A Day in the Life of Looms 2015

Here we are at the beginning of 2015.  During the first 6 months of 2014, my looms were idle but after a month long trip to England, Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Russia, Finland and Sweden I was inspired to get back to my weaving.  So currently all my looms are in some state of activity.  Two are awaiting new warps to be tied on to the existing warp, one is ready for the warp to be tied to the front beam, my table looms gets an inch woven now and then and a little 8-shaft floor loom that I am borrowing from a friend needs to have a bunch of threading errors corrected.  So here they are!

 Norwood 4 shaft (above) waiting for new warp, which is already to go, to be tied on.  The 8 shaft Fireside below is waiting for another waffle weave warp to be tied on to the current warp.

 My LeClerc Fanny counterbalance has a small blanket warp ready to be tied to the front.

 The little guy below (8-shaft Baby Macomber) has massive threading errors -- not sure how I did it but I was consistent so there is the same error over and over!

 This warp has been on my table loom a couple of years...I occasionally pass by and weave and inch.

And that's it!  HAPPY NEW YEAR!

This tradition of posting the state of our looms was started a few years ago by Meg in New Zealand. Check out the state of other looms here with a visit to Meg's blog: "Unravelling".

Dish Towel Samples: Part 1

I see that is has been two years since I posted anything...I've been weaving and knitting during that time but doing a whole lot of other stuff too!

My weaving guild has a study group this year that is doing a dish towel exchange.  I joined mainly because I wanted to get a cool dish towel  and because I already had a finger tip towel warp threaded through the reed (but not the heddles) on my big loom – it’s been sitting there for about a year.  Sometimes life’s events just get in the way of threading heddles.

The warp is 8/2 cotton in a mix of green shades.  I had to add more warp threads to each side to get it to a dish towel width but that was easy to do. But I used up about all the greens that I had.

Undecided about what colors to use in the weft, I asked on Ravelry’s Warped Weavers Marketplace forum for small samples of greens and purples…7 weavers were kind enough to send me more than 20 different shades of 8/2 with just one duplicate.  They also sent some other colors in different weights.  I really appreciated this as it will let me decide what color combinations work best before investing in spools of cotton.

Today I transferred all the samples to bobbins, closed my eyes and picked 7 bobbins for my first sample, numbering the bobbins as I pulled them from the basket.  To get the weft color order, I used a permutation generator for 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 which gave me thousands of permutations.  I picked 15 permutations  at random from the list.  Then using an Excel spreadsheet I matched the permutations to part of the Fibonacci sequence of 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,13,8,5,3,2,1.

And that’s as far as I got today.  Still threading heddles!  I hope to finish and tie on this week.  My first sample will be in a waffle weave.  Below are the 8/2 cotton samples my Ravelry friends shared with me.

Finger Tip Towels

Here are some bathroom finger tip towels that I wove in a bumberet structure with a random warp.  The stripe effect is from the bumberet.  Except for the reddish/pink/blue towel in the middle, these are from the same warp with different weft colors.

The colors I used (8/2 cotton) are based on this Hawaiian watercolor -- also in my bathroom.

Warp Rep Weaving Class...

Last weekend I took a 3-day class from Rosalie Neilson on weaving warp rep on an 8-harness table loom.  Today I wove off the last little bit of the warp and my sampler is done!  Doing this type of weaving on my baby table loom was a little challenging since I can't beat the weft into place very hard.  Ralph got some steel rods to insert in the handle of the reed which did help.  Next time I do warp rep weaving, it's going to be on my big floor loom and I can really wack the weft threads into place.  And now for some photos...

  

A Day in the Life of Looms 2012

The Day in the Life of Looms is something started by Meg in New Zealand.  Each New Year's Day weavers post what is on their looms. 

LeClerc Fanny is ready for a new scarf warp to get tie-on. 

Zooey the Fireside loom has a warp using leftover knitting yarns.  About 30 inches done.

Cherry Pie, the Norwood Loom, has a small scarve on it.  About 8 inches done.

A doubleweave project on my table loom -- all the action is on the other side of the warp.  However, it isn't turning out the way I expected so I am going to do a different double weave with the rest of the warp.

The start of a project on my Navajo loom...but it has been at this level for 6 months!

 HAPPY NEW YEAR!

P2P2: The Big Reveal

Here are my P2P2 photos from Esmae, who lives in Australia. 

I did 2 P2P2 projects...the first one I was naturally drawn to by the colors and the blue and white transferware in the photo (I love blue and white china).  I used some hand dyed red boucle from Just Our Yarns and boucle from Weaving Works in Seattle.  I really love how it turned out.

Here's a close up:

But this project was pretty "safe" colorwise.  So I decided to do one more P2P2 project that would move me out of my comfort color zone (and use up some stash cottons that had been gifted to me).  Orange is not a color I like.  Back in my marketing manager days, my team knew if they showed me any creative with orange in it, it was likely not to get approved.  :-)

I divided the photo selected into three components -- using waffle weave on the two ends to imitate the little circles and bumberette in the center, 'cause I just love to weave it.  These are kitchen towels.

Here are the componets:

Here's the close up:



Thanks to Meg for taking the time to organize this challenge and to keep us moving toward our big reveals!  And thanks to Esmae for the wonderful photos.

And now the sewing...

Finished with section 2 and 3 of the P2P2 project this morning.  Left is the middle part (section 2) of the art work.  I used nearly all the orange I had left for the weft and the pattern was Bumberet.   This kitchen towel has odd dimensions because it followed waffle weave towels with have a lot of take up to created the little waffles.  Off the loom it is nearly square.

For the top part of the art work, I used waffle weave again, with lots of orange, yellows and a little blue for the weft.  (Shown on the right).

So here they are before washing -- and remember, as Laura Fry says "the magic is in the water."

This is all I'm going to show of these towels before the "reveal" in Sept.  I'm thinking of doing one more P2P2 color study, if time allows -- or maybe even later in the fall.