Monday, December 27, 2010

More Smiles



some of the painted silk gimp warps....



some of the silk gimp dyed for weft for warps above....



The dye god(dess) smiled again today. 10 pounds of silk gimp dyed, most of it successfully.

I don't try for a truly solid colour - generally I like a slight variation in value but a couple of the skeins have too great a value change for effective weft. On the other hand, they will also knit up quite nicely so I may just toss those into my creative figgiting pile to be knitted into the scarves that I donate to worthy causes.

Just before I left for the guild room the phone rang and my latest student asked about getting more yarn for her scarves. I brought some yarn to the room and we made the skein into a ball and she started winding a 5 yard warp for two scarves. Her family were so impressed with the first scarf she made she had requests. :) Nice to have an appreciative family. Even better, her dh came and took measurements and will make her a warping board, wider lease sticks that I find work more efficiently for the method of dressing the loom I use and now teach, sticks for warp beaming and a bobbin winder for her. What a keeper! :D

So all in all, a very productive day. So happy to cross the dye day off my list, even though I still have about 30 pounds left to do, at least I've got some weft for the painted warps - some of which I'll take to JCC to work on there. And Sharon assures me that she has a naked loom so I can weave while she's at work, too.

Can we say 'bus man's holiday'?

4 comments:

Sherri Woodard Coffey said...

They look wonderful! Love all your "not whites." Now a question (maybe I missed it): what is silk gimp?

Laura Fry said...

A gimp yarn is textured, with little nubbles all along the length. I'll try to get a close up. A lot of people call this yarn boucle, but a boucle has an actual loop where this yarn doesn't.

Cheers,
Laura

Sharon Schulze said...

I was wondering the exact same thing! I have received yarn from other weavers that said "gimp" and I never knew what that meant. Which is kind of a shame, since I've actually SEEN the yarn and still didn't know what made it gimp. ;-)

There will indeed be an empty loom for you, Laura. In fact there will be at least two and maybe three, depending on whether I get myself into a pickle in not finishing something. All my current plans are for short warps, though, so even if something is on the loom we will have to just weave it off. hee hee

Sherri Woodard Coffey said...

Okay, silk gimp sounds like something I would love. Isn't boucle done with the spinning process? I take it that gimp is more an actual part of the naturalness of the silk.