weave4fun

It took me a little while to wrap my head around this program, but now that I have it's certainly saving me a lot of time. I can throw idea out on the screen so quickly, and play about with bracketing and weft variations with the greatest of ease and not spend all that time at the pegging table cursing and weeping as I hammer out peg-plans for the Dobby. This is especially important methinx as I am attempting to combine colour and weave effects together into double weave. I am trying to go for either dots or stripes but am kinda playing with wavy patterns as well. If I use plain weave for the different faces then I can have 4 different interchanging blacks but not so much variation in shade, but if I use 4-shaft twills I can only get two interchanging blocks but get a lot more variation in shades to play with. It's a trade off really Here's some of what I've come up with so far, all on the same warp of 1 pink, 1 blue Straightway I'm noticing t

Ugh, the light in here is terrible. Poor photography, once again. A combination of poor light and the camera on my relatively cheap phone. Anyway, you still get an idea. These are the colour combinations I'm going with from the pink and blue warp. So yeah. I'm using doubleweave. Planning to use doubleweave, I should say (I'm not doing doubleweave yet. I'm sitting at the computer typing. And I don't have doubleweave on the loom at college. What I have at college is a silk warp that's probably going to get turned into a brightly coloured cord or something because I can't afford to waste any more time on it (woe betide me!)) Brackets inside brackets, now my writing is going down the drain. Ho hum, fairly happy with the combinations. I figure I can get a lot of different combinations from which to choose finals from a 2 section warp with only 2 colours in each. hmm. To do tomorrow: Lots of stuff not on the loom I'm a little behind with my CA

2 shaft Dryad Rug/Tapestry loom. Bought in the 70's, never used, stored in a garage for 30-odd years then sold to me today with the demonstration warp still on. Cleaned up and ready to go. The bearer doesn't slide, but I doubt it ever did. Anyone got any experience with these? I'm going to put up a post on weavolution later, see if anyone knows how to get this bearer moving smoothly

Lots of broken ends. Like, more than 40 in the first 5" of weaving. And mostly clustered in particular places, indicating that this is due to rough heddles or reed. I've not given up on 60's silk, but I won't spend any more college time on it as these looms aren't up to it.

1600 ends of 60nm silk at 90epi. Been at this all week. Couple of little errors, but nothing that can't be fixed once weaving is started. Just have to pay more attention and take greater care in my checking is all. Also, threading through yarn this fine is not easy. The next warp will be knotted on. Blatantly. Because the technician found a wee machine for the job, about which you will hear more later.

From the first colour sample warp.

But only a little bit. It's been mad busy over here the last few weeks, been in late every day and on saturdays too. I've finished weaving the first viscose colour sampler and got it cut up into samples. Think there must be something like over 100 samples from that warp, they're only little. Really pleased with the amount of different shades I can get from one warp colour simply by changing the structures and colours about. Going to choose my favourite shades and combinations then try mixing them together in double weave on the next viscose warp, from the previous post. While I'm thinking about that I will be continuing to work on a warp of silk as detailed below Silk 60's, 16 shafts in eight shaft blocks of about 1.5" each. 1600 ends at 90epi, sleyed 4 ends in a 42 reed (scottish system) I've been at the threading for a little while now and it's starting to do my brain in, but I'm nearly through. Should get it finished tomorrow afternoon, then

So delicious and sugary. Sadly this warp was rather slack down the side. Rubbish.

You know It's winter when this falls onto your warp. That was clue #1, clue #2 was the fact that it was f****g freezing last night when I was walking the dog