Thanksgiving is over and I’m swamped with things I want to be doing. What is actually being worked on is a wide variety of projects. On the lace pillow there is an ornament for a gift exchange at the December Guild Meeting. (Don’t tell anyone it’s a secret.) The baby wolf is getting dressed in tencel with a warp for new batch of leno scarves. This group is a beautiful green instead of the white ones I have done in the past. The ‘little’ AVL is waiting for a new warp to be put on this weekend. I just finished 50 yards of cotton huck lace towels and I’ll wind on another 50 yards for more. If I had more cotton I would do a longer warp this time around. I also have to hem a few towels that just came off the loom. They are pinned and just need to be stitched up on the sewing machine. The ‘Big’ AVL is sitting idle, waiting for me to make up my mind what I want to do next. There are several things I need to weave to supply the website with more variety, but I’m not feeling particulary inspired to start any of them. And as if that is not enough, I have been spinning some beautifuly dyed wool on the Ashford Traditional wheel. I bet if I look around I would find three of four more things to list. I love to have projects to work on and at the moment I have my hands full.
For the last four years I have been working on my Certificate of Excellence in Weaving Level 1. This is an educational program through the Handweavers Guild of America. I haven’t really posted much about it since the judging is kept very anonymous. (This is also one of the reasons my posts have been very sparse as I finished the requirements to meet the deadline.)
The first of October I mailed a box containing 40 woven samples and several pages of written material to the Guild in Seattle WA that was hosting the judging for 2006. From then it has been a waiting game till time for the judging and waiting to hear the results. Another member of my Guild submitted her Level 2 work.
Today my waiting came to an end. Read the rest of this entry »
Have you ever put off warping your loom when you are warping front to back because you don’t have time to sley the warp through the reed in one sitting? I have a very easy solution for the next time you find yourself in that situation. All you need are a couple of dowels (or pencils, knitting needles, shish kebab skewers or anything long and narrow) and a couple pieces of yarn.
Take your warp and place one of your sticks in each side of the cross. Lay the warp on the breast beam of your loom with the sticks running parallel to the beam. Read the rest of this entry »
HI–
Bet everyone one is wondering if I’m coming back. Yes, soon I will be posting again. I’ve just been sidetracked with the preperation of sending my daughter off to college. She flies out in the morning and on Tuesday I’ll follow in the truck with all the stuff for her dorm room.
After I get home I get to settle into the empty nest and then I’ll be able to work on posts and other projects without the interruptions. So bear with me, I will be posting soon….
July 8th was our first official dyeing day. Silly me, I forgot my camera. The day was a trial run of what we will be doing on a regular basis. We will take three colors and mix them in different percentages to get an array of related colors. The primary colors we started with did not give us the results we were hoping for. Seems the blue was too strong and it really overpowered the yellow and to a lesser extent the red. So the 36 colors we ended up with were a nice bunch of dark blues, browns and some reds. All very dark. So much depends on the dyes you start with, the fiber you are dyeing and the percentages used.
Next month we will try the same formulas again with new primary colors to start with and a lighter depth of shade. I am looking forward to getting a library of color recipes to start dyeing my own tencel yarn for weaving projects. I’ll also remember my camera and add a picture of the first dye results to this later.
I always seem to be trying to finish several projects at once. Or should I say, ignoring several projects while I am working on one that has caught my attention at the moment. I need to be doing several things and right now the one that is keeping my attention most of the time is weaving off the workshop warp from the baby wolf.
A few months ago, we had Bonnie Inouye come to town for the Guilds annual weaving workshop. The topic was “Advance” and what a wonderful time we had. I still had warp on the loom when I came home and decided to weave a couple of simple cotton scarves. This is the second one I am working on and if I would just get motivated, it could be taken off the loom today.
I think I will add some beads to the fringe to dress these up a bit.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’m so excited. I dug the lace pillow out from under the table it has been hiding under for the last year and a half. I decided I wanted to make up a supply of bookmarks that I could give as gifts. It is nice to have a supply because you never know when you might need one.
The pillow was so dusty, I didn’t cover it properly when I stopped using it and I still need to work on removing more dust. I decided not to wait and found a simple bookmark pattern I had done once before.
Leno Weave is the general term applied to a weave structure in which some of the warp threads do not lie parallel with, but are twisted partly around other threads. It is also know as gauze weave. In the process of weaving a leno fabric, the warp threads are pulled out of their normal straight line in the cloth. They are pulled off the either the right or left of the warp thread next to them and held in that position by the weft thread.
The method of interlacing results in several features peculiar to leno weaves. Leno weaves have an open work effect since the threads to not lie parallel to each other in the fabric. A leno or gauze fabric will have an open or lace-like appearance, be light in weight and yet posses sufficient strength to wear well. Leno fabrics have a zigzag effect, due to the twisting of the ends. This effect is more noticeable in fancy gauze weaves that in plain gauze.
Today I finished warping my 24 harness AVL loom. It seemed to take me forever to get this warp on the loom. I kept putting off working on it since I was a bit nervous about what I was doing. The draft came from a weaving book published in 1740 in Germany. The book is “Nutzliches Weber-Bild-Buch (Weaver’s Tie-up Book)” and was written by Johann Michael Frickinger. I have a translation of the book and have found some very nice weaving drafts in it and other old resources.
The fabric is a plain weave background with a supplemental weft pattern. Not too fancy or complicated, just different than what I have done before. Read the rest of this entry »
Soon after I started weaving I discovered a very nice weave structure known as ‘Huck Lace’. It is primarily a plain-weave cloth with either warp floats, weft floats, or a combination of both. Floats are made when the warp or weft is not woven in the plain-weave fashion, but lays on top or under the cloth for 3 or 5 threads depending on the type of huck lace you are weaving. In the diagram below shows the areas of ‘plain-weave’ and areas where either the warp and weft threads are not caught in the plain-weave structure. This is a five-thread huck meaning the warp or weft will skip over or under five threads before it will return into the plain-weave structure. In the areas where there are blocks of warp floats next to blocks of weft floats, the fabric is very loosly woven and there will be open lacy places in the cloth. This type of lacy area is much less obvious in three-thread huck patterns.
Huck lace fabric can be used for several things. I have woven curtains for my kitchen and my daughter’s room. I have a red table cloth woven in huck lace that gets used during the holidays. A special project happened when one of my step-daughters had her first child. I wove huck lace fabric and her mother made a christening gown for the baby. Soon I would like to weave baby blankets using cotton and the huck lace patterns I have been developing.
I also weave kitchen towels from 8/2 cotton using huck lace patterns. The towels are very absorbent and wash up nicely. I get a kick out of watching them slurp up the water left on the ‘top’ of things after the dishwasher has stopped. Take a look at the huck lace towels I have on my web site.
