Forward Progress

second butterfly motif....

All of the CD Weaver II's have been spoken for. I hope that people find them helpful. :)

When I decided to produce CD Weaver it was in order to provide people with some video without going to an expensive video format while allowing people to be a fly on the wall of my studio and watch how I do what I do. Everything is described in text and illustrated with numerous colour photos - video clips show the parts I felt needed to be seen in motion.

Many people tell me how fast I am. Working efficiently means that productivity can increase. Learning how to do the various tasks involved in weaving with less wasted motion means that a person can do more in less time.

So many people tell me that they have no interest in hurrying. What they don't realize is that I don't. Hurry, I mean. What I have done is learned the value of taking the time to do the preparation at one stage in order to save a whole lot of time and bother during the next stage. Investing 10 or 15 minutes of preparation to save 2 hours further down the line just makes good sense to me.

Today my student came back to finish her sample warp and start her scarf warp. She did the majority of the loom dressing herself - the first time ever for her.

From the time she arrived, she finished her sample warp by practising controlling the beater producing a sample with a heavily beaten section, a moderately beaten section and a lightly beaten section. We talked about being consistent. We talked about learning how to control the loom.

Then I showed her how to wind a warp and she worked at refining her movements until she finished winding - and got the motions down pat.

Once the warp was wound, she rough sleyed the reed, then we took it to the loom and she beamed it using a water jug to provide tension as it rolled on.

Threading presented more of a challenge to her, but she caught the sequencing error she had slipped into as she threaded a 24 end herringbone twill sequence and we fixed it even before she finished threading the entire warp. :)

Sleying proceded without too much trouble although there was a pair of ends twisted between the heddles. Something easily fixed.

I tied on and demonstrated how to begin weaving and at that point it was time to stop for the day. She had done all of the above from 1-5 pm. Just four hours.

She will come back on Monday and weave her scarf and I'll serge her sample so that we can do the wet finishing. Hopefully she will be able to fringe twist her scarf before she leaves on Monday, but if not I can loan her a fringe twister.

Everything I showed her today - except how I now sley the reed - is on CD Weaver (part I).

Part II covers shuttle handling (one and two shuttles), bobbin winding, hemstitching, fringe twisting etc.

Part III brings the series up to speed on wet finishing, plus we added most of the articles I'd written for Heddle magazine, handouts that were included with the Workshop in a Box kits I did a while ago, plus other articles/essays that used to be on my website. Possibly a couple hundred pages - I haven't actually counted them. Some technical, some opinion pieces.

I have 12 CD Weaver III's left. I'm at the stage where I need to decide if I order more of them made up. It would be nice to know if there was any interest in them before I invested more money in doing it. Right now I'm reserving these 12 cd's for the students who enroll in the class at John C. Campbell Folk School next January. To register http://3.ly/9EKb

Currently reading Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs