It's the Little Things

 

Yesterday I felt a bit 'better' and puttered in the studio for a bit doing small things that, I hoped, wouldn't aggravate my back.  One of the things I did was remove the ratty 4/8 cotton yarn I had been using as a 'sling' or 'cradle' for the brake handle on the Megado.

Over the winter the relative humidity drops such that a wooden machine like the Megado shrinks.  The loom is generally pretty good at dealing with this, but the one thing that did seem to be affected was the brake handle and the 'stop' the loom has to keep the handle up close and within reach.  The handle would slip by the 'stop' and next time I wanted to advance the fell, I would have to bend over, fish around and get the handle before I could do that.  

My patience, never very thick, meant I grabbed the first thing to hand, which was a bobbin of 4/8 cotton, and tied a loop around the loom side frame and handle which prevented it from dropping more than in inch below where it was supposed to be.

That worked well enough, but...it wasn't very attractive.  

Needing a band for a hat (see previous post), I asked a local guild member if she had some and I got some nice 'trims' from her.  The hat was dealt with immediately, but right after I got the trims, my back went into spasm and I haven't felt up to doing very much of anything.

Yesterday I felt improved enough after massage I thought I could at least deal with this little job and give the Megado some handwoven 'bling'.  I asked for several inches more than I needed because instead of sewing the band in place, I decided to tie it.  That way, should I ever need to remove the beam, or take the loom apart (I'm not immortal, and the loom will likely go to live somewhere else at some point), it can be easily untied and re-used.

While I had the ipad down in the studio I took a closeup of one of the 'new' tea towels I've been playing with.  The weave structure is documented in Stories from the Matrix, is generally 'best' woven with more than 8 shafts (12 and up) and a computer assisted dobby because of the number of treadles/lifts needed.

But the weave structure creates a very interesting texture that I am finding very satisfying, as I work through various iterations of what is possible.  The current design is really tickling my fancy, but I don't want to photograph it until I have wet finished the towels.  If I remember I will do a before and after comparison.

The weave structure is a 1:3-3:1 twill block and as the blocks change from one to the other they create a texture due to the weave structure.  Because they also 'shift' half a block, you get 'half-tones' which create a different kind of texture.  And I'm really quite enjoying trying various things in Fiberworks, then watching them as they develop in the weaving, then after wet finishing.

My back isn't happy today - certainly not enough to contemplate weaving - so I will try and work on the workshop drafts for a while, then perhaps finally dig out the Matrix towels and begin photographing them and uploading them to my ko-fi shop.

We'll see how far I get.

Here's one of the recent towels in close up: