weave4fun

 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.