Skip to main content

disruption, tidyness, and JC Rennies

so, i've suffered a great deal of disruption this month, what with fate snatching me away from my cosy bed and taking me to bolton via inverness, lanark and edinburgh. so i haven't actually got very much done in terms of physical productivity or sampling.

i did do a day lesson for joan the other saturday, which was nice, and she's now got the table loom i've been using for the last three years. it's a community loom like i say, so it's there for people to use. and i'm arranging for castletown heritage centre, which is trying to develop itself as a traditional crafts place, to take on my smaller (Dryad) floor loom. i have also arranged for me to be doing a knotted pile weaving class there in july. which isn't that far away, really. and no doubt the idle (with any luck) summer will just speed on by like a fast thing, say a train. or a car on the motorway.

anyway, i have spent the week tidying the house. i spent about half a day doing the dishes and the recycling, another day doing the front room and hallway, and i finally got the loom room sparkling last night, for the first time in months. the thing is i can't make and beam a warp properly when my brain's battered, and my brain's always battered when the house is a mess. which isn't a problem when i want to sit on my arse playing Monkey Island 2 (classic) and drinking beer. but, like i say, i can't do anything complicated while my brain's battered.

so anyhow, i spent the last of last night drinking crap cider and making a new warp. this be an experimental warp. see, my mum wan'ts curtains for the kitchen, and they have to be so wide, and i can't make them so wide with the normal way i'm used to doing, co i only have so many heddles, see, which i have moaned abouit before. so i'm doing this thing where i have bands of 32epi seperating larger spacings of 16 epi. this on a 8 dent reed. so with any luck this should make nice sorta gauzy effect for the sun to shine through. we'll see. the shame is that i can't create a truly checked pattern, because of the way it is, which i can't explain properly, but it makes sense in my head. anyway, this just a sample to see how it goes. and i'm running out of clean clothes cos i don't want to go to the laundrette till i've got some weaving to wash, and at this rate i'll need to do two loads.

ho hum

and i got shade cards from JC Rennies. but silly me i forgot to specify shade cards for weaving yarn (like, singles) so i got a bunch of knitting swatches. still, the colours are the same, so i'm going to go ahead and get some samples of their yarns and make up some sample scarves. i'm not sure if they do cotton, but if they do i might do some tea towels as well.

we'll see.

anyway,l that's that. i'm stranded in reay just now, supervising my brother to make sure he doesn't go on accidental hunger strike while my parents are on holiday, so i have every good reason for doing bugger all

hooray!

Comments

Dorothy said…
The curtains project should be fun. I like the idea of curtain fabric because I'm sure you can do things that wouldn't work for upholstery or clothing - like the variations in warp spacing you're thinking about. It's an opportunity to play with light and shadow.

Re. pirn winding, I use a swedish bobbin winder, as sold by Don Porritt, Fibrecrafts, Frank Herring, Handweavers Studio. As the pirns are too big to fit the shaft, I either fit them over one of the cheap cardboard bobbins for hand shuttles or else use a wedge of folded paper. I've seen a few of these bobbin winders go on ebay recently at prices which are a good saving on the new price - i.e. £30 instead of £50. If you have or are thinking of getting a spinning wheel there's a quill spindle available for the Traditional and Traveller models which is good for winding pirns. I used to use one, but sold the wheel.
Andrew Kieran said…
yeah, i've got one of those swedish pirn winders. i'm actually thinking of an automatic pirn winder. not that i need one just now, it's one of those "next level" things.

i've got an ashford joy wheel as it goes. is nice. and my cousin's got another ashford model, which is also nice, but not quite as folding-tastic as mine's

Popular posts from this blog

Tablet Weaving Lesson #1: Backstrap weaving a simple diamond motif

This is the first in a series of video and photo tutorials showing basic to advanced tablet-weaving concepts. These lessons shall each build on the last and hopefully take the viewer from simple diamond patterns up to more complicated double face pattern weaving with finer yarns and eventually onto the heady heights of brocading and other fancy techniques (just as soon as I learn how to do them myself). In this first lesson we'll learn the basic weaving steps involved in weaving a diamond pattern in the backstrap style. This lesson is meant for someone who has purchased a ready-made warp from me. The next lesson shall detail how to design and make this warp oneself. And we begin This is the basic pattern we are making. The woven band is tied to my waist with another strap. I am holding a small stick shuttle in my right hand which contains the weft. In front of me are the cards, each card has 4 warp threads going through it. The gap that you can see is called the

The curse of the faulty rachet-stop + The contractual obligation video post

I got the warp wound on the medium sized loom last week, and threaded and sleyed it this weekend Now. The back beam is held by a ratchet. and the ratchet-stop is a plate of metal which is pulled up from the ratchet-wheel with a handle attached to the main upright. It seems that somewhere along the line of the last couple of weeks i must have bent the plate back a little cos it no longer holds tight against the wheel. i've tried holding it down with a piece of cord wrapped round the beam, but it's not having it and i've had the whole thing come loose while swinging the batten twice already. I've tried to remove the plate but one of the screws is held tight. I'm going to have to take it outside and hammer it flat on the doorstep. This is aggravating On another aggravating note, the shuttle keeps flying out of the race and hitting the wall when i beat from the left hand side on the larger loom and i can't figure out why, cos i haven't changed anything from the

treble-cloth construction

I am currently in the process of designing a triple layered fabric. One layer shall carry conductive warp threads (one out of every three), another layer shall carry conductive weft threads (again, one out of every three) and a third layer shall lay between them and act as an insulator, keeping them apart and preventing unwanted contact between the two conductive layers. Constructing a treble cloth is a compicated process. The way that a treble cloth is woven is that first the face cloth is woven, then the centre cloth is woven, then the back cloth is woven. This is a draft for a treble cloth. The crosses indicate weaving marks for the cloth currently being woven, the dashes are lifts and are used to indicate shafts that are being lifted in the case of layers that are above the layer currently being woven. Blue is back, Red is front, Green is centre (All three layers are plain weave btw) The cloth is constructed like so 1: Back cloth is woven. All red and green marks are lif