Of Faith and Finesse

First the finesse....

I am always looking for new ways to do things that will either allow me to do what's necessary in less time, or cause the least amount of angst whilst doing it.

While whining to a friend this morning about that pesky linen, which was causing me the most grief not in the weaving but in the winding of the bobbins, the proverbial light came on over my head.

My doubling stand is set up so that the two yarns come up out of a two stage bucket and run over an S hook that dangles from a hook in the ceiling.

The linen is just springy and wire-y enough that if I wound too fast, or just because it wanted to be pesky, the linen would leap off the S hook. Sometimes just one, sometimes both, but either way it meant that the yarn broke, or the two threads got out of alignment. In the long run it meant that winding bobbins was becoming a bit of a teeth grinding time for me.

As I was describing the pesky behaviour, I thought how much better it would be if the yarn ran through a ring. No way the yarn could escape! Ah-ha, says I - I do believe that I have a one inch tack ring in my toolbox!





I did have a ring handy so I put it up on the hook....



....a close up so you can see how it looks....and voila! Well behaved - or at least well controlled - linen!

Now for the item of faith...

The other thing related to the tea towels that had been vaguely bothering me was beaming the 2/16 warps. Since I had never been taught how to do this but just kept working at it until I sort of got it figured out I wondered if there wasn't a still simpler and faster way than what I was doing.




On the last warp I thought to myself, why am I strumming and brushing this warp? Didn't I do a good enough job that it should just wind on? So I didn't, and it did, with just one thread that snagged and broke.

This time I thought, okay, let's try this again and see if it was just a fluke, but let's also try something a little bit different. So instead of keeping the lease sticks between the reed and the breast beam I moved them beyond the breast beam to between that and the valet.

There were several improvements noticed. For one thing I had a much longer area that could be wound on before anything needed to be adjusted/moved. The chains stayed much neater. There were very few snags or loose threads until the last two yards (11 meter long warp) at which point I took out the brush and quickly dealt with those.

In the end I figure I halved the beaming time and much less fussing.

Happy new year and lots of fibre finessing to everyone!

Coping with Wire-y Thread

You can clearly see how spring-y this yarn is - it doesn't want to lie nice and tidy on the bobbins but leaps off at every opportunity.

It's especially difficult when it's being doubled (click on the doubling stand tag to the right) as each end can spring off in different directions.

So the first strategy in dealing with this yarn is to hold it close to the bobbin as it is being wound on. That way the placement of the yarn onto the bobbin can be better controlled. My fingers are no more than 2" away from the bobbin during winding, more usually 1".

Secondly, fill the bobbin only equal to the height of the flanges. There are two reasons for this - a) linen is dense and filling the bobbin any fuller makes the drag on the weft too heavy and b) keeping the yarn filled to a low profile makes it easier to weave. Since it wants to spring off at every opportunity, any higher and the snarls and tangles around the spindle in the shuttle just increase proprotionately. (Ask how I know!)

Third, when inserting the bobbin into the shuttle make sure that both threads are coming off the bobbin equally. It is common for one of the threads to spring off the bobbin 3 turns while the other one springs off 4 or 5 turns. So take the time when inserting the bobbin to make sure they are coming off together.

I think I've just finished towel #4 - or is it 5? Whatever, progress is being made and it's time to think about the next warp. Will I have the patience to do another warp using this yarn as weft? Hmmmmmm...a break using something friendlier may be in order. :^)

Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

Well, hopefully not the Toil and Trouble when you use a doubling stand!



I'm trying to use up this extremely fine singles linen Lynn gave me last fall, and the only way it will work on the fine cotton warp is to double it. Yes, it's that fine! :O

However, as I mentioned in a previous post, trying to wind two strands of yarn together can produce less than desirable results. When I need to double a yarn for weft, I use this handy bucket arrangement as a doubling stand. One cone is inside the bucket, threaded through a hole in the lid, then through the centre of the cone on top of the lid. This yarn is so fine, you may not be able to actually see it in the photo.

You can use any number of things - there are purpose built gizmos, but the one I have is too small to handle these large cones (nearly 4 pounds each!) - and another simple solution is a plastic milk crate or wire file bin. Set the cone on the floor, then tip the crate over it and run the thread up through one of the holes in the crate. Then thread the yarn through the bottom of the second cone (I use a long threading hook to fish the yarn up through the cone) and set the second cone centered over the first cone. If the crate or bin has smooth sides, you can also set it on the side so that you don't have to lift it up to get at the bottom cone.

I've found that the longer a length the two yarns run together the better they wind onto the bobbin, so my bucket is approximately 6 feet away from the bobbin winder. The yarn goes straight up to a hook in the ceiling so the length the yarn travels before winding onto the bobbin is probably close to 15 feet.

When winding, the hand that guides the yarn onto the bobbin is held about 1 inch away from the bobbin. The closer you hold, the less likely the yarns will split apart as they wind on, and the more evenly they will load.

I've got 3 of these almost four pound cones. I don't know how much I can use up on this 40 yard warp, but I'm hoping that most of the two cones I'm using will go. There is still a little of the very fine cottons left, so those pale blues will get combined with bleached white for one more warp - which will hopefully use up the very fine cottons, and most of the very fine linens. :)

Flowers in November

After the weekly errand run with my mom I came home and finished threading the warp and sleyed it at 24 epi (with the doubled ends counting as 'one').

This is the very beginning of the weaving. I keep left over weft on bobbins to use for headers, cut lines, testing colours and so on, so I began with the natural singles 20. It was difficult to see the pattern to check for oopsies so I switched to the red singles 20. Thankfully there were no threading or sleying errors, so I was able to begin weaving.

While threading, I continued to mull over my plan of using the white singles for weft, and after comparing it to the singles 20 noting that the white was much finer than the singles 20 (in spite of being labelled singles 12, both on the cone and the invoice) decided that I had to double it. Especially for the floral motif. So I dragged out my trusty doubling stand.

The resulting fabric is open and not suitable for towels, but the length of the floats would rule out use as towel fabric anyway. It would, however, make really nice fabric for a window covering. It's light enough and open enough that it would not block out the light entirely, but would provide sufficient privacy.

Once again I'm weaving this fabric up-side-down in terms of which side will be used for the face. No real reason except that I used the draft as given, which was probably written for a counter balanced or countra marche loom.

The draft is taken from the monograph done by Pat Hilts for Ars Textrina. She translated two old German weaving books of patterns. Many of the patterns are similar to Irene Woods monograph The Fanciest Twills, another book I often peruse for ideas. A third resource is Olesner's book.

Yes, I could draft these patterns from scratch, but when I have a concept of what I want, I will sometimes flip through these old books until I see something close to what I want. Sometimes I find precisely what I want, in which case I give a nod to the resource, thanking them for not having to spend a couple of hours at the computer clicking the mouse. :)

Sometimes I take their draft as a starting point and adapt it to my vision. In this instance, I was just looking for something to weave for the Seattle Guild newsletter, and somehow weaving flowers in deary November seemed very appealing.

PS - while winding a bobbin, the cone on the top of the doubling stand had a break in the thread and I lost the end. The yarn is so fine it's difficult to see, and finding the broken end proved fruitless. Inspiration struck, and I grabbed the lint roller, rolling it around the cone in the direction the yarn was winding off the cone. It only took a swipe 1/4 of the way around the cone for the broken end to be caught on the sticky roller, saving minutes - possibly quite a few minutes - not to mention the frustration. :D