More Leafpile Scarf and March Plum Blossoms

Blogging two days running! What am I thinking!

Here's how the warp looks and how the first 7-8 inches look. You can't really see the pattern right now unless you stand off at the side. I've included the draft so that you can see where I'm heading. The red wine colors aren't coming out as much as I had hoped but the texture of the handspun is adding lots of dimension to it. Its looking more like the trees along the VA/NC border than the ones in our yard.

I also photographed the most recent scarf I finished on my table loom. The warp is left over knitting yarns as is the weft...a cashmere merino blend from one of the big name yarn distributors. It is lovely and soft. The photo looks more blue than purple but the weft is a deep purple. I still have quite lot of the purple weft yarn left so I may knit a hat to go along with it.

And finally for everyone who wants to see a little springtime...a photo of our plum tree in bloom and a close up. The temperatures did get into the upper 20s last night so who knows what kind of crop we will have. But if the blossoms weren't harmed lasted night and the Mason bees did their job, we will be having a bumper crop of plums this year. All the neighbors will be happy! I've never seen trees so loaded with blossoms.

Leafpile Scarf

Seems a rather odd time of year to be working on a project with fall colors but that’s what I’m doing. I got this most fabulous skein of handspun hand dyed yarn from Lisa Souza last fall. She calls it “Leafpile” and it’s perfect for a couple of fall color studies I have been thinking about. The first fall color study is a photo from our front yard…our Japanese Maple tree and a white snowball type shrub with it’s dried flowers. The second color study is a photo I took in November of 2008 – we were driving across the North Carolina border into Southwest Virginia when I made DH pull over so I could take photos.

I've been slowly collecting yarns over the winter to use as the warp and two are in the photo with the Leafpile skein. I've also added a dark brown and a gold. Over these I have added a random threading of a deep wine red kid silk/mohair yarn -- to give it a Japanese Maple tree cast...we will see how it turns out. The handspun skein is also part of my "secret stash" so I'll be working on that stash reduction with this project (never mind how much yarn I bought to create the warp).






I'll be doing these color studies on my little table loom. I finished the scarf that's been on my table loom for most of the winter...photos to follow as it is currently drying.

I feel I must apologize to our Mason bees. I've been going out to their little houses and telling them to wake up and get busy in our plum trees. So this weekend they came out in force...but today the weather turned on them. So far today we have had rain, sleet, snow, sun, and sun with snow at the same time. So where ever you little bees are - I'm sorry that you woke up too soon! And I hope you are somewhere warm (just not under our house).

Thank you Donatella! She awarded me a Kreative Blogger Award, and you find her lovely blog here. If you don't follow her blog, you should. She has the most wonderful photos on her blog and her weaving is truely as inspiration.

Here are the rules of the Kreative Blogger Award -- but don't as if you have to comply:
1. Thank the person who gave this to you.
2. Copy the logo and place it in your blog.
3. Link the person who nominated you.
4. Name 7 things about yourself that no one would really know.
5. Nominate seven 'Kreativ Bloggers'
6. Post links to the seven blogs you nominate
7. Leave a comment on each of the blogs letting them know you nominated them.

There are only about 20 people that read my blog. Most of them know me well and know just about everything there is to know about me...so I won't bore you with more details about me.

Here are my nominees -- they were selected mostly because I love the photos on their blogs so some of them are weavers and some aren't.

Twist of Fate
Fensismensi
Victoria Souza
Buy A Thread
Shinning Egg
Hemvävt
David Lebovitz

Busy Here…

I've been silent on the blog but busy all the same. I've used up all the boucle yarn in my stash and I'm trying to resist buying more. Right now I'm putting a warp for a crib blanket on my Fireside loom and facing some challenges with the tension on the front beam. I tried lashing the warp to the front beam but that just didn't work out. I had about 4-5 smiley faces across the warp even after repeatedly making adjustments. So I unwove and went back to my regular shoe string method. The warp is about 36 inches wide, and for some reason I have more problems with the tension on a wide warp than say 25 inches. So not much weaving has been getting done here.

Here are the boucle scarves…already gone out the door and a better photo of the boucle laprug.

Bad Weather = Weaving Time!

Lots of weaving related stuff going on this past month.

First, I created a website to help advertise the weaving and fiber guilds in my local area. If you are in the Pac NW and want to add a link on your blog or website -- go for it. All of these guilds have great program and activities -- and they welcome new members. Or if you know of a PNW guild that would like its own page on the site, just let me know.

Then I went to a free workshop, sponsored by the Seattle Weavers' Guild, on using a warping paddle. It was a great class. The excellent instructor first demostrated her technique and then paired us up to try it out. I pretty much got the hang of it and have done it a couple times since -- with the help of my husband! So far, it works best for me with two people!

Shortly after that I took a 2 day workshop at Weaving Works in Seattle on making chenille scarves. The main take away was (for me) whack the beater like the dickens to really pack in the chenille weft. There were 6 of us in the class. Mostly on the first day we spent time winding warps and warping three looms. Late on Saturday I started my scarf and didn't beat hard enough in the beginning. I went back on Sunday, started visualizing those folks that have made such an economic mess and whacked the heck out of the weft...packing it quite nicely. The women in the class were a great group and we were quickly able to decide on the colors for our warps. Great class!

In between the workshop and the class, I spent a great day visiting with JoAn and helping her get a scarf warp on her JMade loom so that she could get some practice warping prior to the chenille class. JoAn also wove a red scarf at the chenille class and was able to get back to Weaving Works later in the week to do another one.

Winter weather has been loath to depart the PNW, providing lots of weaving time. I've finished a couple of scarves, a mobius (all shown here) and some yardage on my Fireside loom. I don't know what the yardage will be...I had a warping mess on the loom and finally got it sorted out. By then I just wanted the warp off the loom and just wove yardage without a plan in mind. The scarves and mobius were done on Fanny. The green-yellow scarf incorporates some Fizz yarn -- I'm calling it "Dandelions Gone to Seed."

I've also found time to knit a hat, some slippers for felting and unravel a thrift store cashmere sweater so that I could use the yarn as weft in a scarf.

The garden and trees are starting to flower, adding lots of color outside my studio windows. Our Mason bees finally woke up and started hanging out with the plum trees so hopefully we will have lots of plums this year. They were very slow to wake up -- I was afraid I would look out the backdoor and see DH trying to warm and wake them up with the blow dryer!

Right now on my looms I have another double weave going on my table loom -- slowly as I am using a heavier, sticky yarn. Lesson learned -- don't use sticky yarns in double weave! I have a scarf almost warped on Fanny and a few more inches of yardage to weave on the Fireside (aka Zooey). I want to do another chenille scarf soon -- a great way to work through crankiness!

Fibonacci Sequence Scarf

The past couple of weeks I have been playing with message drafts and Fibonacci sequences. The scarf here is the result. If you aren’t familiar with the Fibonacci Sequence there is an excellent description on Leigh’s Fiber Journal.

I wanted to used different shades of the same yarn and happened to have a bag of yarn that I picked up our annual knitting retreat garage sale (thanks Katie). The bag had several greens, yellows and burgundies yarns. These colors were perfect for this project as I was also looking for a project that would remind me of the fabulous fall colors we saw in North Carolina last fall. The texture of the yarn wasn’t as soft as I usually use for my scarves so I washed a sample to see if it would bleed and soften. It didn’t bleed and it did get softer. I’m mostly happy with how it turned out. I did have a boo-boo in the home stretch, but as my DH points out – only I know it’s a boo-boo and not a design feature.

I’ve always been interested in name and message drafts but found getting a good sequence with the word or message I wanted was a little challenging. I tend to want to use just short 4-letter words (no, not that kind of 4-letter word!) which could be my problem. I did get a workable pattern using some of Ralph Griswold’s sequences and used one of those in the scarf shown here. This is the one I used for Fibonacci scarf.

But for the next scarf that I want to do, using Mr. Griswold’s sequences just didn’t work very well. So I decided to strike out on my own using an online sequence generator. I had the generator give me a list of numbers between 1 and 26 in a random order and with no repeats. In Excel, with the alphabet in column one, I pasted the numbers from the sequence generator in the next column and then in the third column I assigned shafts. The results were:
# 1 x l k u d r c
# 2 y o w e s q
#3 m h b a z i
#4 j v p f t n g

I added a point twill threading (I think) in between the word as I repeated it across. The draft I ended up with is very similar to other drafts that I have seen but I didn’t expect anything no one else had ever thought. I just wanted something to reflect the word I had in mind and for me to be the only one who knows :-).

Right now I am slowly putting the warp for a laprug on my floor loom, have the warp for the above scarf ready to slap on my 8 harness table loom, am winding the warp for a summer and winter project to go on my 4 harness table loom and am patiently waiting for DH to finished getting the rust of the reeds for my other floor loom. And it has lots of other work that needs to be done on it!

Happy Weaving!

Fore and Aft Scarf -- Off the Loom

My double weave scarf (Fore and Aft Scarf, Handwoven, J/F 1998, page 59) is off the loom and finished. The weaving went along without any problems so I really regret not using yarns that have more personality and zing.

The only tricky part is cutting the warp and using it as the weft. The bottom warp becomes the top weft and the top warp becomes the bottom weft and that connects the two layers along one side.

The tension on the warp gets a little wonky the closer you get to the end as you can see from the photo. You just have to trust that it works. I was actually fretting about it a lot ahead of time and had a dream about it -- in the dream it worked and I saw how it worked. So my subconscious was way ahead of me on this project.

Here are some photos of it finished and hanging on Headless Harriet. I did overdye it with some blue dye in my stash of dyes and I like the colors a lot better now. The back does lay flat, it's just the two different colors on each side that makes it seem like it isn't flat. If I do it again, I would like to nuke the fringe along the back.

I used my Louet W30 table loom for this project so that I raised the harnesses independently and could really get an understanding of how double weave works. The beater in my little Louet can be very wobbly and I've heard others have this same problem. I fixed it, mostly, by jamming long knitting needles on both sides of the reed housing. The photos are below.

My looms are naked again but I have some warp really to slap on them; I just have to decide on a pattern. I'm also doing an online summer and winter weave along on Ravelry so I will be experimenting with that.

Happy New Year and Happy Weaving!