weave4fun

This is the kind of thing I've been listening to a lot of recently, while writing my preachy essay. See, us wee Jocks didn't invent the pipes and we don't give them their best treatment either. Anyway, everything is now handed in, for better or for worse. I'm going to begin next year's project tomorrow, the first stages.

So, the looms at college are not generally as clean as I'd like them to be. This is to be expected as I'm a little bit odd when it comes to looms. My loom at home is tenderly cared for and loved whenever I see it. Which isn't often, sadly. But heyho. Anyway, I was unhappy using shafts that had all sorts of random, bent, different sized heddles, many on the wrong way round and some crossing each other. So I found a couple of rounds of barely-used heddles in a cupboard and decided to take the old ones off and put the new ones on. Also, I wanted to clean the loom anyway, as I am unhappy with the idea of weaving on an unclean loom, it seems like it'll make the cloth dirty. And I don't want dirty cloth. So, for the first time in this establishment I have orderly heddles. And a clean loom. I don't know if I mentioned that I managed to get texsolv put on all the looms instead of the manky old cotton string, so now we get better shedding. Hurrah! I love

Whooo! CONDUCTIVE YARN!! Like, actual yarn, not something with a continuous filament of steel in it, which is basically wire! Well easy to work with, happy days :) I wanted to make a square wave generator, but I haven't figured out a good way to sew on the IC's. They're a little fiddly. Also, I can't find my wee baggy of 555's, so I'd have to use half a 556 instead and that seems wasteful. So, you might not be able to see the traces that well, on the left hand side I measured out a little over 1kohm worth of yarn and darned it back and forth as a resistor. So that's cool. Everything else is just embroidered in. As you can see it works. So that's a start  * * * I have a new blog, brew4drunk , detailing my fun and trials learning to brew wine, beer and other forms of alcohol * * *

There are two seperate packs of 20 cards here, each working independently and then together. The left hand pack is threaded in the Z direction, the right hand pack is threaded S. If you weave them together they form a chevron. If you weave them seperately they form two different twisted bands. So, here I wove them together for a but, then seperated them and wove each pack seperately for 40 picks. I then allowed them to follow their natural twist and added a little extra in, by turning the band over in their desired direction, cards and all by 360 degrees. Then weave them together again for a bit. And you get this interesting effect. Which is interesting

I apologise for once again using my blog as a placeholder for my notes and planning stuff. It's just quicker typing it out here than writing it down on paper, and if i saved it as a normal document I'd just lose it. Anyway. For the innovation project I will be working from the work I did in last year's innovation project, where I made potentiometers from knitted conductive fabric. I also made knitted pushbuttons. All of which worked, but the potentiometers were a wee bit sketchy. Though, funnily,  they're the part of the project that was picked up by someone else, and was used as the basis of a synthesizer with a knitted textile interface. Simply a 1D potentiometer, with a single variable. Pressing it against a conductive surface at various points along it's length caused the resistance value of the circuit created to vary, thus making the circuit do different things. It was all analog, my good man Tom is all about the analog. This year I want to expand o

Because of Reasons

 This is becoming a real pain the backside. These are 3 sample warps with a mix of card and heddle weaving in them. It works beautifully in theory. In practice it's really bloody hard work. The cards are behind the reed. This is an overslung beater, with box-changing levers above the batten. I have to lean over to turn the cards. They're maybe a little too closely packed so it's difficult to open the new shed, and I have to put backbone into that as well Argh. Why do I do this to myself? Anyway, I also have to hold the heddle-woven ends to the side of the cards on the close of each shed so they don't get all finagled up with the cards and cause me problems. On top of that this loom demands I yank the switching lever to turn the barrel. I should probably put weights on the shafts, but it'll take ages and might not even help. Och, never mind. Anyway, it'll work out in the end. I've also had to abandon one of the warps because it's unwe

 I've had to abandon my last three weeks work because it was chaotic. Frankly, there was no direction to the whole thing. I didn't have the foggiest clue what I was doing, it was going nowhere and it took me far too long to realise that. Heyho. The upshot is that I have to start from scratch and now do 4 weeks work in 1 week. This is called a quick turnaround I believe. People in real jobs do it all the time, it's normal. So, no worries right? I'm not worried, I've got a can of beer and two paracetemol inside me, how can I be worried?  Previously, you see me weaving with sticks, which is a true thing because it is what it is. I am attempting to create rigidity in the horizontal direction. And succeeding, though it's not very stable, because one could quite easily pull those wee coffee-stirrer sticks (which I stole from Subway) out and the thing would fall apart. Never mind, when I do it big scale they shall be held together by steel cable and rivets.

 So, this is kinda good fun. I bought two raw fleeces from Tweedside Jacobs , who have a herd of Jacobs and Gotland sheepies over in Newtown St Boswells (I think, nearby anyway) Nice people, nice wool. So this is my first wee test of a fleece-staple pile technique I'm trying out. I was intrigued at the idea of making a tufted cloak fabric, as is occassionally described in saga and ancient law codes of scandinavia. Apparently they had individual staples of fleece knotted into the cloth. Now I've done pile before, so I figure it's much of a muchness. I am using a normal pile knot, using two warp ends on one side and two on the other. Here I am knotting in the stripes. For one sequence I put the pile in one stripe, then in the other. I count two ends in from the edge of the stripe, then I take the next 4 ends, seperate them and anchor the staple there. Then once finished knotting that row, do two picks and move two threads along until you get to the other side of

So, this is the Texel loom I am using this month. I used one of these last year and it seemed to work. Mostly. Except when it didn't. Sometimes it works fine, which suggests that the mechanism is perfectly capable and has no faults. It can work fine for hundreds of picks. And then sometimes it just stops. Or sometimes it selects the wrong shafts. It's still difficult to know if it's a mechanical fault as I don't fully understand the lifting mechanism and it's difficult to get somebody to sit there doing false weaving while I examine each moving part in detail. However, I suspect it could potentially be a problem with the computer that directs it. Not sure how to diagnose that though. So yeah. For some reason this damn interface isn't letting me insert text next to or between my images. Ridiculous. Anyway, you can see how the computer connec

So. Context: While researching Viking Textiles I have uncovered mention of a fabric named Hodden, which isn't viking, but which I was lead to in my research of information regarding the Viking Wadmal (trade cloth). I quote the Mighty Wiki: " Hodden or wadmel is a coarse kind of cloth made of undyed wool , formerly much worn by the peasantry of Scotland . It was usually made on small hand- looms by the peasants themselves. Grey hodden was made by mixing black and white fleeces together in the proportion of one to twelve when weaving. The origin of the word is unknown.  So, this is interesting isn't it? It raises a lot of questions, firstly, is this cloth an inherited tradition from the Norsemen? If so, was it's status as a trading good continued, or did it become a rough word to describe home-spun rough textiles worn by the poor? Anyway, enough of that. I ask you to look at the above picture of Ben Affleck. Now, we can all agree that he looks

 Well, I'm going to be a little self-indulgent. I again rearranged the room the other day and I'm still quite happy with it. Though I still think the room could do with a little red. In this pic we see the Dryad TallBoy, who is currently unwarped and merely being used to hang tablet bands and unwoven warps on. And the ottoman with a shaggy rug on it, and the laundry basket. I don't know what the laundry basket is doing there. That is not where the laundry basket lives, this crime shall not go unpunished.  Think I've finally figured out what to do with this so-called coffee table. Coffee table my hairy behind, it's nothing but an oversized obstacle when it's lain down upon the ground. When stood up on end it's a very nice set of shelves, just perfect for piling up yarns you don't have space for in your massive box of yarn you'll never get round to using (we've all got one, you know it's true) as well as random unwoven warps from the pa

Doubleface card weaving is actually considerably simpler than it looks, by a good long measure. The basic principle is that you warp your deck up in two colours, with one colour in 2 adjacent holes and the other colour in the opposite holes. Say it's white and black. You then set your pack with all of the white facing towards you and al the black facing away. Now, to make a white-face cloth, you turn the whole pack forward for two turns. the white will now be facing away from you. To continue making plain white you then turn the whole deck backwards for two turns (for clarity, 90 degree turns) Now, if you want to make some black come up on the surface, you take the cards you want to be weaving black and slide them forward, to make a second pack above the first. Now, for clarity, when you're weaving white, what will happen is you'll first turn the white cards once so that all the white threads are on top. then turn them once more so the white threads en

 Potential use of secondary dying to create checked patterns? Could be used to create patterning without extra cost.  Tiny wee bitty red. Expensive stuff, but doesn't it add the cheer, no?  Put a tiny wee bitty red next to a larger area of green and it brings it right up. Something to do with the biology of the eye and the way it perceives red and green. I think it uses the same bits of the eye for both.

. . . or is there something masonic about this motif I've just woven? Can't quite place my finger on it.

This is a tablet-woven QR code. I am very happy with it, because I scanned it with my phone and the phone went straight to this website, which is what I was hoping would happen. I can still not quite believe it actually works. I used QRDroid for Android to scan it, I'm not sure what you'd use on iOS or any other type of phone. There's probably a way of scanning it without using a phone, like copying it to a conversion website or something, but it seems like a bit of a footer, so don't worry about it. You can just take my word for it if you like

Hurrah! It works! It's finally starting to look like the patterning I've seen on Linda Hendricksohn's website. The first band is in progress right now. The second couple of pics are from a warp I was previously working on. I tend to make very long warps, then get bored of them and move onto another one that offers greater possibilities. This warp is using 40 cards of 2/32's cotton. I am using the technique that Linda describes for making her calligraphy bands.  Look, it's an ankh and a pointy manny. You can get quite nice smooth diagonals if you have the cards pointing in a certain direction. Which maybe matters more with chunkier yarns like this. Actually, it's not chunky yarn, it's 8 ends of fine viscose run together as one end in each hole. but the effect is the same. And some more, including a cross and what looks like a christian fish but was actually meant to be the letter A. Something I really like about this technique is it gives y

 A few of these. I've been beating my head against the double-weave badness today. I think I'll need to get some graph paper and try graphing out some lettering. Graph paper is probably the way forward. Go graph paper. I don't think I have any though, and they don't sell it in Tesco. Maybe I can get digital graph paper, like on the interwebs and that. No, apparently not. You'd think there'd be something for just filling in wee boxes with black or whatever. But apparently not.  I think I might have reached the limit of what I can do with regular TW here without turning my brain to custard. I was doing a wee bit of interchanging double warp-face plain weave on the same warp today. You turn the cards so they're kinda on their points, then you have a shed above and a shed below. It's fairly cool, though it's definitely more difficult than it should be to beat back the fell, as far as I'm concerned.  I guess once this is all done, I'