Snow in the Forecast!

The wind is howling and there is snow in the forecast! That certainly isn’t the usual March weather forecast in the Pacific Northwest – at least not down here in the lowlands. We have some spring flowers blooming and I’m sure they are not happy campers tonight. But a snow forecast provides plenty time for weaving and knitting.

I’ve finished 4 woven scarves and a mobius since I posted last but only have two of them wet finished. So you will have to check back to see the others. And I still haven’t taken photos of my stash enrichment purchases at the recent Madrona market.

I started the red scarf while I was deep into my February funk. I had been in my weaving studio and getting ready to leave when, I just as I turned, a ball of variegated red ribbon yarn caught my eye and beside it, in another clear plastic box. was some of Lisa Souza’s yarn in her Joseph Coat colorway. I pulled them out of their boxes and realized I could combine them with some red yarn I got a few years ago at the Madrona market. I usually ponder these things for awhile, but in this case, I had the warp on my table loom before lunch. I tied on the previous warp so I used my word draft for “heal” for the scarf. I just love it. The colors really cheered me up. It’s about 60 inches long and 6 inches wide. It’s soft and drapes nicely. You can find a swatch close up in the slideshow on the right.

The other scarf, shown here, was the scarf that I was weaving on Fanny and wrote about in my last post. The warp is a lovely cotton yarn, dyed by Lisa Souza a few years ago and she recently gifted it to me (whadda pal!). The weft is yarn that is part of my odd ball reduction plan. I have lots of onesy-twosey balls of yarn – mostly impulse buys with plans to “mix it with something else”. Since my fingers rebel at a lot of knitting, I need to find other uses for these odd balls and they usually make great weft yarns.

My inspiration for the scarf was a painting by Van Gogh -- Café Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night. It has lots of the gold and blue colors found in Lisa’s colorway.

I’ve had two recent weaving guild meetings. First I went to the Seattle Weavers Guild to hear Patsy Zawistoski. She gave a interesting and in-depth presentation of high-tech fibers. She passed around lots of man-made fiber samples so we could all touch them. I don’t think I want to spin any of them…I’ll stick to wool.

This past Thursday was the Arachne Guild meeting and Robyn Spady was our guest speaker. She showed us lots of ways to turn our thrums into jewelry.

Happy Weaving and I hope it isn't snowing where you are!

Got Shed!

Wove my first scarf on Fanny and it was a dream to weave. I had a nice, lovely shed opening. I think I need to replace the brake coil but it still holds the tension pretty well. Any of you LeClerc loom experts -- please let me know what you think.

Tension is my question of day -- how much is right? On my Fireside loom I've always assumed that I needed a really tight tension (like you could bounce a coin on the warp). But Fanny's tension in tight -- but not that tight. So have I been putting too much tension on the Fireside (which could be one of the reasons the shed on the Fireside is less than lovely)?

Here are some photos of Fanny, all cleaned up and my re-arranged weaving studio.

I'm not sure how much more I can get in here! I really like the new arrangement. I can get to the back of both loom without tripping! Have have two finished scarves -- I'll post more photos soon. Happy Weaving!

February Funk!

I’ve been in a February funk for various reasons and when I’m in a funk I mostly whine, knit and rearrange my yarn! So I’ve been knitting hats and slippers. But I have done some weaving.

The laprug on my Fireside is going nowhere fast. I started with ulta alpaca yarn for the warp and when I was tying it on, it stretched and stretched. With some encouragement from DH and my weaving mentor, I opted to switch to cotton. So I tied on 480 threads and in the process I got my warp ends in a tangle. I'm using multiple colors of cotton and as I was tying on to the old warp, I decided to change the order that I had the thread in -- in retrospect -- not a smart idea. I’m slowly getting the mess under control -- one thread at a time.

I did completely re-arrange my weaving studio, complete with moving nearly all the furniture, giving away furniture and consolidating my yarn and roving. Now I have more room in front and back of my looms and can get to the back of my Fireside without trying to break a leg. DH finished the cleanup/refurbishing of my Fanny loom and I have started to sley the reed. All the rust is gone. She had quite a severe addiction to rust and various parts of her had to spend considerable time in rehab.

I finished this scarf on my table loom. I created another word draft. The warp is Cascade 220 from my stash and the weft is a multi-color(orange, yellow and pink) mystery single also from the stash. Not at all my colors but I needed to do something in these colors for a guild project. I like how it turned out and as DH said “did you ever expect it to turn out this good?” He's not an orange person either. I have another skein of the multi-single so I'm going to get some yellow/color Cascade 220 and make another one. Eventually these scarves will end up at a local hospital, so the word draft I created was "heal".

I got involved in a knitting bet with a 10-year-old -- we were both knitting hats at our weekly knitting group get-together. The bet was that the first one to complete their hat had to bake cookies for the other person. I thought this was a sure thing because she was averaging a row a week and had been working on it for months with little progress. I had visions of oatmeal cookies in my future! The cookie bet fired that girl up and within a week the hat was complete. (Mine still had inches to go on No. 2 needles.) She had definite ideas about the cookies -- decorated cut out cookies and did I have any bear cookie cutters and oh, by the way, could she come over and bake them. So that's what we did. I felt a little like Tom Sawyer and his fence as she did all the work! However, she did get to wear my brand new (got it for xmas -- thanks Sandy) apron from Paris.

This past weekend was the Madrona Fiber event in Tacoma, lots of classes and a great market. My buddy JoAn came down and we made it a day at the market. I was thrilled that Just Our Yarns was there and I added to my stash :-). I'll post stash enrichment photos when this funk passes! My other favorite vendors were: Toots LeBlanc -- their angora blend is awesome -- and Sheila Ernst buttons.

I have a bright, bright red scarf on my table loom now -- hoping the bright colors help pop me out of my February funk (but I think a trip to someplace sunny would work better!).

Happy Weaving!

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!

Adventures in Double Weave

When I took my beginning weaving class in the ‘90s we did a week on double weave. At the time, I thought it was quite interesting so one of my goals for 2009 is to do some double weave projects.

Finding my looms all naked this week, I decided to start one before the new year. After cruising through piles of back issues of Handwoven, I picked the “Fore-And-Aft Scarf,” Handwoven, J/F 1998, page 59. (Photo on right.)

The pattern calls for silks and cotton but since this was my first real double weave project, I decided to use some Berroco Ultra Alpaca from my stash – some blue for the bottom layer and gray for the top layer, then use blue for the weft with the gray and vice versa. This yarn is easily replaced so if I messed up I wouldn’t be really upset.

I had some trouble figuring out how to position the shuttles as I changed between layers so that I wouldn’t connect the layers on the side…but once I had the treadling correct (I was reading it wrong) that fell into place. Taking the advice of some of the articles I read, I’m doing this project on my Louet w-30 table loom with direct tie up since direct tie does make it easier to understand what’s going on.

So far, it slow and rather boring since I don’t really have any interplay of color and design to entertain me as I shuttle along. The pattern has you weave along in plain weave for 36 inches. Then the fun begins – weaving the point. The instructions call for cutting two warp threads at the back of the loom and then you bring them forward, pulling them from the reed and using them as your weft threads. You weave the warp end from the top layer across the bottom and warp end from the bottom layer across the top layer. You continue cutting the warp threads and weaving until all the warp is cut. I’m assuming that this creates a join along the side so that when you are done and open it up – magic occurs and you have the point.

I’m at 25 inches so I’m just 11 inches away from the fun part. So far I’ve been trying to entertain myself by visualizing what colors I can overdye with scarf with! If I like the end product I will probably do it again in some silk from my stash. It could make a good gift for my still working buddies who live in warm climates.

And for a little eye candy from our trip to Italy. This is only my favorite photos of the Ponte Vecchio bridge in Florence because I took it from the balconey of a yarn store -- Beatrice Yarn Shop. Unfortunately she is retiring and closing the shop in March.

What! Home for the Holidays!

Home for the holidays --- what’s that about! When the holidays arrive, my feet get itchy and I’m ready to travel. Last year we spent all of December and then some in Italy and the year before we went to the Christmas markets in Austria and Germany. Maybe this desire to see the world in December comes from living overseas for awhile – or maybe it is just a way to avoid our US holiday madness.
So when we decided to stay home this year, I thought “Okay, that’s probably a good thing.” NOT! Instead of getting my Christmas cards done in Sept, packages mailed in November and avoiding all candy making…I put it all off until the last possible moment. (I’m still avoiding the candy making – DH did it.) Then I felt rushed and very, very cranky (think the b-word). Then the weather turned nasty and all white. We don’t usually have a white Christmas here – a green Christmas is the norm! Temps have been in the teens and we have almost 10 inches of snow on the ground. So why am I not in Sorrento, that’s what I wanna know!

I have spent time at my looms…getting more presents completed and thinking to myself “I have until Christmas Eve!” Well, I’m all done now and have a few things to show you. I have still been caught up in Mobius Mania and sent a few off before photos were taken. Plus I did a few more scarves.

I’m been thinking about my weaving goals for the beginning of the New Year. First I want to get my LeClerc Fanny loom up and weaving, then I want to explore double weaving and just maybe sort through all the stuff in my studio (or not!)

And now for those of you who like snow and dog in the snow pictures:

Wishing you a totally terrific holiday -- where ever you are!