Use it or Lose it

red and white bookmark completed


Well, I made it down to the AVL today with every intention of weaving two tea towels.

It was made very clear to me that not only has my left calf muscle wasted away, so have many other muscles in my body. :(

About half way through the first tea towel I realized that my arms and shoulders were feeling the fact that they have not been used that way for 5 weeks.

It's truly amazing how quickly muscle tissue disappears when it isn't used, but I've been assured that it will come back quickly once I'm active again.

And so I went ahead and wove two towels. My neck is aching a bit now, so instead of weaving three tomorrow I'll probably just do two more towels and call it a day. Will see how I feel tomorrow.

The really good news is that my ankle is a tiny bit more flexible every day and pain levels have not gone up significantly with the activity I've done so far.

Really hoping that I won't need months of physio and that I'll soon be back to 'normal'.

Currently reading Not Less Than Gods by Kage Baker - will have to ask Doug to pull some more Terry Pratchett out of his office 'cause I can't get to them myself

One Step Forward

Mizz B is here and helped get the studio sorted out so that I could wind bobbins. Found an old 'sloppy' sock of Doug's and slipped that onto my foot which I rest on the top of the box housing the fly shuttle air switches when I'm not weaving with the fly shuttle.



Things went fairly well and I had originally intended to weave two towels so that I could get Mizz B to help cut the apron out and put a storage roller on but decided that perhaps that, along with bobbin winding and tieing the warp onto the apron etc., was quite possibly a bit much for a first day back in the studio. So I stopped at one.



Not totally in love with this warp - oranges are not really 'my' colours - but the linen weft mutes them a bit so.........besides, this is by way of being a therapy warp (mental if nothing else!) so it doesn't really matter about whether or not I'm in love with the colours.

Point of fact, these towels would probably look really good in my kitchen with the rosewood cabinets and soon to be cork floors. :) So who knows, I may keep a couple for myself.

I'm really hoping this warp will use up the rest of the extremely fine linen - or use up enough that I can justify recycling the rest(?) - and then move on to the rayon chenille Diversifed Plain Weave warp.

But we will see. I really need to be harsh about my stash and either use it up or pass it on. Since Mizz B is doing so well I may bequeath some of it to her. We'll see what she likes to work with and if she's at all interested in being creative with yarns that I'm bored with.

Currently reading Interesting Times by Terry Pratchett

Bunch o' Bookmarks

Don't know if two and a bit bookmarks can legally be called a 'bunch', but oh well...

I've made this pattern numerous times, in a variety of colour combinations. It's sort of a colour exercise because depending on the stitch (woven structure) the colours can read quite differently. Click on the photo for a close up.

The blue and white bookmark looked quite incipid on the white pricking, but really pops on the dark blue cushion.

A friend in England has a lace supply business and I can get bookmark sleeves from her. As soon as I'm mobile I'll dig through the mountain of boxes hiding my lace supplies with the sleeves in it so I can file the bookmarks I've managed to make so far in their protective sleeves.

What do I do with them? I give them away. It takes me several hours to make one - which means that if I were to sell them I'd have to charge about $30. I doubt very much anyone is willing to pay that much for a bookmark so rather than offer them and be rebuffed, or charge way too little to reflect the time and effort that goes into them, they are used as gifts.

The good news is that I'm able to tolerate having my foot down for longer periods of time (although I think I've hit my limit for today) so working at the computer or the lace isn't so uncomfortable. Just nine more sleeps and I see the surgeon who will hopefully allow me to put weight on my foot so I can start doing things again. :}

On Monday when Mizz B comes I'll get her to set the studio up so that I can wind bobbins and I'm going to try to weave a tea towel on the AVL. It's been a long (almost) 5 weeks away from the studio.

Currently reading Eric by Terry Pratchett.

Making Plans

One of the warps that has been on my to-be-done list for a rather long time is a production run of rayon chenille scarves woven in Diversified Plain Weave.

I first came across this weave structure in a copy of Weaver's Magazine where it was referred to as Diversified Huck because the threading system was a single end huck progression.

This wasn't necessarily the easiest approach in terms of threading/weaving and people played around with it and came up with the theading below.



I'm going to futz with it a bit more and change it again because of the way I thread to this:



I'm right handed and find that if I thread the end furthest away, then the thread nearest me my body likes that a whole lot more. (See the threads on shafts 1 and 2)

But no matter how one twiddles the threading, these sorts of threading systems are not simple or easy and setting the loom up will take a fair amount of time.

Which is why I'll put on a fairly long warp so that I can amortize my time over as many scarves as possible. And use up a significant amount of my all too generous stash of solid coloured rayon chenille yarns!

Right now I'm thinking 40 yards - 40 turns of rayon chenille on the big beam, and 80 turns of 2/16 bamboo on the smaller second beam.

The beauty of this threading system is that the tie up can be changed so that I don't have to weave all of the scarves in the same pattern. What I've shown here is just a very simple twill progression that will make chevrons but that's only the beginning.

I did afghans in this weave structure last summer and really liked the quality of the cloth. I think it will make great scarves.

2/3's

There are a lot of 2/3's in my life right now. Fer instance - the bookmark is 1/3rd done, so there are 2/3's left to finish it.

But far more important to me right now is that I am 2/3's the way through the 6 week non-weight bearing portion of my recovery.

It has become very clear to me that I will not throw down my crutches and arise fully healed, (or should I say fully heeled - too much Terry Pratchett mayhaps?) but that there are going to be some weeks, perhaps months, left before total recovery.

But that's okay. I *will* recover. Many people live with mobility issues every day of their lives (my neighbour being one of them - boy do I empathize with her right now!)

Mizz B came yesterday and helped me re-assemble the AVL once I finished sleying the tea towel warp. She wound another scarf warp for the rigid heddle loom. She needs to finish weaving her scarf on it, but there's no screaming hurry. I also talked her through beaming the warp I will use in the first stage of my physiotherapy - a 2/8 cotton warp for placemats. Not sure if it is totally ready to go so if not she can finish that next Monday.

It was the longest warp she's beamed so far and we had some adventures but she got it on and threaded. Took her an hour to thread 300 ends - not bad considering it was only about the 4th warp she has threaded so far. I'm giving her Rising Weaving Star status already. Can hardly wait to see what she does once she gets her own loom the end of May. :D

In the meantime I need to order more yarn in for placemat weft and if I do that tomorrow or the next day it should arrive in time for me to start weaving in two weeks. Right now I'm planning one placemat a day and see how it goes.

OTOH, since I have air assist on the AVL and don't need my left foot at all to weave on that loom, I'm hoping that I'll also be able to weave at least one tea towel, perhaps two, a day.

Currently reading Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett (and for fans - I went to his website last night and discovered a new title will be out in September)

Random Thoughts

bamboo and wool/lycra

My supply of wool/lycra is nearly gone (I think there may be 16 cones left) so I was pleased to see that Ashford now supplies colcolastic - a cotton/lycra yarn - and in a variety of colours. I'd made plans to include this new yarn in Magic in the Water, Part II and test drive it in the workshop at Columbus, OH in May ..... BUT..... when I started investigating air fares, it was going to cost twice as much as my workshop fee to get me from here to there.

I offered to cancel the workshop, and they accepted my offer. :(

While I like living where I do I also have to accept the fact that I live a long way from anywhere else. Out of the $1000+ air fare to get to Columbus, $500 of that is just to get me from Prince George to Vancouver. The shortest leg of the journey.

So now I'm wondering if there is even any point in my continuing to offer to teach for guilds. When it costs twice as much to get me to the guild event than it does to pay me to teach, it's the airlines that are making the bulk of the money. :( OTOH, weavers don't realize that - they just know that it's way too expensive to have me come to them.

If the workshops in Joplin had gone ahead there would at least have been two groups to share the cost of travel, but for a variety of reasons there weren't enough people for them to go ahead and the entire cost of travel fell onto the Columbus guild's shoulders.

Right now I have just two events booked for next year, one in January, one in July, both in the east of the USA. If guilds on the eastern seaboard want to share travel costs with either John C. Campbell Folk School or NEWS, let me know. Either that or sign up for the events so that they are full and the two organizers can afford to pay the travel costs.....

Currently reading Carpe Jugulum by Terry Pratchett

A Thread Under Tension...

is a thread under control.

Kati Meek has reprinted her book Warp With A Trapeze.

She describes herself as a 'lazy' weaver in the same way I call myself lazy. I don't want to do any more work than I absolutely have to. The process of weaving is complex enough that using inefficient processes and equipment can add serious time to the whole enchilada.

I was first exposed to the tool I call a warping valet (because that was the translation provided to me) in Sweden in 2001.

It was a smack-me-upside-the-head sort of experience. Of course this tool needed to be introduced to my studio! No more requirement for assistance for long/wide warps - I could be completely independant of needing helping hands.

Now any time I beam a warp longer than 3 yards and/or wider than 15 inches I use the warping valet.

Over the years I've tweaked the process - I was never shown how to use the tool, just saw it mounted on some looms in a studio in southern Sweden - and my process is somewhat different from Kati's, but not in any major way.

Rather than use a raddle, I rough sley a reed and mount that into the beater with the valet positioned at the front of the loom. My valet is mounted into the ceiling - not something that is practical for many people. Therefore mounting the apparatus onto the loom itself is probably the way to go for most.

But this book has more than just how to use a trapeze/valet. Kati also talks about how to sit and beat to reduce stress (the same way I do) and how to hold and throw the shuttle (the same way I do).

It's nice to have confirmation that other weavers have found the same processes as efficient as I find them. :)

Kati also shows how to install a free weight braking system. I first saw this in Allen Fannin's Handloom Weaving Technology, but Kati provides much more information and lots of pictures to help someone install one on their loom.

Overall a very handy resource.

More information on Kati's blog http://katimeek.blogspot.com

ps - I will be at John C. Campbell Folk School Jan. 9-15 2011 giving a workshop The Efficient Weaver and will be doing some seminars at NEWS, ditto.