Guest Post - Katie

My name is Katie Rivas and I met Laura Fry in January '09 while taking a class she did for my weaving guild in Southern California. I liked Laura off the bat and even though the class was round-robin, I spent way more time asking Laura about a million questions I had stored up regarding weaving.

You see, I live in Lancaster, California which is about an hour northeast of L.A. in the high desert. It's a great area to live in but is isolated when it comes to things like weaving (and shopping and finding good gelati - you get the idea).

I learned to weave while living in the Washington DC area, and then moved back home and was like, "Hey - I'm a weaving lone wolf out here!" There aren't any teachers for about an hour radius from me. So I joined the guild and took Laura's class - and by then my list of questions had grown to several pages!

So meeting Laura was GREAT for me! We also talked about her health issues, my mom's health issues, and other stuff.

So when Laura invited me to come to Canada to visit her and weave, I jumped at the chance. I had been emailing her and had told her my long sob story about my love/hate relationship with rayon chenille. Very long story but basically I felt rayon chenille to be the Darth Vader of the yarn world!!

No matter what techniques I tried to get a consistent, even warp on - I could never accomplish this. One side of the warp would always loosen (or both sides), and my back would hurt just trying to get the thing on the loom. It usually took me about 7-9 hours to do one scarf. So when Laura asked me what I wanted to focus on in my 3 days weaving in her studio, I told her - "Learning your technique for getting a good rayon chenille warp on the loom!!" Talk about a no-brainer for me!

I also wanted to learn more about how to do things faster, since I have very limited time in the week to weave. And I wanted to learn about how to do things in an ergonomically correct way, so I'm not tweaking my back out more.

Well - Laura is AWESOME - is all I have to say!!! She taught me how to warp from Back to Front - which I actually had never done. A little hard to get, since am not used to it - but after weaving 5 rayon chenille scarves in a 2 day period (can you believe that?!) - I truly believe B2F is much better with this particular fiber.

Laura's CDWeaver has all of her B2F steps in it if you have that. I can't express what a BREEZE it is warping in this way! We're talking about 1-2 hours to thread the loom and warp on, compared to about 4 hours before. And the warp goes on like a dream - is evenly tensioned and very effortless to weave on.

Laura wanted her rayon chenille stash used up some - twist my arm - so I did 3 different scarf designs. After the last one was done today I was pretty wiped out - am not as tough as Laura - you should feel how strong her forearms are!

Doug and Laura have been WONDERFUL hosts to me the past few days. They are the most generous people with their time, and I got a good look around Prince George - very green with TALL trees. If you're ever here, Connaught Restaurant serves the best salisbury steak dinner I've ever had. Wish I could stay longer, but leave tomorrow for 105 degree heat.

I did purchase a Laura Fry Weaving Studio t-shirt that I've already worn. When someone asked me who I was going to visit in Canada, I said, "You know Yoda from Star Wars? Well, this is the Yoda of the Weaving World" - and she really is :)

Bamboo Rain

Shawl #2

In between helping Katie get started I did get the AVL dressed with the Bamboo Rain yarn. It's weaving up co-operatively and looking quite nice on the loom.

The bright pink has been somewhat subdued by the paler purple being used for weft on this shawl. The first shawl I used pink weft and it's pretty bright. But with winter coming soon, bright isn't necessarily a bad thing. :}

I'm going way out on a personal creative limb for the next shawl. I have some dark turquoise dyed and will get over my trepidation and go ahead and weave the next shawl using that for weft. The bobbins are already wound, so I'm committed!

This afternoon, though, is lace. Since my pillow is bare I'll probably just go with pillow, bobbins and some yarn and try to find another bookmark pricking to do. My goal is to have some bookmarks to include in with Christmas cards this year. So far I've made a half dozen but I've also given some away so there is a ways to go before I can meet that goal.

Katie dressed the loom this morning, pretty much by herself. A big step for her as she's not done back to front beaming before and was finding it all a bit overwhelming. However, she has just about finished sleying and it isn't even lunch time yet. :)

On Friday I dressed the loom while she video taped - she is a visual learned and wanted a visual record for reference. Part of that video will be loaded onto my website (it was too large to post on blogspot). Watch for it next week sometime. It will be on the Education page if I remember correctly.

I've offered to let her do a guest post here, so we'll see if she has time.

Currently reading A Vein of Deceit by Susanna Gregory

Silk Yarn

50 skeins of silk dyed today

The dyeing went quite well. I got four dyepots done (two colours per skein) and some of the colours are unusual but attractive, I think.

The red/green at the bottom will look terrific with a dark teal weft - it will be hard to put these skeins up for sale!

The blue/purple above the red/green also looks great in real life. The light purple is not solid but shades from a pale almost pink to a lavender.

I'm really happy with the turquoise/blue. The red/blue isn't my personal taste, but looks pretty good for 'spring' type people. The red in these skeins is more of a coral colour.

These are 50 gram skeins. In future if I import more yarn I'll get it done in 100 gram skeins, so I'll sell this yarn two skeins at a time. That should give enough for a scarf warp at 30 epi.

It should show up on my Art Fire store in a few days as it will take a couple days to dry.

Currently reading The Lacemakers of Glenmara by Heather Barbieri

On Intentions

Bamboo Rain (merino, bamboo, silk blend)


I've been toying with the idea of making afghans from the Bamboo Rain yarn. But when I dug out all the boxes and looked at my colours, I realized that afghans weren't likely the most marketable textile to make with these bright pinks, corals, blues and purples.

One of the intended afghans was going to be given to my cousin (her DH died a few days ago and I wanted to give her something comfy/cosy) and while the colours would be good for her in terms of a shawl, I really couldn't see them in an afghan.

So there are intentions and then there is reality and today, reality won out.

I don't generally dress the AVL with less than a 10 yard long warp, so I wound enough spools so that I could do a 20 yard long warp with a rich magenta and a dark purple. The warp will be a straight draw over 16 shafts and I'll play around with some twills and different weft colours. All the yarn has been hand dyed and is not level. Industry does level very well. If I want a true solid, I'll buy it.

Since the yarn has bamboo blended into it and the bamboo doesn't take acid dyes very well the final effect is tweedy, anyway.

Doug is doing the final painting of the main bathroom. I'm still keeping fingers crossed it will be done in time to put everything back together before Katie gets here Thursday afternoon. :}

Currently reading Paris Noir

Dye Day

20 skeins of Bamboo Rain and 40 fifty gram skeins of 2/20 silk

I bought this drying rack a couple of weeks ago, knowing I needed to do a lot of dyeing. Having gotten fed up with the two dinky racks I had and which were falling apart, it seemed time to buy something else. It was more expensive than I'd hoped, but after setting it up last night I realized that it was much bigger and studier than the one I'd originally seen and had gone to buy - until I spotted this one.


The silk skeins are tied too tightly, so there are some issues with resisting the dye on some of the skeins. However, it will be a lot faster to simply re-tie the skeins than buy the yarn on cones and skein the yarn myself. So now I have another tv watching job - re-tieing silk skeins and cutting off the too tight tie. One per skein. Sigh.

Fortunately the new tv season is starting soon, so at least there will be (one hopes!) new episodes to watch. Speaking of which, I've sort of gotten hooked by Defying Gravity. And I've gotten hooked on So You Think You Can Dance Canada, too. :) I watched the finals last year because a dancer from my town made the final 20, and then Sharon said she enjoyed So You Think You Can Dance. So we watched the first couple of episodes while she was here and I've continued watching..........

Given the areas of resist on some of the skeins, I toyed with the idea of doing shadow weave with one white end and one dyed. This idea is in keeping with the realization that I don't have to only do the fastest techniques possible, but can invest a little more time in more complex/time consuming approaches to weaving. And shadow weave has intrigued me for a long time - I've just never had the time to really work with it and weave with two shuttles making textiles for sale. :)

The Bamboo Rain is a merino/bamboo/silk blend. The bamboo doesn't take the acid dyes the way the protein fibres do, so the result is a kind of tweedy effect. The plan is to make afghans with it. The yarn feels wonderful, and throws should feel scrumptious. But first I have to finish dyeing the yarn.

Equipment Failure

I admit it - I expect my equipment to perform under what some would label 'adverse conditions'.

So it was with the warping valet at the AVL last night.

Now the bar mounted in the ceiling was not originally intended to support a lot of weight. It was originally intended to get repair ends up off the floor. As such, the bar was mounted inside the footprint of the loom.

What this meant was that the water jugs would jam up against the tension box rail as the warp was being beamed. And last night they jammed up against the rail one too many times and just yards away from finishing the warp, one of the support brackets pulled out of the ceiling and dumped the bar, lease sticks/reed/warp into my arms. Since I'm taking Plavix, I bruise like a peach (as Doug puts it) so I have the bruises to show for it. :}

Now that Doug has to repair the valet anyway, the plan is for him to move it a foot towards the back of the loom so that in future the water jugs will not jam against the tension box rail. He'll also install much sturdier screws into the ceiling to help support the weight of the water jugs (and the tugging I give the warp to straighten it) and in the end, that should make beaming the painted warps much easier, ergo faster.

Sometimes there are little things that need to be fixed but they haven't been a big enough pain for me to ask Doug to find time in his schedule to actually do the fix. And sometimes things break so that I have to deal with equipment down time and let him get to it.

Fortunately in this case I can finish beaming the warp without the valet - albeit more slowly - and continue to weave, but I really need the valet in order to beam the last painted shawl warp.

For today, however, I'm off to the dyepots with the 2/20 silk. I'm hoping to get the skeins up on my Art Fire store soon.

More Musings

Some of the towels on the towel rack after pressing

Pressing is the sort of job that is necessary, so I do it. It's not something that I love to do, so I play upbeat music (really loudly!) and try not to do more than 90 minutes to two hours at any given time. I find it kind of mind numbing so quite often I use the time while pressing to think things through.

I don't think quickly when I'm trying to unravel a Giordian knot. I'm more of a "look at every facet of the thing" kind of thinker when I'm trying to figure something out, especially something like "where do I go from here" or "what do I really truly want to do with the rest of my life" type of question.

So some of the themes that ran through my head this morning were - how much inventory is too much? What sorts of textiles do I want to make? How much time can I invest in making textiles, now that I don't actually have to scramble to make more (I've got enough inventory for several years worth of craft fairs, after all.)

If I can afford to invest more time in making textiles, can I look at doing things that are, by their very nature, more time consuming (complex threading structures, two shuttles, two warps)? These are techniques that I have pretty much avoided unless I was making something special for myself - not for production.

The question "do I want to weave" remains a very firm yes, so now all I need to do is figure out what sort of textiles I want to make and then chart a new course.

No conclusions yet, but opening the door to new possibilities is the first step. :)