Final Submission

This is a list of all relevant blog pages for my final submission of work for semester 2 of the 2013 academic year.

In reverse chronological order.

In which I explain what went wrong in my final hand warp and why it doesn't matter.

In which I demonstrate an interesting visual effect while weaving, which unfortunately didn't survive finishing.

In which I talk about yarn making.

In which I demonstrate the tying of a repair heddle for one time when I miscpunted the amount of heddles I had

In which I demonstrate how little I understand the twisting frame.

In which I talk with great excitement about possibly the most boring piece of kit on campus.

In which I explain how to pick and place a cross for stake warping.

In which I have great frustration with broken ends in my second warp.

In which I find a fault and just kinda ignore it.

In which I upset my dog's sense of homeliness by sorting masses of fabric scraps in the front room

In which I feel like my warp would taste of skittles if it didn't in fact taste of wool and regenerated cellulose.

In which I post some links to music I listen to on the loom that kinda affects my brain thinking.

In which I explain how to sley the reed correctly.

In which I show off my frames for New Designers.

In which I demonstrate chain warping.

In which I go on again about warping, but with less clarity than the other time.

In which I show off the result of my first warp.

In which I outline my ideas for what I'm doing this semester.

This post shall remain up until the end of marking, at which point it shall be removed from the page and archived in case anyone needs it in the future.

A lovely visit and an interesting challenge

I had the priviledge this week of paying host to Laura Fry and Kerstin Froberg.

Sadly, they arrived the day before the bank holiday and had to leave the following afternoon so were unable to receive the tour of the School of Textile And Design they were hoping for.

Never mind though, as weavers are weavers and we love to talk about weaving. Over dinner and a pint or two we discussed many subjects including Vadmal, the pros and cons of AVL looms and the routes by which each of us came to weaving. It was a very nice evening and a real delight to meet other weavers with such a depth of passion and knowledge.

Why I didn't take any pictures I'll never know, I guess I was just too busy chatting away about looms and yarn and going on about how I learned to weave upside down and back to front and made myself do everything the hard way (which stands me in good stead when I have to rescue other people's warping errors).

Interestingly, I'd had it in my head the Laura was American and Kerstin was Finnish, whereas they're actually Canadian and Swedish, so that's weird. I wonder how that mix up occurred in my brainpan?

Anyhow, the next day they came to visit my house, all rammed with cloth and I showed them through all the work I've been doing for college and sold them each a quantity of cashmere, which was very nice for me as I've been pure brassic this month due to The Economy.

And Kerstin gave me a challenge, to weave a V-neck shawl, on a power loom, as I have been going on about power looms somewhat as I am currently enjoying the prospect of getting use of one soon. I believe it's doable, though not to the exact technique she describes, but nevertheless something similar could no doubt be done on a Jacquard shuttle loom, assuming you were happy to do the hand finishing. It's a thought. I foresee some small technical difficulties, though one could easily stop the machine after every pick to make weft adjustments and still weave quicker than by hand, especially as the bulk would be woven by automagicalness.

Anyhoo, that's only the start, we also talked about the idea of weaving a shirt in one piece without seams straight on the loom. Apparently, back in the heyday of industrial weaving, this was acheived at great length and expense by the son of an industrial mill family who tied up a jacquard loom for a whole year making a garment that came complete with pockets, frills, collars, the lot, without a single sewing stitch, and then proceeded to give it to the queen, or someone similar.

This was done either in Dunfermline or Dundee, it's something I've never heard or read about, but I must look into it. The brain-work demon at the back of my head is telling me it's totally doable with enough thought and careful planning but I suspect it wouldn't be woven quickly, and I'm sure it would need a multi-box shuttle loom, a rapier wouldn't do it.

The knitters are already making seamless clothing on machine, so I guess it's about time us weavers stepped up to the plate.

Does anyone know anything about these seamless woven garments? I don't have time to go searching just now, but I'm more than happy to idly receive links and information or even wild speculation.

Almost totally off topic, hanging onto relevance by the narrowest of threads.

I've just found my new favourite author.

Cixin Liu (or is that Liu Cixin, I don't know) is an SF write from China, I have just read a free offering of his from Amazon which you can download for free as an E-book. It's a novella describing humanity's travails in escaping the death of the sun with the earth as our spaceship.

To say this this book is epic, majestic and terrifying in it's magnificient concept is a remarkable understatement. But to fail to acknowledge the hope gleaned from finding an author who is willing to conceive of humanity facing up to huge and terrible challenges with stoicism and resourcefulness would be a mistake.

The Wandering Earth

It's simply unlike anything I have ever read.

But what is more remarkable is that it hits the very note that I have been attempting to hit with my last warp

Can you see what I'm trying to do? It's supposed to be like a representation of the galaxy as viewed in transit at high speed, with stars stretched out and long wispy streamers of pink gas flitting by. The other thing you'll notice about this warp is the large number of broken ends I've chosen not to fix. As we know, all things in the universe are subject to entropy, which is the tendency of ordered systems to break down into chaos. The yarn itself accelerates this process as the added fibres clung to each other causing broken ends and many weird lifts and poor shedding. As a careless god weaving my own little universe I have gleefully chosen to let the cloth do as it wishes to do, pausing only to remove broken ends from the back of the shafts. The funny thing is you really can't tell until you look closely. This mirrors the apparent simplicity if large systems when viewed from far away, but when examined up close reveal hidden depths of complexity and numerous exceptions to dearly held natural laws. Somewhere on this warp I have darned in a single grey thread, this represents humanity sailing blindly onwards through the incomprehensible vastness of space, unaware of the dangers that may await us, lurking in the darkness to cut short the thread of our existence

A shimmer effect while weaving on the Jacquard

I love Jacquard weaving. It's official.

You'll probably notice an interesting wee effect there in the black areas of this cloth. The reason for this is that this cloth has 2 layers but 4 different wefts, meaning there's always 2 wefts floating in the middle of the cloth at any time. This is what allows me to weave 4 seperate colours across the width of the cloth. Which is pretty neat.

Jacquard weaving is pretty neat, but it's difficult to wrap your head around it unless you start off simple. Luckily, I have a love of geometric patterns.

 

 That's a wee taster of one of my coming final samples. I'm not shouting this stuff to the rooftops. 

This is something I find pleasing. My sister's new puppy, Lenny. Thinks he's a draught excluder, currently here trying to get a rise out of my Eris

A twisted yarn

Did I mention I was making yarn? Probably, I know I've been wittering on about the twisting machine and the twist measuring machine lately. Well, here are my first proper results.

The one on the right is called Stretch Starlight and is made with 97/3 merino/lycra with small pieces of English 56 thrown in and the one on the right is called Nebula, which has a greater amount of a longer staple woollen fibre of unknown origin attached to a regular worsted yarn.

These yarns are not yet perfect, but I think I'm getting closer. I still have problems with the fibres not binding into the twist perfectly. Of course, the Boyd isn't actually designed in any way to bind fibre into a twist, but it's a wee hack I guess.

How are these made?

Well, these are what's called Siro yarns. What this means is they're folded yarns made of singles which are practically unspun. In effect this means that when you remove the folded twist what you're left with is roving. As a consequence you can't remove all the twist, as the stuff simpy falls apart.

But I have to untwist this stuff and retwist it in order to get the extra fibres to bind to the yarn.

So first you go and measure the twist of the yarn, as I explained previously in a previous post previously.

This yarn has 13 twists per inch in the S direction, or 13 TPI S, as it shall henceforth be referred to as. henceforthly.

A brief aside regarding yarn twist.

S or Z twist refers to the direction the yarn is twisted in. If the yarn is twisted in a counter clockwise direction you get an S twist, if clockwise, you get a Z twist.

Look at the yarn closely, then imagine the letter S or Z superimposed upon the twist direction, and whichever of those diagonals it follows indicates which twist it is. Quite simply really, though one does wonder how folks with different alphabets, such as Arabic or Chinese speakers go about describing this. I must ask.


Anyway, moving onward (ever onwards), as the yarn had 13 TPI S I had to twist it in the opposite direction in order to remove some ov the twist, but not so much that it became too fragile to run through the machine. So I twisted it 5 TPI Z, another way of saying this is that I removed 5 TPI S

13 TPI S + 5 TPI Z = 8 TPI S

Simples, as the insurance rodent would say.

Anyway, then I have to twist it back.

You'd think I'd simply twist it back 5 TPI while adding the fibre. Oh, if only life were so simple. You see, the stuff doesn't really bind that well on just one twist, so I feel it's better to add it and then retwist to give it a better shot at really binding into the yarn.

So you'd think I'd do 2.5 TPI S twice, to get it back to where it was, right?

13 TPI S + 5 TPI Z + 5 TPI S = 13 TPI S

Of course, you've guessed it, things aren't that simple.

You see, the twister twists onto these big old wooden packages, which are fine for nice big heavy yarns which have actual twist in their singles, but this yarn is none of those things. It is light, fine and has no twist in it's singles. So it needs to be on a nice light package that rotates easily on the upper yarn holders.

Here's where things get weird and a little maddening.

So, I take this big wooden yarn package over to another machine, a cone winder, and transfer it onto a small plastic sample cone. The only problem here is that as the yarn is coming off the bottom package into the tension guide of the machine, it is twisting. Not a lot, but enough to make some kind of a difference. And I don't do that once, or twice, but four times in the process of making this yarn. Here's how it goes.

Yarn goes like this

From big 2 kilo cone to small package

From small package, twisted onto large wooden bobbin + 5 TPI Z

Bobbin to package

Package to bobbin + 2 TPI S

Bobbin to package

Package to bobbin + 2 TPI S

Bobbin to final package

Everytime I transfer from bobbin to package I add an unknown amount of twist into it, in which direction I am unsure, as I haven't taken the time to examine the process in such minute detail yet.

Also, I am reliably informed by a PhD student that the twist added in this manner is very difficult to ascertain as it is determined by the size of the package, the circumference of the yarn on the package at any given point (which is always shrinking), the distance from the yarn to the tension guide (which changes as you go along as the yarn runs up and down the cone on it's way round), the tension of the tensioner and even the speed of the machine.

All you can say is you have to work it in somehow.

The upshot is that it's next to impossible to create a philosophically perfect yarn using this technology. Luckily you can simply steam the stuff, but in practice you have to make allowances.

So I spun 2 TPI S twice and got a yarn that is close enough to being perfectly balance that frankly I'm happy enough with it.

Now I just have to hope the coloured fibre parts will make it all the way through the loom and into the cloth.

Wish me luck

Tying a repair heddle

Not much else to say. Sometimes you run out of heddles, or perhaps you have to add one after you're started warping due to a threading error, so here's how I do it.

The Boyd twister

I have been attempting to add flecks of colour to yarns by untwisting and then retwisting them.

Here is a wee video of the machine I've been using.

There is a good reason why what I'm trying to do isn't working, which I shall go into tomorrow. I'll have to make a video for that too. It involves the mechanical nature of the actual machine.

I had it in my head that you could do both S and Z twist on it at the same time, but that is clearly impossible as all spinners spin in the same direction due to being driven by the same drive belt.

I hope it's maybe possible to reverse the direction of the belt, but I doubt it, I think this is just an S-twister.