Thursday, January 29, 2009

Holy Snowball, Batman!



I expected this design to be more of an X and O, but the O's definitely seem to dominate!

I'm not sure if the pattern should be called snowballs, or raindrops keep falling, or.....?

The lines in the cloth are due to cramming the threads in the reed, although in the picture I see one area that looks particularly wonky so I'm going to have to look at it more closely in the morning and see if there is a sleying error there or just that a few of the darker threads got grouped together. The stripes should even out during wet finishing so that it doesn't look quite so streaky.

I had delusions of finishing this warp before I left on Feb. 9, forgetting that 32 ppi is that much slower than 24 ppi. :} Not to mention the somewhat unco-operative linen weft. So instead of trying to rush through this warp, I decided to leave some of it on the loom for when I get back on the 23rd of Feb., and concentrate on some other things that are beginning to reach critical mass in terms of deadlines.

There is a load of wet finishing to do, a beginning workshop to organize (March 7/8 if anyone wants to come to Prince George during spring breakup - not the best time to visit!) transcribing, the workshop in Grand Forks to finish getting ready, Fibres West to get yarns labelled and packed, etc., etc., etc.

Spent part of this afternoon teaching an 8 year old to knit. Hopefully she can continue on with help from her mom.

The weather forecast says warm (above freezing) for the next week or so with colder weather returning on Feb. 9, the day I leave for warmer climes. :D

Currently reading Halo - The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund

3 comments:

Janet said...

Love your snowballs, whatever you wind up calling them. There are so many big geometrics in textiles the past few years and I've been lamenting that they're so hard to do in handweaving.. but lo! you have done it. I'm guessing there are a ton of shafts involved tho, eh wot?

Do you find that reed marks that defined really do come out in the wash? I've always been anxious that some remnant will always hang around. I find the juxtaposition of the lines from the reed and the big circles kind of interesting, actually.

Dorothy said...

To me those O rings look like the pattern of rain falling on water, I like the effect.

Laura Fry said...

The reed marks won't likely come out entirely due to the stiffness of the linen. But as I always say - if you can't be perfect, be consistent. :}

This pattern is on 12 shafts, but you can do something similar on eight. I've taken another pattern on 12 and reduced it to 8 with pretty good results. If you'd like me to reduce this to 8 email me at laura@laurafry.com

Guess I'm thinking more along the lines of snow right now because we've got quite a lot of it around, but the more I look at it, the more I'm seeing rain on a pond surface. :)

Cheers,

Laura