Chocolate

 

The next few scarves will be woven with a dark chocolate brown weft.  The photo doesn't do the depth of colour justice - take my word for it - it's a lot darker than this.

I worked with indie dyers to get colours specific to my needs.  Generally I asked them to make 'semi-solids', not level.  If I was paying for custom colours, I wanted something not available commercially.  Although, truth to be told, I was asking them for colours I couldn't get commercially.

The lighter value in this brown is not as light as it looks so the overall effect is what dyers tend to refer to as 'abrash'.

The warp is quite dark value to begin with - a rust red, a kind of forest green and some black.  To add a dark chocolate brown was a 'safe' choice.  It was also the 'best' choice I had available, unless I wanted a lot of rust red Tencel weft scarves.  Which would have been fine, but...I had these skeins of dark chocolate rayon.

This yarn is quite a bit finer than the 2/8 Tencel and the resulting cloth is quite a lovely lightweight fabric which should work well for summer.  It's got a nice hand or drape.  The weave structure is a combination of twill and plain weave.  The density of the warp was chosen for the slightly thicker yarns I'm also trying to use up and to make the fabric be 'balanced' I added plain weave to the tie up.  

I was going to change the tie-up and treadling for each of the four scarves, but you can't really see the weave structure anyway so I'm just going to make all four the same.  

The 'abrash' of the weft is going to make them look slightly different so all in all, I'm not motivated to spend the time conjuring up 3 more options for weaving.

The guild room sale is over and this week everything will get moved next door to the Studio Shop.  Since the Studio Shop is a lot better known, AND it's on the ground floor, not up a long staircase, we are hoping for a nice ending of our sale.  

The year is nearly over and suddenly those distant deadlines are looming (pun alert) and I find I'm needing to scramble a bit to get everything done that needs doing.

I'm also beginning to fill my calendar with guild programs via Zoom so if anyone is interested, they should contact me soon-ish.  With my on line classes launching in January, I will become a bit busy in in the new year.

We are still a week away from the solstice and the weather report for the coming two weeks is cold, cold, cold, with a serving of Omicron.  I'm grateful for the chance to keep teaching - safely - even if on line isn't ideal!

My yarn order should be here, maybe before Christmas.  In the meantime I'll keep working on scarves.  I should finish this warp this week, then put on another one in hopes of emptying more cones.  Or at least making them smaller!  And then I'll go back to tea towels.  But I may do a 2/20 mercerized warp first in an effort to use up that really fine linen I was given a couple of years ago.  Stash reduction.  It's progressing.

One by One

 

I have great hopes of this design because it looks quite different depending on the angle at which the cloth is viewed.  

The warp is 2/16 bamboo (Brassard) and the weft various rayon yarns from my stash.  Because yes, I'm still working on using up my stash!

The weft is textured - a rough kind of 'flake' - and overall thicker than the warp threads.  As such the weft tends to dominate the warp when viewed from face on.  But walking away from the loom I could see that as the angle of viewing changed, so did the appearance of the cloth.  So I am hopeful that once wet finished this will be quite a subtle but interesting cloth.

That is not say this warp has been without incident!  Rather it has been a bit challenging as I made a few oopsies in the processes.  Operator error, combined with pushing the yarn to it's limit led to some interesting two-step shuffles as I put the warp into the loom and got it ready to start weaving.  And then broke a warp end due to a shuttle 'mis-fire'.  Again - operator error.

But this morning I finished scarf #1 and began #2.

I've sorted through my stash.  Again.  Picked several yarns as being good candidates for using on this warp.  And now it is just to sit down and do the weaving.

The warp has some tension 'issues'.  I had already decided to cut off and lash on after each group of three scarves, so that will help even out the tension problems.  But nothing that seems to be proving catastrophic.  So far.

In the meantime I've reviewed what I'm doing and decided on the next warp in this series.  And targeted an array of different wefts that can be used on that one.  It would be nice to use up all of something, but then I'd have a big stack of one colour combination, which isn't great for selling.  Having a variety of different colours, woven on different coloured warps, will give people a much bigger choice.

We still have three more weekends of the guild room sale, then the pop up sale at the art centre.  For that I'm thinking of getting the silk/rayon scarves tagged/priced and  place them on consignment with that facility, plus whatever I put into the guild pop up sale there.  Beyond that, I'm not pushing to get these scarves done, but if they are, they can go into the sale(s), too.

But before that can happen, I need to weave, fringe twist and wet finish them.

So - back to the loom.

Special Handling

Yesterday I posted about yarns that are 'tender' and need special handling. 

This yarn is not tender but it still needs special handling.

Even though it was stored in a plastic bag, the bag was loose and during transportation, the coils of yarn around the cone loosened to the point where it was pretty much impossible to find the end of the yarn, and trying to unwind it would have turned into a nightmare of snarls and tangles.

In the end when I gently grabbed the snarl of loose coils and gently pulled them off the cone and onto the table, there really wasn't all that much in terms of yardage - certainly well under an ounce of this 16 ounce cone.

Stripping the loose yarns off the cone took less than a minute, the value of the yarn was very low and many minutes of my time (not to mention the frustration of trying to salvedge it) were saved.

I used to work with this quality of yarn all the time when I wove for the fashion designer.  In point of fact I bought this yarn from her when she decided to retire and close down her business.  So I knew what I was getting in terms of quality - and behaviour.

In order to keep the yarn well behaved I got a bunch of net scrubbies and kept them to put onto the base of the cone.  I cut them long enough to pull up over the cone for storage, but they need to be pulled down to the base or else there is too much friction and the yarn won't feed off without a lot of tension being applied to the yarn.

The scrubbies prevent the yarn from slithering down the cone and wrapping around the base so that as you are winding it catches and snags.  They are also quite elastic and as the diameter of the cone reduces, they simply shrink to accommodate the smaller size.

I finished winding the warp with this yarn with no problems. 

There are other things that can be used in similar fashion - old pantyhose, for example.

Currently reading More Bitter Than Death - remembered to look up the title of the Dana Cameron book I'm nearly finished.

Mining the Stash

Nine boxes.  I was thinking there were six. 

Well, I am going to try to use some of this up.  But first I need to see what is actually in those boxes.

This is yarn from the fashion designer I used to weave for.  She retired when she hit 65 and offered me her yarn to buy at a huge discount.  Since I was familiar with the yarns she used, I foolishly said yes.

Of course I was recovering from by-pass surgery, beginning to feel 'normal' again, no problem, I can buy some of your stash!  And then I sent Doug back for more...

Now, what to do with it?  Now that I'm three years older, dealing with adverse effects from the medication that is keeping me this side of the grass/snow.  Tired All The Damn Time.

Since I'm low on scarf inventory, I've been proto-typing scarves.  They won't be *fabulous* but they will be classic.  And being rayon (mostly) they will have great drape, and not the silk price.  Although I did manage to use up some (most?) of my silk stash earlier this year. 

Since I have taken a booth at the ANWG conference, mostly to sell books, I will also offer textiles.  Who knows, maybe some of these soon-to-be scarves will grace the booth, not just tea towels?

Anyway, it's lunch time.  After lunch I will start to paw through these boxes and see what there is in them.

Currently reading Craeft by Alexander Langlands

The Drape!

One of the things that people find appealing is a textile that feels good 'in the hand'.  A textile that bends and flows.  That drapes lovingly around the body.  

I have been working with various forms of rayon for quite a few years, now.  Rayon was developed to mimic silk, without the price of silk.  It drapes well, feels substantial (at a good density for the yarn) and takes dye to a brilliant depth of shade.  It can also have a luxurious sheen.  

It was an enormous relief when we were finally able to get some of the new scarf design wet finished.  There are still some left, which may not get done in time for this year, but there are enough for the upcoming show season.  And who knows?  There may be time next week to get the rest done before show two and three...