Sunday Progress

20 yard warp - done!



yarns for next warp of tea towels

Hallelujah - the grey warp is woven! The next warp is going to be a lot more colourful. (Ignore the blue cone - it's just hangin' around.)

I'm looking forward to finally using up the last of the fine linen, but am not sure another 20 yard warp will do it. So I'm looking around to see if I have enough of the 2/16 cotton to do one more warp of maybe 10 yards. I was positive I had a box of partial tubes of black 2/16 but can't locate it so we'll see what I come up with. :}

This afternoon I went and made lace for a couple of hours. Got half a bookmark done while catching up with my friends and sneaking peeks at the hockey game. The Olympics are now over. Some truly amazing athletes and stories.

After finishing the tea towels I went to the small loom and finished off scarf number one and started number 2. Click on the photo for a close up.

This section of the warp has a lot of bright spring, almost lime, green and rather than mute it with chocolate I switched to kelp - a very dark green with a yellow cast. I think it's turning out quite well. The green mutes the rose but there isn't nearly as much rose in this section so I think it will be just fine.

Tomorrow I'll beam the warp onto the AVL. The threading will be something fairly simple so that it will go quickly. I'm feeling like I can see the light at the end of the tunnel! I've got a chenille warp in Diversified Plain Weave planned for the AVL for scarves, but just really wanted to get the linen used up first.

Painted Warp

painted warp - rose and greens


same painted warp - blue/greens with more rose coming up


Back to working on the multitude of painted warps. It was hard to get a picture of the colours as they shifted through the warp.

This warp is fairly subdued with browned roses, deep blues and greens. I'm using chocolate for weft. The dark brown has a reddish cast so I figured it would highlight the slightly brownish roses. Click on the photos for close ups.

I don't do my own fibre reactive dyeing but get Teresa Ruch to do it.

http://teresaruchdesigns.com

Teresa will have a booth at Convergence. She also dyed the HGA special colourway for Convergence this year.

It's been great working with another creative person. We both have similar tastes in colour palettes so I pretty much give her carte blanche to do what she wants. About all I'll say is "I need some nice reds" or blues or whatever, send her the warps and then dive in when they come back all pretty. :)

The warp is a strand of soy protein fibre (sorry - just cannot call it 'silk') and one of bamboo. The two yarns take the dyes very differently. The most effective weave structure is plain weave, I think. I did a bunch with fancy twills, but the weave structure and the contrast between the two yarns and their different colours meant a textile that was overly textural to my eye. So it's back to basics. :)

I've got 3 boxes of warps waiting to be woven, so that's next on my priority list for the small loom.

After rummaging in the store room I cobbled together enough yarn for another tea towel warp. This extremely fine linen goes a long way! I may have to put one more warp onto the loom after the next one to use it up.

That's one of the benefits of working with fine threads though. They don't cost substantially more than fat threads, and you get hours of play time out of them.

It's one of the biggest reasons why I urge people to become more efficient. The more efficient you are, the less fine threads will intimidate. If you can thread 300 ends in an hour, there will be less resistance to using a thread that requires 30+ epi. :)

Inching Along

Made pretty significant progress today in spite of some retail therapy (shopping for a new vacuum cleaner) and continuing issues with pain. :(

Got a better picture of the cloth tonight. It still looks better in photos than it does in real life - go figure! Maybe I should get over being disappointed and withhold judgement until after it's wet finished. It's the advice I'm always giving others, after all. :}

Tally for the day - 6 towels, 6 yards. I'm over the one-third mark and should be able to finish this warp off by Monday at the latest.

I think I've got enough yarn for one more warp. It will take that to finish off the pesky linen. Haven't rummaged through the buckets yet, but if I remember correctly there might just be sufficient for another 20 yard warp. That should put a period to using the 12 and 24 nm linen doubled.

Doug works opening shift tomorrow - if I can drag myself out of bed at 5:15 I should be able to get an early start. I'd like to weave at least 6 more towels Saturday. Sunday it's lace and I'm looking forward to getting together with the other gals to fwip (technical term) a few bobbins.

The other thing that happened today is that I was invited to be Featured Artist at the CAC Studio Shoppe for April and May. The official opening reception will be April 8. We get back from Fibres West on Monday March 29 and I have to deliver inventory to them before March 30. It looks like March is going to be a bit crazy with appointments and deadlines.

Oh yes - deadlines are my friend. Nearly forgot!

Currently reading Vanished by Kat Richardson

When You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling

option #1


beginning of option #2

The AVL had been sitting nekkid for far too long and for that reason and a bunch of others, I needed to slam a warp onto it pronto.

My first inclination was to have a predominantly black warp with the blue and plum colour accents. Unfortunately I didn't have enough black 2/16 on hand to wind a warp. :( One of the disadvantages when you are trying to use up stash and not buy more yarn - you do start to run low - eventually.

What I did have enough of was a blued grey and since both the blue and plum had blue in them decided that should work just dandy.

Well, I don't know if it's the old 'grey muddies' at work, or my grey mood, but I wasn't really liking the warp as it was being wound on. I think it's also the big contrast in values at work. The black would have been much closer in value to the other colours than the pale blue/grey.

And then I'm crossing the whole thing with natural linen - a grey-beige.

So what happens when you're sitting at the loom with a 20 yard warp and your little heart is not going pit-a-pat?

Well, the first thing you do is get up off the stool (in my case) and look at the cloth from different angles and distances. Sometimes what doesn't look great sitting at the loom takes on more interest when you see it from a different perspective.

(I apologize for the photos - it was really hard to get a picture of this fabric on the loom!)

So I got up and walked around the loom and decided that, while my heart did not have to be coaxed to be still, it would do. Not my best work, by any means.

But since I've worked with this yarn combination before, I know that the resulting fabric will work well as tea towels and just because the colours don't make my heart sing doesn't mean that the project is a disaster.

This isn't the first time I've woven fabric that didn't make my heart sing. Believe me, when you're a production weaver weaving for someone else, you quite often wind up weaving stuff that can be a big ho-hum.

At this point I have to tell my ego to go stand in the corner because it doesn't matter that "I" don't really like the cloth, it's got to be woven off. I have to shut the nag that wants to keep whining "I don't really like this" up and just get on with the weaving. So I focus on getting into the zone - being present with the loom and the yarns (regardless of their colours, as boring or mundane as they may be), feeling the physical satisfaction of treadling, throwing the shuttle and beating. Concentrating on the process, not the colour.

After all, the next warp can be much prettier, right?

Value/Hue

Just cut the red scarves off the loom and it's a perfect example of the principle that value is more important than hue.

Each of these scarves was woven with a different weft colour, but all of them were about the same value.

From left to right the weft colours are:
burgundy, kelp, black and chocolate

Not a totally fair comparison of course because none of the scarves have exactly the same colours in the warp, but interesting nonetheless. I think you can see that the black weft scarf has the purest/brightest colours - the rest are a bit softer in appearance.

When I'm weaving a painted warp like this, I try to match the weft colour (hue) to the dominant look of the warp. Therefore the bit that had the most of a dark olive green got the kelp. The bit that had a dark brownish purple got the chocolate.

Having such a lively red on the loom was very happy making. :)

Fibres West

Yesterday the postcards arrived for Fibres West being held in Abbotsford, BC March 26/27.

This is the show I'm getting ready to do, introducing myself for the first time as an Ashford and Ashland Bay dealer.

http://fibreswest.com

There are classes in various textile media and a nice vendor hall.

Started packaging the merino/silk fibre yesterday and hope to finish that off today along with stripping the AVL down for the next tea towel warp, finishing scarf #3 on the Fanny and maybe even weaving #4. But since I also have a massage booked this afternoon, we'll see how that goes.

Also started spinning a sample of the merino silk last night - it's very nice stuff! :D

I've been plagued with muscle spasms in my lower back and groin for the past 10 days. So far it hasn't interfered with actual weaving, but standing for any length of time is - a problem. I'm grateful Doug will be with me at the show so that I don't have to face setting up, standing for two long days and then tearing down again all by myself. Not to mention the 8 hour drive each way.

The Olympics will be long over by the end of March so I'm hoping to see lots of people at the event. Bring something to show and share when you come and say hello. I'd love to see what you're working on.

Fear of Colour

scarf #2

When I began weaving lo, these many years ago, I was interested in weave structure as the primary element of design. I would joke that my favourite colour was white. White on white, to be precise!

I loved the look of damask, but of course without a drawloom that was a bit of a stretch. Fancy twills, however, were possible and I thoroughly enjoyed playing with them. Still do, in fact.

My forays into using colour were tentative and conservative. I did not feel confident that I could put colours together in a pleasing way. Therefore I pretty much confined myself to things that I knew were 'safe'.

Eventually I decided that I wanted to learn more about colour and one of the things I did was enroll in a workshop with Jack Lenor Larsen. The topic was Irridescence, but really it was just about colour. Colour in all it's glorious combinations.

What really broke through my mental attitude, however, was the fact that I consistently got positive critiques from JLL. Since he didn't really know who had done which samples pinned to the wall of the building I knew that what he was saying was completely unbiased. I mean, why wouldn't it be? :} But I finally got it through my thick head that I did know something about putting colours together!

Shortly after that I found myself in a position where weaving rayon chenille scarves seemed like a really good idea. And so I started winding 5 meter long warps - sufficient for two scarves. What do you do with rayon chenille, after all, but weave plain weave and use lots of colour?

And so I did. Lots of them. And the more I designed and wove them, the more adventurous and confident I became.

On the spectrum of structure <----> colour/texture, I found myself shifting from structure all the way over into colour. And now I feel that I'm solidly in the middle of that spectrum. That when I design something, both go hand in hand. That I do not consider one without considering the other.

Many people insist that the only thing to do with a painted warp is to weave it in plain weave. Although at the moment I am weaving them in plain weave, it's not an exclusive thing. It has more to do with which loom I'm using, what quality of cloth I want to wind up with and other factors.

So even though a weaver may start out at one end of the spectrum, there is no reason why they can't shift a little ways toward the other.

Currently reading Backstabber by Tim Cockey