to ask and hope that one of you can help!!!

The Question

I want to use double weave to make a purse with a flap.

I'd like the purse to be a tube that's closed at the bottom and both sides. (I know how to do that with double weave).

At the top of the purse, I'd like to smoothly transition into weaving a flap.

The only thing I've been able to figure out is to start weaving two separate layers at the top of the purse. One layer can be the flap, and the other layer could be cut off and hemmed or made into a pocket for the bag or something.

Does anyone have other ideas? I keep wanting there to be a way for the flap to include both layers of fabric, but doing that seems like it will close the top of the purse. (And a purse with a closed top isn't very useful!)

Thank you in advance!!!!

Sorry for the lack of photos in this post. My mind is boggled because I've spent most of the day weaving double weave pickup. It's like magic, slow magic....but my brain is tired!!

(I will definitely have blog entries about pickup, if only to help myself remember how I did it!! I think I'll have questions for you about that too.....but those questions aren't stopping my progress luckily!)

Thank you for reading, and have a great weekend!

Related posts:
Starting my double weave sampler

Double Weave Sampler

Now that I'm back from vacation in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, I need to get serious in my studio. I have several fall weaving deadlines. (And both of my looms are dressed with warps that aren't even working toward those deadlines.)

I need to be very consistent and productive over the next two months!

I need my Baby Wolf for a project that's due in mid-September. Definitely time to free up that loom!

The project on my Baby Wolf is double weave that I started last winter, but never got around to blogging (or actually weaving for that matter).

Baby Wolf with Alternating Red and White Warp

At the beginning of a project, I like to record my inspiration and motivation for the project.

Weaving a top layer of white fabric

Motivation

• Who isn't inspired by some of the fabulous double weave projects that other weavers show us?
• Double weave is one of my weaving resolutions for 2010
• There's something fascinating about the way double weave can produce tubes, wide fabrics, double-sided designs, pouches, pillows and somehow still allow people to play with color and structure
  

Section with white weft is a double width fabric
Useful for making cloth wider than your loom

Inspiration

• Theresa's triple weave blanket
• Cally's samples
• Dawn's color windows
• Evelyn Oldroyd's Stitched Double Weave Kimono
• Tons of cool and interesting double weave projects that I've seen online or in person
  

Goals for this Project

• Complete the exercise on double weave in Learning to Weave by Deborah Chandler
• Experiment with double weave pickup
• Try to figure out a way to weave a pouch (like for a purse) that smoothly transitions into a flap for the purse

I made a tube closed on both sides, stuffed it, and will weave the end shut.
Great for pillows or anything padded.

You can see that I've chosen a thick yarn for this sampler. It's what I had on hand (leftover from the much-loved Larry the Lobster knitted toy). Plus it's super thick, so I could sett at 20 epi, making threading and pickup easier.

The red and white stripes are tubes, open at each end.
These are skinny (knitting needle size), but you could make them any size.

I need to make steady progress on this sampler because by September 15 (less than 2 weeks away), I must share lace samples with a class at the NH Weavers Guild. I need the loom for those samples!

Good thing the yarn is fat and is weaving up quickly!!

So Speedy!

Wow! That was quick!!

Less than 24 hours after I placed my order, UPS brought a box of yarn to my door!

Here are my Homestead Cotton colors for lace samples and dishtowels. A green that I'm considering for the warp is back-ordered.

The colors in this project remind me of SweeTarts (one of my favorite candies growing up).


The purple cottolin and pearl cotton from my towels and Theo Moorman homework also arrived.


Plus, new color cards for yarns like bamboo, tencel and updated colors for Harrisville and Halcyon's new cotolin.

Exciting!!!

Related posts:
Fall yarn order

Time for More Yarn!

It's August.

I have weaving homework due in September and October.

Time to get to work!

Here's my dining room when I'm deep in thought about a yarn purchase.

I'm buying yarn right now to make 24 lace samples by mid-September. I've chosen a draft. Now I need yarn.

My plan is to do the samples at the start of the warp (4 samples wide by 6 samples long), then weave 7 dish towels from the end of the warp. I can never have enough towels for my kitchen, and the kitchens of friends. I love giving towels as gifts!


While I'm at it, I've got a towel warp on my Toika that has veered off course from my original concept for the project. I'm still very happy with the project, but I need a different weft color.

I have a bit of a purple cottolin from Halcyon that will be perfect for this project. Their website makes cottolin seem a little confusing.

A quick phone call straightens me out. Halcyon will still carry the Swedish cottolin that I love, but as a special order.

They will also be sourcing a new cotolin from Canada that they can get more quickly.

Fortunately, the color I want is still in stock so there won't be a long wait for it.


For my lace samples and towels, I've played around a bit with the Homestead Cotton color card. I'm planning a warp with 3 colors, then will experiment with different colors in the weft.

I used crayons to design my general color scheme. I won't really know what I think until the yarn arrives.

Fortunately, it's $3.50 for a 600-yard mini-cone, so I can afford to buy some extra colors.


In October, I have homework in the Theo Moorman technique. We just have to make a finished project, rather than samples to share with the rest of the class.

I've decided to try to make a bag using yarn left from my First-Time-at-WEBS Scarves.

I'll use the bulky knitting yarns from that project as the inlay threads. I have a blended yarn for the thick yarn in the ground cloth. But I need to find a coordinating thin yarn for the ground cloth. That thin yarn will also tie down the inlay threads. (If I'm using this terminology incorrectly, please let me know! I don't want to lead people astray!)

Luckily, Halcyon has Pearl Cotton that should do nicely.

Now, I'll just add some soda ash for a future dyeing project, and some new color cards since my Yarn Store in a Box is a little out of date.

Hopefully the yarn will arrive in plenty of time for my fall deadlines! (Of course, both of my looms are occupied too.....so I need to get weaving!)

I know these projects probably don't make a lot of sense to you from this blog post. I will be blogging about each one as I work on it....so no worries! Soon you'll be tired of me giving details about lace or Theo Moorman technique I promise!!

Advice Please: Moths or Paranoia?

Last fall, a retiring weaver gave me a bit of yarn.

I bagged each of the 4 cones of yarn in individual bags and let it sit over the winter in an upstairs closet.


If there were moths, would I see signs of them?


Do the little flecks in this picture indicate moths?? I can't remember if the flecks were there when I stored the yarn. I think they were, which is what concerned me to begin with.

The yarn is rayon, if that makes a difference. I see no other signs of insects. No evidence of damage to the yarn.

Do you think this yarn is OK?

Thanks in advance for your advice!!!

Horizontal Sleying

If you're not a weaver, this post definitely won't be interesting to you. (No promises that it will be interesting if you are a weaver though!)

Since I sometimes take months off between projects, I'm creating a checklist to remind me about my preferred warping techniques.

For the past few days, I've been sneaking up to my studio to pick up where I left off dressing my Baby Wolf for a doubleweave sampler.


On my checklist, I had a note to try sleying the reed horizontally. Usually I put the reed in the beater in weaving position, and sley the reed that way when warping the loom back to front.

Last spring at Ruby Leslie's workshop, she mentioned that she prefers to sley the reed horizontally. One of my local weaving friends also endorsed that method. Deanna from A Winding Thread is also a fan.

I tried it out, and now I'm a fan too!!!

Deanna attaches her reed to the beater using ribbons from champagne bottles. I am a bit duller than that....I use shoelaces. (We runners tend to have lots of shoe laces that last longer than our running shoes!)


This method is more comfortable than putting the reed in the beater for me mostly because I'm never in a position where I'm looking through the reed at the heddles. Plus it seems easier for my hands and arms to be in comfortable positions with the reed horizontal. Also, I can tell from looking at the photos that I rest my forearms on the loom, which makes it more comfortable too.

I'm trying to develop a typical way of warping so that it becomes automatic for me. But I'm still willing to try different techniques to see if it gets easier, faster, more comfortable, more fun or better in some other way.


Sleying horizontally is definitely worth a try sometime if you haven't tried it yet. I was pleasantly surprised!

Let me know if you've tried it and what you think! Any other tips and pointers to make me a happier warper are also welcome!

Surprise: New Loom!

Maybe the universe is encouraging me to return to my studio?

Thursday, I finished threading a project on my Baby Wolf. Plus I spent hours searching for the perfect lace pattern for my lace sample due in September. (More on those projects another time!)

That night, I got an email about looms and weaving equipment for sale in New Hampshire.

I jumped right on it. Friday morning we drove over to check things out.


My first purchase is this beautiful walnut raddle from Treeditions. I've been using a borrowed raddle for over a year now. It's high time I got one of my own!

I had been planning to make a homemade version, but this gorgeous raddle will help make warping more of a pleasure!


Inspired by lots of cool inkle projects I've seen other bloggers create, I decided to bring this inkle loom home too. I love the portability of an inkle.


Finally, this table loom is the reason I went to check out the equipment in the first place. So far I've passed up a few workshops, or borrowed looms to take workshops. Having a workable table loom for times when I really need one seems like a good idea.

This one doesn't have a reed, but I'm sure the good folks at Gowdey Reed will remedy that situation pronto.

Even though I got this loom mostly for workshops, I can imagine using it for sampling, for on location weaving (at the beach?), and I could probably even get away with taking it to my knitting group sometimes.

I would never have imagined Thursday afternoon that I'd bring two new looms into the fold Friday!

Now I have pretty much a full complement of looms: table, inkle, tapestry, rigid heddle, small floor loom, large countermarche loom. The only thing that might be missing, and way off in the future, is a computerized loom. (Way, way, way off in the future!)

Changing Gears

After a couple of busy weeks - busy with boring, unbloggable stuff - I'm changing gears in my studio.


The painted warps are dry, stashed and waiting for design work then summer weaving.


I've got wefts and treadlings chosen for my first samples on the towel warp. Weaving will commence, first thing tomorrow!!

Beater on my Toika Loom

Gjeani of Handmade by Gjeani , who recently brought home a new-to-her Toika loom, asked for pictures of how the beater on my Toika is attached.

Side view

The beater contains a 26 inch reed, instead of a full 60 inches, since I'm working on hand towels.

Front of beater

Back of beater

Bottom attachment

Hope this helps!!! Happy weaving!

Folding my Warp in Half

Now, before I started all that warp painting, what was I working on?

Towels for our guest bathroom.

I was stuck after making a silly mistake.

When I finished winding one cone of yarn on my warping board, I realized I only had 1/4 of the warp ends needed. Oops!!! I'd used half of my yarn already. Not good.

I went back to check my math. I made a simple mistake. I assumed that each cone of yarn held 1 pound of yarn, when in reality each held 1/2 a pound.

I felt bad about that assumption, but after winding all of those warps for warp painting, I realized that 1 pound cones are very common.

But still, what to do about my warp?

I decided that rather than buy more yarn, I'd fold the warp in half.

Some people fold a warp in half on purpose, particularly when setting up a complicated color sequence that will be symmetrical. In that case, you'd wind the warp twice as long as needed, put a cross at both ends, and fold the warp in half when you're dressing the loom.

End with cross on left and end with counting tie on right

In my case, I didn't have a cross at both ends, but I did have a cross at one end and a counting tie every 1/2 inch at the other end. I decided that was good enough.

I marked the center of the warp with a new counting tie, then folded the warp.

I decided to dress the loom front to back. For the portion of the warp that had a cross, I used the cross. For the portion that just had the counting tie, I selected my threads out of the counting tie.

Section with cross sleyed, starting on section with counting tie

Each segment within the counting tie isn't too hard to divide up

It worked surprisingly well.

After threading and beaming on, here's the fold

Phew!! That much closer to weaving!!

Related posts:
Ordering more yarn for warp
Getting started

Warp Painting: So Far So Good

Today I painted a tencel warp long enough for 4 scarves.

Kitchen dye setup

Even though this is my first time warp painting, it went pretty well. No major dyeing disasters - no damage to my kitchen. (Previously I've always dyed outside....but it's February here in New Hampshire, plus it's absolutely pouring rain. Outdoors is not an option!)

I wound this warp in 1 inch segments that I chained separately. I'm not sure if I needed to do that or not, but it gives me a lot of flexibility.

Waves
(Purple, Red, Wisteria, Intense Blue, Turquoise)

Jim figured out this stretcher that I clamped the warp to, but I'm not sure whether I needed it. The wet warp on the tubes at either end of my setup was weighty enough that things might not have rolled around if they hadn't been clamped.

Of course, the proof of the painting is in the weaving. (Or something like that).

Askew
(Pale green, pale apricot, turquoise, purple, intense blue)

The warp is curing overnight. Tomorrow I hope to rinse this warp and to paint my giant pillow sham warp.

Numbered tags of individual warp bouts
(Just in case I need to see them later!)

Two tendencies that I really noticed today:

• I like doing things I've never done before
• When I'm doing something complicated that I don't understand, I like to just dive into it and try it, rather than understand it first. For the longest time, every time I dressed my loom, I couldn't connect all the steps mentally. I just did one after the other. Today, I didn't fully understand how to dye the warp until I did it. (And I'm still not totally sure I understand it!)

Seeing Spots
(Black, yellow, red, turquoise, green)

I definitely leaned heavily on advice from:

• Patricia Morton from Treeditions in Massachusetts, who teaches painted warp workshops
• Cindie Kitchin from Eweniquely Ewe in Oregon, who teaches painted warp workshops
• Online instruction sheet from ProChem Dye
  
• Phone support at ProChem Dye
• Phone support at Dharma Trading (for questions after ProChem closes for the day)

Garden Path
(Pale yellow, pale green, pale blue, pale pink)

Fun stuff!! I'm excited to see what tomorrow's warp will look like!

Related posts:
Interrupting my studio progress to do some warp painting
Preparing warp