Another Special Commission

Today I met with the rep from the local Ukranian dance troupe. I've done fabric for them in the past, and they needed new fabric for skirts. They also needed sashes and headbands.





I wove the skirt fabric above several years ago. It's actually a lot more orange than the photo shows. They need 5 more skirts and 5 sashes. They also want 12 head dresses, but to match the sashes.

So I have to do some number crunching tomorrow and put a yarn order in. I already ordered the yarn for the skirts because they need this by the end of May and since I'll be away the last two weeks of May, it all has to be done before I leave for the Alberta conference in Olds.



This is the other skirt fabric I've done for them. Thankfully they didn't need any more of this right now as it's very fiddly with four shuttles and I would have been hard pressed to get this woven!

I've just beamed a 40 yard black warp for throws. Guess my goal of only working 3 hours a day is going to get set aside for the next 6 weeks............. :)

Currently reading Whisper to the Blood by Dana Stabenow

All Squared Away

Here are the square cloths draped over the back of my sofa. The two on the outsides have the linen/rayon boucle for weft, the next two inside those on each side use the same ivory for weft as the majority of the warp, and the one in the middle is the cotton slub for weft.





The photo below is a bit of a close up.




The next step is to hem them, and then send photos to the client and see what he thinks. I have a woven sample of the one that is my personal favourite and which will let him see/feel the cloth. Whether it will meet his needs or not I won't know until I hear back. But in the meantime, I'm quite pleased with these.

The two that were woven in the block design are seconds and have already been sent to their new home. I may not pay my studio assistants very well, but they do get perks. (Or that should be 'perq' I suppose - short for perquisite.)

In the meantime the first student has come and chosen her yarn for the weekend and wound her warp. A lady after my own heart, she didn't even take off her coat before diving into the bucket of yarn! :D

And I started beaming a 40 yard warp for throws. I have an enormous amount of a high quality acrylic yarn that I have been knitting with, but knitting is way too slow to use up the quantities that I have so I'll do some throws. Nothing fancy, just a straight twill draw for structure and hems rather than fringes because I'm using up a bunch of black and dark blue 2/16 cotton for warp (using it doubled) at 20 epi. Such fine yarn would make a rather thready fringe so I'll use up some black 2/8 cotton doubled (to more closely match the thickness of the acrylic) for hems.

Karena cut apart and serged the tea towels from the aqua warp, and my wet finishing pile is now huge so I am going to try to work on getting the towels processed. That way the pile will be transferred to the love seat in the living room (tv watching job) rather than a pile threatening to topple over in the studio.

And like Janet in the Maritimes - enough already with the snow! It was a glorious day yesterday - brilliant sun, mild (for us) temps, and this morning we awoke to a snow storm. Sigh.

Studio Assistance and Going Slow

As you know, I'm all about working as efficiently as possible. To that end I have invested in equipment that helps me work faster.



This is my pirn winder. I love using weft yarns that allow me to wind pirns this way! So long as there are pirns in the carousel it will keep winding, doffing the full pirn and loading the next from the carousel until the weft package is empty. The full pirns slide down a chute below into a box placed there to catch them.

That means that I can be doing other things while the winder is chugging away. This morning I wove one square while the winder was preparing the pirns for the next one. The huge advantage to this winder is that it pretty much winds perfect pirns every time and I don't need to be standing over it while it's doing it! :D

On the other hand, sometimes you just need to go slower.
So it was with the new block design. I had woven one whole square and started on the next when I noticed that the 16th thread from the left hand selvedge had stopped weaving. Don't know why - it wasn't mis-threaded and it wasn't crossed in the reed. It just stopped weaving into the cloth!

I had been toying with adding the temple because the cloth was beating in at about 23 instead of 24 ppi which meant that every once in a while I'd either have to beat a few extra times, or manually advance by hand. So when I saw the miscreant, I started the green square over again (I'd only woven about 12") and added the temple.

The cloth is now beating in at 24, and the wayward thread is also weaving in. So I'm grinning and bearing it, advancing the temple every 20 picks.

In this photo you can see the padded bicycle gloves I wear while weaving with the fly shuttle. You can also see the controls for the fly shuttle boxes sitting on the top of the beater. I have four fly shuttle boxes, and they were getting a bit on the heavy side to change manually so since I already had air to the loom anyway, I challenged Doug to come up with a system to use air to lift and lower the boxes.

Even though many people doubted he could do it, he did, and it works quite well.

The controls to throw the fly shuttle are activated with my left foot, and the control to open the shed is activated with my right foot.

Changing My Mind

Well, after doing one square with the 2/8 cotton, I remembered the linen/rayon boucle and decided to do one with that.

The pattern is twill blocks in a point treadling progression, and I decided I liked it enough that I did both the ivory cotton and the boucle in the same treadling.

In the photo, the white rayon looks a bit stark. It's not quite so bright in real life. :)

The next square will be twill blocks again, but in a small and large block design. With 16 shafts I can weave 4 squares of 4 threads each. One of the blocks will be 1:3 twill for 4 threads, and 3:1 twill for 12 threads, then reverse. Right now I'm thinking of doing one each with the two other colours from the warp - one the sort of golden colour and the other the pale green. But we'll see. I may change my mind - again! ;)

Special Order

From time to time I take special orders. This is one. The view is from the back so you can't see the colours very clearly, but the cloth hasn't come round far enough for me to get a good view of the front, yet.

This is a very special order because it is long distance. The customer saw my work at a show last Christmas, and contacted me and asked if I would do a square cloth for their house. I requested that they send paint chips of the colours they wanted in the fabric and some pictures so that I could get a feel for what they wanted.

The yarns were ordered based on the paint chips and I dressed the loom yesterday and started weaving today. There is enough warp for several square cloths and each will have a different weft. The one pictured is a natural cotton slub which will give a bit of texture. The others will likely be 2/8 cotton and will be much smoother in appearance.

When they are done I'll take photos of each and send them to the customer and see if any of them appeal.

I have also begun loading items for sale into my Art Fire store. Eventually I will have yarn, but for now I've begun with tea towels. http://laurafry.artfire.com/

The good news today is that the new computer is all hooked up. It took a little fiddling around to get it running due to confusion about which cable needed to be plugged in where, but eventually it all worked.

I'm really happy to be weaving this fabric. For the past couple of years I've almost exclusively used hand shuttles and I was really wanting a break from that. This warp is wide enough at 38" that I can use the fly shuttles. Even better, I can use the industrial pirn winder and industrial fly shuttles.

Currently reading When Gods Die by C. S. Harris

Threading

One of the fun things about travelling and meeting other weavers is that we can have conversations about things like techniques and preferences.

Some weavers really dislike TexSolv heddles. I like them, but part of why I like them is due to the way I thread.

I thread in groups, not one thread at a time, so I actually like the fact that TexSolv heddles don't move around very easily. :)

I have also numbered the tops of the bottom heddle bars to make it easier to find the shafts I want to work with.





This photo shows the stick I tape all the warp bouts to in order to bring them all forward so that I can easily reach them. It also shows the numbers (in red) on the top part of the shafts. In this photo I am 2/3's of the way through a one inch section of warp ends, just ready to thread the last 8 ends (taped to shaft 16).

The heddles have been brought forward from the left hand side and stacked - in order - from shafts 16 through 9.

Below I am about to thread ends 8-1.



Unfortunately I didn't have anyone handy to run the camera so I can't show my threading method, but I've covered that elsewhere. What I wanted to show here was that rather than thread my fingers through the individual ends, I pinch them between my index and middle finger at the top, and my thumb and ring finger at the bottom. This allows me to either hold the ends under tension or apply some slack to allow the ends to bow outwards just a little. This makes getting the hook around the end I want easier.

The photo also shows that I am supporting the the heddle that I will thread next by placing my ring finger on the heddle just below the eye (I know it looks like my finger is on the eye, but really it's just below.

As I thread each heddle, my ring finger moves to the next heddle in line to support it until all 8 ends are threaded and then I pull all 8 through their respective heddles in one motion.

Once that is done, I tie a slip knot, move the heddles to the right, and begin the next group by pulling the heddles from the left. In this repeat (which is a straight draw over 16 shafts) I'm threading 8 ends per group. How many ends I do at once will depend on the repeat - it may be 4, 6, or 8.

I don't put a cross into the sections - just tape the bout. Generally I am threading a solid coloured warp, or a random coloured warp, so preserving a strict warp end order isn't a priority for me. It is for others and they have come up with various ways of preserving a cross while beaming sectionally.

More Stash? Moi?

Falling into the category of 'what was she thinking?' - this photo shows in the foreground about 70 pounds of yarn that arrived this morning, along with a few of the boxes of yarn returning from the Fibres West show that still need to be unpacked. Somewhere needs to be found for it all to live until the next show. :}

Now twenty pounds of that yarn will be skeined and sent to Teresa to be dyed for re-sale, and some of the rest is for a commission, but still! Where it will all go remains to be seen.

Add into that the fact that my Basic Weaving students will begin coming next Monday to wind warps, and I confess to a little panic along with low energy and no particular desire to actually attack the unpacking.

However I continue to think a great deal about the shape of my time and how I want to spend it and ultimately feel that while I do still want to weave, I also need to deal with the over abundance of inventory.

To that end I have opened an Art Fire store, and begun by listing one lonely tea towel. As I get myself organized over the next few days I expect to add more stuff. I've got lots of tea towels and scarves. I haven't researched enough to find out if I can sell yarn on Art Fire.

One of the advantages of Art Fire is that they don't charge listing fees, just a flat fee per month. Payment can be by Paypal and since I already have a Paypal account set up, that was easy enough.

While I have the tea towel listed on Art Fire for sale on my website, my website is really much more about education and my workshop/seminars and the books that I sell.

I've had my website since the internet was mostly about education, not selling, so I've sort of kept that approach in terms of format. I would likely have to work a lot harder to turn my website into a 'store' than I really want to, so thought I'd try Art Fire.

Well, we will see how it goes!

http://LauraFry.artfire.com