Portrait of an Unhappy Warp

The leaves are out so goodbye decent lighting!

I've worked a lot in merino. I definitely know the properties of merino a lot better then I know the Homestead Strike of 1892, and I wrote my thesis on that strike. So it's rather shameful that this little etude into my familiar medium is going so badly.

A few of the errors.

This warp does not want to be happening. I'm not sure why. Or rather I have about twenty theories and it's probably about 5% each one of those theories. Suffice to say, something, or maybe everything, is just a little bit off in this warp. So everything is breaking. I'm two feet in and I've replaced half a dozen threads.

Le Sigh.

Cotton, unfortunately.

Painted Warps.

I get tongue tied when I try to describe why I love wool. The technical terms like elasticity, resilence, staple length and crimp don't really make sense even to me. It's more like when a song comes on the radio, and it doesn't really matter what song it is, just that it is the perfect song for right now. For me, wool is always that perfect song, and that little buzz between the ears is in my hands every time I work with wool. 

Finnish Birds Eye, painted weft.

So I've been working with cotton lately and its off putting. Sometimes dangerous, I got rug burn on a finger when winding a bobbin. And apparently if there's a catch and you're not paying attention and holding the yarn tight, a cotton yarn will try to just wind your finger onto the bobbin, instead of breaking itself like any noble and kind wool yarn will do. Then there's the weird tension that starts happening with every change of humidity...

The colors remind me of Parrots.

It was worth it. 5/2 Unmercerized cotton produces an absolutely lovely fabric. It's a coarse netting on the loom but after a wash and tumble dry it's soft, drapy, and surprisingly cozy. Shawls are substantial, cushy, and keep back just enough heat to combat air-conditioning, and are airy enough to wear outside in the sun. They're perfect nursing shawls. Comfy, cozy, won't suffocate the babe, and can be washed with all manner of soaps and stain removers. 

The pink set.

I wove the pink set on a very, very, long warp. It was about twelve yards long. I cut off after every shawl, all 4.5 of them, due to tension problems. The two yellow/green/orange shawls were woven together and only cut apart once off the loom. 

Yeah, definitely going through a pink phase. It's not over. 

On all shawls I finished with an inch of free fringe, and a row of stabilizing stitching that encapsulating the last three picks. The stitch is one of the decorative ones on my machine, but it's incredibly sturdy, as I found out when unpicking a few mistakes! Since I hate hemstitching and have never been too keen on hand twisted fringe, this is like the holy grail of finishing techniques. It gives an edge that isn't a statement so much as a gentle ending. No abruptness, no fuss, just an edge. The inch and a half of loose fringe isn't enough to get into trouble, but still enough to flit with nervously with your fingers. 

Shawls will be up in the shop sometime tomorrow-ish. 

Gone Away, Gone Ahead

Marybeth

Spent the weekend spreading my cold germs at the lovely BYM Women's Retreat. A hundred-ish lovely Quaker ladies in the lovely mountains. I brought my stuff to sell and boy did it sell.

Tolly

Quakers are a seriously adorable faith. There wasn't a cash register or shopkeepers or any sort of organization to the craft show part. Just a bunch of tables around the perimeter of the big meeting room covered in stuff. We put out our stuff along with a receipt book, a pen, and a box. That was it! It worked beautifully, although I did have to track down a few people who had written checks with the "to" part blank.  Studies do show that people are more honest if you expect it of them...

Citrus Scarf

All of the these items are now sold. I also sold a bunch that I had never properly photographed. Of course, the weather was helping wool sales conciderably. It was warm for January, but that's a pretty harsh set to begin with. 34º with 50mph winds isn't exactly warm!

This had been going to be a fish. Yay failed class assignments!

I actually sold that shawl twice. Somebody bought it, then decided it was too short, and then almost immediately someone else bought it.

This now belongs to a banjo-playing stand-up comedian.

Of my total sales, I've made .09% of them on Etsy and that accounts for .02% of revenue.  Given the tactile nature of fiber arts it's really no surprise that they sell so much better when potential customers can feel them. At the same time, my Etsy store has paid  for itself - which really isn't hard, they're delightfully cheap - and it does represent a sort of commercial anchor. The shop is always up, whereas festivals are few and far between this time of year.

And at this rate, if there was another craft show tomorrow, I'm not completely sure I could fill a table! Back to the loom for me!

Rags to Riches: II

Its January and I'm taking sunny pictures outside. WTH?

The weaving part of rag rugs is relatively easy. Well, I said "relatively."

4 epi, straight twill. 

Tip #1 Set it wide. Yes, wider even then you think. 4 ends per inch you say? Only for a twill. Three per inch is a safer bet. I've even used 2 epi for plain weave.

A slightly fancy edge.

Tip #2 Stay away from rug warp. Yes, it's super strong, but it's also thin. Rag rugs aren't woven at very high tension, in fact the washcloth on the loom right now is far tighter then I ever pulled my rug warps.  A thick cotton, I use coned kitchen cotton, is far easier on your fingers when tensioning and produces a far nicer finished edge and fringe. Thin rug warp at 3 ends per inch is almost impossible to pull into a neat finish.  Bonus: 2 or 3 passes with your warp yarn in the weft makes a sweet weft protector during finishing.

None of these "in progress" pictures are off the rug up top. 

Tip #3. Be prepared to place your weft by hand. Sure there are rag shuttles that will hold tons of rag at a time. But let's be honest, none of your strips are more then 6 feet long. Any piece shorter then 3 feet will just fall off your shuttle, so at most you can use the shuttle once, and then hand place the rest. Really, it's not so bad.

Tip #4 Random striping is harder then it looks, but worth the pay off. Trying to make sure it's balanced while still being random will drive you bonkers. A quick solution is to divide all of your colors in half. Use half of each before you get to the middle, use the other half after the middle. Beyond that, let randomness take hold. It'll be fine, I promise.

Its electric

Dyeing records act as inspirations

The problem with planning ahead of time is I get all excited about what will be happening next and bored with what's happening now. I have a rug on my loom but all I'm thinking about is napkins. Well, I say napkins. I'm actually thinking some 9x9 waffle weave face cloths. But then I could do napkins...

Drawdown for Waffle Weave.

This is one draft I'm considering. It's waffle weave, that eternally wonderful fabric relegated almost entirely to towels. The cells in this draft wouldn't be square, but the asymmetry would allow more depth then normal in a 4 shaft waffle. To heck with that though! If I want the trouble of setting up 8 treadles, I'll do an 8 harness pattern! For the record, I have no idea what "C 1hr, H 5min" means. I mean, I assume it's related to the dying records on the opposite page, but it's still greek to me.

Hemstitching: You have been Upgraded.

Any way, the reason for all the excitement about making washclothes/towels/napkins/placemats and everything else exciting in the universe is that Santa brought me a Brother 104D Serger. Hemstitching (above) is now a thing of the past! I can now weave 9 yards of fabric, run it through the serger a few times, and suddenly have 27 perfectly finished washclothes/towels/napkins - You know what? They're just rectangles of cloth, you figure out what to do with them.

In my excitement to tell everyone in the world about how utterly exciting this gift is, a lot of people have expected some sort of agonizing over whether these yet-to-be-rectangles would still be handmade, like I needed some justification for mechanizing part of the process.

Bullshit. Machines planted the flax/cotton, harvested, washed, spun, washed again and wound the yarn before I even get it. Plenty of mechanization has already happened.

Moreover, I weave because I love weaving. I hate hemstitching. This serger means more time doing what I love, and less doing what I hate. Perfect!

Oh, and I have an electric ball-winder now too.  I'm basically a cyborg already

On the Beam

The Proudz, I has it. 

Ochre scarf is finished. The canvas structure really pops in Pony II. I'm very much in love. Ok, so I finished it weeks ago, Holidays are hard!

Random striping is harder then it looks. 

I was determined to use up all my blue/purple rag, and I almost succeeded. This rug is over 70" long. I used a 100 inch warp, the same as I do for a 72 inch scarf, and I had no loom waste. Didn't even have room for a dummy warp!

Nailpolish marks the center of the beater.

Current project: pointe twill rag rug. Color choices are slightly unfortunate but in a fun way. I'm aiming for a 2'x3', which will leave enough warp for a craazzzy stripe number.

At Least the Scarf is Done

Today Didn't Go Well for Anyone.

So today sort of sucked. Various little things went wrong all day, but at least I had gotten my Luskofte! scarf knitted and fringed and washed and outside to dry. So what if my camera deleted the photo tutorial I was going to post on how to put a fringe on a knitted scarf? At least the scarf was done.

And a Damn Fine Fringe it Was Too. 

So as usual, I completely forget about this thing called a dew point until after the sun is done and everything outside is covered in dew. With a sigh, I go and collect my knitting from the outdoors.

It crunches.

Because, you know, it's winter. There isn't a dew point. There's a frost point.

I may have knitted a Companion Cube or three. 

So on top of everything else that went wrong, I froze my knitting. Great.

On a related note, ironing a scarf after midnight is the sort of thing that causes existential crises.

The pin marks 40 inches.

Weaving continues apace. This ochre really is a lovely color and I'm ridiculously proud of it.

Scrap Monsters

Mary-Beth, Alphozo, Alice, Raymond, Quincy, Tolly, and Ozwald.

I don't believe in wasting fiber. So when I finished my senior project I had two nine foot crocodiles, and a lot of left over fabric in odd shapes. It seemed perfectly obvious therefore to make a series of scrap monsters.

The difficult part is putting together the body shapes. Mary-Beth was easy, she's a rectangle with rectangular appendages. Smaller, odder-scraps demand more complicated shapes. Sewing machines like rectangles like Mary-Beth. They don't like oddities like Ozwald, or sewing through five or more layers at once as is necessary for appendages. So a lot of the sewing I do by hand, or I reinforce by hand afterwards.

Adding Eyes.

Additional features are hand felted on. Eyes begin as huge balls of fluff that get matted down slowly. Generally eyes that look straight ahead are confrontational or creepy, so most of my monsters look off to the side. Oswald has three eyes, so he just looks everywhere.

Uh, Shelby? You got something on your mouth, there.

Felting is a process of making things smaller. Fine tuning the shaping on eyes and mouths can take forever since every alteration in outline changes the proportions and density of the entire feature. Above, Shelby's eyes are still pretty irregular. That can't be fixed until his mouth is on, since adding the mouth pulls in the entire plane of the face.

It might be awhile before I can finish him up though....

Rags to Riches I

A finished rug.

I make all of my rag rugs from rags. I think it's ludicrous to use new fabric as rag, but I know plenty of people do. Clothing is too difficult to take apart (which I'm sure is why many people buy new fabric) so I use old sheets. They're conveniently rectangular, lots of yardage in a single piece, and easy to come across. A ripped sheet fits so perfectly into the, "too good to throw away, too bad to keep," category that people are happy to donate to me. As a general rule, two queen sized sheets will weave up to 15 square feet, with a pretty high margin of error.

Pro Tip: Pull out shower curtain so you don't get dye on it like I did.

I have professional grade fiber-reactive dyes, but they're finicky so for rag rugs I usually use Rit. Dump bottle in tub of water, ignore for a few hours, and then give a quick rinse. Easy peasy. The brilliant thing about dying fabric rather then yarn is that the washing machine can do all the heavy rinsing and washing for you. Just make sure to do an extra rinse afterwards to make sure there isn't any dye lingering in the drum.

The Long Part. The Very Long Part. 

What takes the longest is cutting fabric into strips. There are two main methods, ripping, and the rotary cutter. I recommend a rotary cutter as it can go through three or four layers at once and is therefore some what faster. Either way, wear a mask. Tiny fibers go EVERYWHERE and when I forget the mask I end up coughing and sneezing like it's 1914. The finished strips can be wound into balls, although for today I just tied them into bundles.

Sleeping it off.

I feel Luskofte must be pronounced with a Fist Bump.

Winterfest was amazing, but very tiring. Arrived at 7:30 to set up, and didn't leave until five. Of course packing up was much easier since so much stock was sold. I and the other Quaker Ladies had a huge blast.  Finished up the evening, and most of today, with some peaceful knitting.

Loom is Empty but Dye Pot is Not

I have plans for rag rugs to use up more of that indomitable stash. But first to use that ochre warp I haven't done a thing with yet.

Orange you glad

The Quest to Not be Shot Continues Apace.

Believe it or not, photographing neon orange in bad interior lighting is difficult. The weaving at least is very easy. The treadling is a simple 121, 343. The new-to-me fly shuttles hold enough doubled thread for ten inches or so. Given that the piece is twice as wide as my scarves, and the thread twice as thick, this means they're holding about four times as much thread as the boat shuttles I have.

The pin marks twenty inches.

Among the many things this orange clashes with is my loom. Makes the poor Standard look positive jaundiced. I did a bit of a red border at the hem. I'm not sure if I like it beyond sartorially - haha, blood red on the hunter's scarf. I'll see how I like it off the loom before deciding to cut it off or not. I'd hate to have doe all that hemstitching just to cut it off though.

Shuttle Launch.

I'm pretty fly.

I got these babies at the MDSW under the assumption that they were end-feed shuttles.  They were in positively awful shape. The wood was dry, the metal was rusted, and the bobbins didn't come out. Why was I so eager to snatch up these dilapidated wrecks? Because size matters. End feed shuttles hold three to four times as much yarn as a boat shuttle. Careful application of Sweet Reason (a hammer) popped out the bobbin. Two afternoons with my Dad, sanding and polishing and varnishing fixed the rest. Had I known they were so easy to fix up, I would have gotten a lot more.

Sweat Reason also helped get the bobbins back in.

Through some extensive research (about five minutes on Google) I discovered that these guys aren't actually end-feed-shuttles. They're fly shuttles, meant to work with a type of mechanized loom. From a practical stand point, all that means is that they're heavier then end-feed-shuttles, and if I become Cyber-converted I'll still be able to weave. If the weight is a problem I'll just drill out some extraneous wood and metal (there really is a vast amount of metal in these guys), but I don't foresee that being a problem.

U.S.S. Make Shit Up.

Fly or End-Feed, either way the bobbins don't spin. Instead the yarn feeds straight off them, and through a tensioner device. If you buy your shuttles from a source other then someone who ransacked a closed down mill while hunting ghosts (I might be making some assumptions here), then they probably come with an instruction manual that will tell you how to tension your yarn by following a specific path through the tensioner. Since I learned to weave with shuttles that didn't tension at all I didn't worry too much about this, I just pulled the thread through a sequence of holes that would allow it to come off cleanly. I've woven a few inches and everything is working fine.

Don't shoot me.

Warping in sections can prevent tangling becoming epic.

I used to make fun of my weaving teacher, Nancy. The studio had a huge stash of yarns to play with, and in the very back of the very top cabinet, there was a giant cone of orange wool. It was about three or four pounds of a very fine cobweb weight that broke if you looked at it funny. If you dusted the cone off enough, you could tell it was high-visibility orange. The don't-shoot-me orange that hunters wear.
No one in their right minds would ever use this. It was fine, delicate, and hideous. Why did she even have it?

So four years later I graduate, and I'm at the Maryladn Sheep and Wool Festival having the time of my life.  Mom comes up to me with a big bag, grinning. "Guess what I got for $3!"

You mean they paid you $3, right?

I think this wool was raided from a closing mill. It doesn't have a whole lot to recommend it to a handweaver. The hand is mediocre and it's terribly weak. I double it in the warp and will probably do the same in the weft.

On the plus side, and this is why I didn't make my mother return it, the yarn is wool. Most high-visibility clothing is made out of nasty synthetics that either don't insulate well, or insulate without breathing. It might be weak on the cone, but woven up it'll be a hard, sturdy fabric that can get dirty and be washed clean. Back in the day, wools like this were what endurance sports fabrics were made of.

I'll probably just cut out that mistake.

I warped enough for 2 scarves 72 inches long. I warped until I got bored. I happen to like warping, so even at 15 epi, this will be about 18inches wide. That's wide enough to fold in half to wear. Although I suppose if you really wanted to it could be a stole. Canvas weave will pucker and let lots of air be caught. Air pockets equals insulation! The lofty weave and a half-fold will make this scarf very warm for its weight.

Note: In the picture above you can see how I do my header. Put in three picks without beating, then beat back suddenly. Not only is it as effective as the traditional  toilet paper or scrap rags, on fine yarns it'll even out tension. It's really cool how you slam the beater back and then up pop all the loose threads.

Averages

Shown with my one successful crochet project.

Day glow scarf is off the loom after far more warp breakages then were really neccisary. I could have woven at least another foot, but I'd already hit 70" and the warps were starting to break two at a time.  Next up will be canvas weave in this lovely ochre color. Either two scarves or a shawl, haven't done the math yet. But the ochre is just a prelude for what is to come.

Also capable of stacking like this. Black magic maybe?

So based on the last three scarves, I've worked out some averages. I weave about thirty inches a day. I plan scarves to be roughly 6 feet long. I make a warp 100 inches, and weave until it becomes difficult or I run out of weft. This work out to two days, heavy on the ish, of weaving. Another day for warping and slaying, and if I have to heddle another day for that. So three days if I have a dummy warp, four days if I don't.

Some tools: Skin Winder, Ball Winder, Bobbin Winder.

I wind bobbins using a drill, although when you call this guy a drill, other drills get upset. He has trouble with drywall. But he's great for bobbins, as long as you have a bobbin-adapter. Which is a pencil. The drill was $30, bobbin winders are often over a hundred dollars, so the price was right. And the pencil was free.

Shown on its side since it can't stand up with a bobbin attached.

Each bobbin holds enough weft for about 10 inches. So I weave about 3 bobbins a day. I also weave standing up. Some times I work the treadles like I'm walking, right foot, left foot, right foot, and so on. Most days I stand on my right foot and use my left until that gets sore, and then switch. Ten inches is about as long as I can weave like that before wanting a break.

My loom shelf.

So it's all so clearly itemized and balanced and lovely. Weave a bobbin, take a break, weave a bobbin, take a break, weave a bobbin, take a break. Repeat tomorrow and the scarf is done! So now I'm going to mix it all up and use a different type of bobbin, a different treddeling pattern, and a different yarn!

These will be used. May god have pity on my retina. 

Don't shoot me orange. Super fine mystery wool laceweight. Canvas weave.