Harrisville loom

Calling My Name

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131005 Maltese Cross

 

Weaving has become an obsession with me.  I warped my loom in Rowe last week.  I was proud to say after 430 ends only one was threaded wrong and I was able to fix it with a string heddle.  I love having an instructor who knows the craft so well she can teach you the tricks that get you out of a jam.

I wound an extra long warp so I could weave three of these throws in succession with different colors.  This is the traditional blue and white.  The next will be with a variegated green/brown combination and the last will be anyone’s guess.  Christmas is coming.  I figure I can have these off of the loom by Halloween and move on to other gifts.

Although I weave during the week at the studio in Brimfield we are weaving cotton.  Cotton is what I started with when I began learning to weave, it gives a beautiful definition to the structure.  For that reason I like weaving with it, especially when I am doing something new.  My last project for the class this past spring was the red and white wool throw and it was revelation.

I love the feel of wool.  I love the way it feels going through my hands. Winding the warp seemed effortless, it had a calming effect. That’s really the reason I love having something in wool always going somewhere.  It’s not just the counting and meditative repetition of the act of weaving, it is also the feel.  This throw is warped in Jaggerspun Maineline 2/8 yarn, it is soft and wonderful to work with.  The weft on this section is Bartlettyarn Maine Wool  which is a beautiful worsted weight yarn.

The other aspect of weaving with wool is the smell – I’m thinking it’s only fiber people that will understand that statement.  It smells like it came from an animal, it’s wonderful.  Don’t get me wrong – it doesn’t smell while you’re weaving but you can take a hank of wool and breathe it in, ahhhh.  It’s in the finishing that some of these remaining oils are washed out and that’s what makes the fiber “bloom”.  There are so many times when I look at the weaving on the loom and think it doesn’t look as good as it should.  Once it is washed and dried a miracle happens and it often looks better than anticipated.

That’s the thing I’ve found with weaving – every aspect of it is equally important to the finished project.  People tell me they love to weave but hate to warp.  To me that is the most important part, otherwise nothing else works.  It is time consuming, yes, but I take it as a challenge.  I try to beam my warp so the tension is even, thread my heddles so there are no mistakes, slay the reed without skipping a space all the first time.  It becomes tedious when I don’t pay attention and have to take it all out and start over.  Throwing the shuttle is the easy part most of the time.  Finishing can be tedious as well but when you do it it’s magic.  What looked just okay on the loom becomes a masterpiece once it is washed.  All aspects of the process come together.

Weaving Wednesday – Round Robin 3

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131008 Advancing TwillI had to travel to Boston for most of the day before weaving class.  The bonus was I was there an hour and a half early so I picked a more complicated twill to work on.  This is an advancing twill done in 10/2 mercerized cotton.  I had been thinking about this one for the past week looking forward to weaving it and the moment when I finished most of the first repeat.  I love that part.  In your head you know what the draft is going to do but when you actually see it in fiber is magical for me.

I wound my bobbin, made myself comfortable in front of the loom and started to weave.  It didn’t look like I had pictured it.  The pattern wasn’t as defined as I thought it would be.  I questioned my use of the white weft.  I’d woven about 6 inches when my instructor entered the room.  I stopped to visit (this pattern required some serious concentration).  I told her I was having trouble keeping track of what I was doing – I honestly just thought my head was not in the game.  She went to reprint the treddling pattern so it wasn’t so small – I walked away from the loom for a few minutes.

When I sat back down I realized that I had been treddling the pattern as if it didn’t have tie-ups – damn it!  I had tortured myself for an hour in my excitement.  Soooooo, I put in a line and started over . . . at the same time I would have started if I had just come to class.

This pattern is quite beautiful when done correctly but I have to say I had to pay attention throughout the whole thing.  It wasn’t one of those patterns that you get into the groove once you’ve been through a few repeats.  I struggled with it the whole time.  I was sure I would have to come back to finish weaving my 27 inches but at 8:50 I wove the close and was done.  It was a relief really.

I always really look forward to weaving class as a meditative time.  This was different, probably due to the error in the beginning.  I can be compulsive in perfection, a serious curse.  Once the project went off the rails I had a difficult time refocusing.  I struggled through it and walked away thinking I will never weave that pattern again.  I’m still thinking that today so my grand plans for that draft will probably never come to fruition.  Of course I have grand plans for every single draft I see.  That’s been the real beauty of this round robin.  I get to weave what are really great samples, something different every week without the work of warping the loom.  It allows us all to really get a feel for the structure of the twills and what can be done to change them up within each project.  Even though the first 6 inches were woven in a crazy wrong way it still looked pretty cool, the pattern just wasn’t as defined.  Maybe this time a wrong was kind of right.

 

Weaving Wednesday 16 – Round Robin 2

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131001 Undulating TwillThe towel I wove this week is an undulating twill in 8/2 unmercerized cotton.   This is done on a four shaft loom and weaves up pretty fast.

Another new experience for me was using tie-ups for the harnesses.  I never have – I have a four harness loom with four peddles.  I use both feet pretty much all of the time I’m weaving.  I must confess that as I wove last night I felt like I was cheating somehow.  It was so much easier.  Hmmmm, makes me think about modifications to my loom.  Actually, it makes me think I want yet another loom, smaller, 8 shafts, more possibilities.

This is a disease, truly.

 

Weaving Wednesday 15 – Round Robin Week 1

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130917 Weaving (1)I had lost track of time and realized (yesterday) that I was a week off in getting my loom ready for the class round robin. I left work early to get the loom slayed and tied off.  I have to admit I always love the way the loom looks at this point.

It is warped in a 5/2 unmercerized cotton. Once that was done I had 3 hours to weave my 27″ before I could move on to the next loom. The pattern is called “Crooked Check” from Margaret B. Windeknecht’s Color and Weave II.  It’s a straight twill and was fun and quick to weave.

130917 Weaving (4)I kept getting a little confused using two shuttles in a different way than I do with the overshot. With overshot you use two different shuttles for every row you weave, with this it was 4 rows of white, 4 rows of blue. That may be the inherent problem in weaving two totally different projects at the same time.  About two hours into it I was getting the hang of it.

130917 Weaving (3)I did my 27 inches in the alloted time and was very pleased with the results.  This pattern is so cute, it looks like little snail trails.

The round robin project is perfect for me.  I love hand-woven towels, they get better each time you wash them but I find them insufferably boring to weave.  I was a little tired of this by the time I finished it.  I would have been able to weave a second one but by then I would have been done with it.  Next week I will pick another loom, another project without having to warp it.  Sweet!

 

 

 

Weaving Wednesday 14

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130910 Blue and White warpI went to the studio last night to thread the warp on one of the towels we are doing for our round robin.  This warp is cotton in alternating colors – 4 threads blue, 4 threads white.  Pam had wound the warp and beamed it (she did on all 11 looms, crazy woman).  The threading, slaying and tie off was up to each student participating.  She asked me to do this one.

The  warp was wound with the blue and white threads together so when I was threading I has to separate it into groups of 4 as I went along.  I posted a pic to FB as I was doing it because the beginning seemed like a tangled mess to me and it was difficult for me to get a rhythm going that would carry me through.

Just as an FYI this is the sort of thing that makes me just a little crazy.  I love order and symmetry and this seemed anything but.  The threads would tangle together – blue and white as I threaded them through the heddles.  I threaded them in groups of eight.  When the blues were threaded the whites were tangled but once I finished the whites it seemed to straighten out.  For a person with an OCD in order and symmetry this was pretty stressful.

It gets better.  Being the novice that I am I counted the heddles on the first shaft to make sure there were enough before I started – I figured I was good to go.  You guessed it – I was short on two shafts at the end.  DAMN IT!  I had to move heddles from one side of the harness to the other which was a struggle (that, my friends, is a wild understatement).

I had been looking forward to a quiet evening meditation with fiber.  I got a hot, frustrating 3 hours.

There are lessons learned here.  The most obvious to me is count your heddles – all of them, don’t assume anything.  The next is that I can fix my mistakes for the most part.  The most important one for me is learning to work through that OCD.  Yeah, yeah, it made me short of breath with an extreme headache but once it was done I relaxed and thought “that wasn’t THAT bad”.

Years ago, in my quilting days, I had a lot of trouble letting go of control of my projects.  The colors had to be just so, set in the right spots, the seams perfect, the points exact.  I met a woman whose work I greatly admired.  I worked with her on the CT Quilt Search Project for over 3 years where I saw scrap quilts that were stunning.  I couldn’t figure out how they decided what went where to have these textiles of scraps come together with such beauty.  We talked about it at one point and she said “Put all of your light pieces in one bag and your darks in another – as you’re sewing them together just pick random ones alternating from one bag to another”.  That was way, way out of my comfort zone.  I had no control but I forced myself to do it.

I ended up with a beautiful top, exactly what I was looking for made in probably half of the time because I forced myself to let go.   I need to remember those lessons every time I do something that I’m frantically trying to maintain control of – you just have to let it go.

 

And Now for Something Completely Different

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130824 Warp

 

Last week my weaving instructor put out an APB to her students that she needed help winding warps for the upcoming session.  Up until now most of the students were at different points in their weaving journey.  Each of us would work on samplers or projects that would teach us something in particular about weave structure and be something we wanted to make.  This session we are doing a round-robin of twills.  I can’t tell you how excited I am about this.

There will be eleven of us participating.  Pam is in the process of beaming the warps on eleven looms, some 4 shafts, some 8.  Each one of us has to go into the studio before the beginning of the fall session and thread and tie off one loom in the pattern that has been set up for that particular loom.  Once the session starts each we will be weaving a different twill pattern on a different loom each week.  By the end we will each have eleven different dish towels.  How fun is that?

I picked up a cone of 8/2 cotton at the studio and brought in home to wind.  I was a few yards short so I just brought my board to Brimfield to finish it.  Pam was beaming the warps when I got there.  She wanted the tension to be the same on all of the looms.  What a project (for her).  I will be going over sometime before the 17th of September to thread and will be waiting anxiously to get started.

Meanwhile I have four weaving days to finish that scarf for the Big E.  I’m almost there but am at a point where I’m wondering what was I thinking?

Weaving Wednesday 13

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130812 Weaving (2)

I managed to warp the loom this past Saturday and wove some on Sunday and a little on Monday.  After splitting wood I was less than enthusiastic, I really just wanted a nap.

This has a tencel warp with a verigated wool sock yarn for the weft.  It is really quite lovely – the tabby warp in tencel looks like little glass beads when the light hits it just right.  Speaking of warping and weaving I made another mistake threading – can you see it?  I didn’t until I’d woven about 6″ – and that was my point of no return.  It is what it is.  I don’t find it glaring and it wouldn’t stop me from wearing it.  Another exercise.

I have 10 days to finish this.  Barring any unforeseen crisis I shouldn’t have a problem doing it.  It’s nice to be weaving a more complicated draft.  I really love doing overshot.  It reminds me of knitting an Aran pattern in a way.  You have to knit many rows before the pattern appears, then it keeps you interested.  Once you’ve repeated the pattern 5 or 6 times the piece you’re knitting is done.  This does much the same thing, by the time you are in a rhythm with the treddling the piece is nearing completion.

When this is done I will probably weave another wool overshot throw, then I have a striped twill throw in mind.  Christmas is coming.

130812 Weaving (1)

 

Oh the Possibilities

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130720 Halcyon BoxMy box of yarn from Halcyon is waiting for me to make some sort of decision.

Off of the Loom

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Sunday I finished weaving the throw in the morning, tied the fringe and washed it to full the wool.  I threw it over the empty loom to dry.  When I arrived in Rowe yesterday I immediately took it out to the garden to take a couple of photographs.  I’m only sorry you can’t feel how lovely this is.  There is nothing like wool.  I love the color play and it truly was a great experiment in color.

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I learned a lot in this project – there were problems I had to figure out myself.  Those are the solutions you remember, they may not have been the best solutions but the finished project worked and I will do things differently the next time I warp.

It’s getting to the point now where I have so many things I want to weave I don’t know what to do next.  I think I will do another overshot project, maybe with mixed fibers this time.  Who knows, maybe I’ll be learning about a whole new set of problems.