weave4fun

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