weave4fun

I'm the new weave technician at the college now. How utterly odd, who would have thought things would turn out this way 4 years ago when i started studying here. I am in charge of teaching students how to weave, weaving jacquard fabrics and eventually getting the hattersley working. It is part time so I can create my own collections in my spare time, and begin some serious progress on the lifting box From now on I shall publish videos on youtube and articles and so on on my own webspace www.humbleweaver.co.uk I shall at some point begin selling plastic tablet weaving supplies, don't hold your breath for that though. If you don't find out one way or the other then my advertising strategy shall be seen to be rubbish. I continue to have a really scarce involvement in weavolution, but I'm mainly a youtuber these days. I've enjoyed my journey blogging here and all the lovely people I've met. I started this blog to document my journey in learning how t

So I sold the Dryad loom yesterday. It is gone out the door and shall not return. I also took back all the yarn I'm not absolutely certain I want back to the college because most of it came from there anyway. I retain a small amount of wool and silk and stainless steel yarn too. This is all to say things are changing. We've been doing a lot of clearing out over here, I've sold many surplus books on amazon, only retaining the fiction and those which are definitely useful. Beginners weaving books are all sold but all the tablet weaving and historical clothing books have been retained. In time I shall be moving my online weavey presence over to www.humbleweaver.co.uk which shall predominantly be a place where I post notes on my progress in designing a jack loom. It's useful as I can easily give collaborators access to the page with which they can also post or edit. I'm not sure exactly how i'll be using this page in the future, but I suspect that it'll be

test test test

So, I saw a picture of a Hochdorf band woven by a member of the Historic Tablet Weaving group on Facebook. It looks like you can get more detailed patterning with this technique and you also get a nice sort of pebbled effect in the background weave. Anyway, so I googled it and found this webpage  The Warp Factor , with a nice explanation of how to weave this band and a good diagram to go with it that tells you exactly when and where to turn the cards. Nice stuff. This is my second attempt at Hochdorf patterning. First was in acrylic to work out the technique and the use of the board. Second in 2/60's silk, to make something extra special nice. This is my new weaving board. It's a bit scrappy but it does the job. there's a few wee annoying problems with it, but the next one will be better. This is how tension is maintained on the band, with a nice even consistency. The main part of the band is held as one with a bag full of weights. The selvedge table

Spent the last week (or so) at New Designers in London (LaaaaahnDaaaaaahn, innit guv). New Designers is an annual exhibition of work by graduates from colleges all over Britain. Anyhow, it was absolutely amazing. It's generally considered rude to take pictures, but let me tell you some of the 3D design work was simply jaw dropping. Here's some of my display anyway. I had a few useful conversations, of which more shall be said later. The week was very useful and completely exhausting (as all trips to London inevitably are) and we're glad to be home. Now I'm off out back to cut my loom-wood down to size so I can get it into the house.

I've been thinking about it for a while to be fair. What I'm thinking about is an 8 shaft folding jack loom. The interesting part comes when I point out that I'm going to build an electric dobby controller into the bottom of it so it operates from one pedal and a computer program. So far I've been thinking and thinking and I'm basically roughly copying the kind of frame you'd find in a Siever's school or Baby wolf loom. Basically it's like an X that folds up on itself with the castle in the middle. Should be able to reduce it's depth from 3 feet to about 1 for storage. I don't think it's really that difficult to design the loom frame, aside from building the beams and making the ratchets and so on, which I may just jigsaw out of thick MDF. I have most of the wood I need asides from some panelling and I need to buy some aluminium sheet to make the shaft dividers with and also to hold the shaft bodies together with. The rising levers w

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

I had the priviledge this week of paying host to Laura Fry and Kerstin Froberg. Sadly, they arrived the day before the bank holiday and had to leave the following afternoon so were unable to receive the tour of the School of Textile And Design they were hoping for. Never mind though, as weavers are weavers and we love to talk about weaving. Over dinner and a pint or two we discussed many subjects including Vadmal, the pros and cons of AVL looms and the routes by which each of us came to weaving. It was a very nice evening and a real delight to meet other weavers with such a depth of passion and knowledge. Why I didn't take any pictures I'll never know, I guess I was just too busy chatting away about looms and yarn and going on about how I learned to weave upside down and back to front and made myself do everything the hard way (which stands me in good stead when I have to rescue other people's warping errors). Interestingly, I'd had it in my head the Laura wa

I've just found my new favourite author. Cixin Liu (or is that Liu Cixin, I don't know) is an SF write from China, I have just read a free offering of his from Amazon which you can download for free as an E-book. It's a novella describing humanity's travails in escaping the death of the sun with the earth as our spaceship. To say this this book is epic, majestic and terrifying in it's magnificient concept is a remarkable understatement. But to fail to acknowledge the hope gleaned from finding an author who is willing to conceive of humanity facing up to huge and terrible challenges with stoicism and resourcefulness would be a mistake. The Wandering Earth It's simply unlike anything I have ever read. But what is more remarkable is that it hits the very note that I have been attempting to hit with my last warp Can you see what I'm trying to do? It's supposed to be like a representation of the galaxy as viewed in transit at high spe

I love Jacquard weaving. It's official. You'll probably notice an interesting wee effect there in the black areas of this cloth. The reason for this is that this cloth has 2 layers but 4 different wefts, meaning there's always 2 wefts floating in the middle of the cloth at any time. This is what allows me to weave 4 seperate colours across the width of the cloth. Which is pretty neat. Jacquard weaving is pretty neat, but it's difficult to wrap your head around it unless you start off simple. Luckily, I have a love of geometric patterns.    That's a wee taster of one of my coming final samples. I'm not shouting this stuff to the rooftops.  This is something I find pleasing. My sister's new puppy, Lenny. Thinks he's a draught excluder, currently here trying to get a rise out of my Eris

Did I mention I was making yarn? Probably, I know I've been wittering on about the twisting machine and the twist measuring machine lately. Well, here are my first proper results. The one on the right is called Stretch Starlight and is made with 97/3 merino/lycra with small pieces of English 56 thrown in and the one on the right is called Nebula, which has a greater amount of a longer staple woollen fibre of unknown origin attached to a regular worsted yarn. These yarns are not yet perfect, but I think I'm getting closer. I still have problems with the fibres not binding into the twist perfectly. Of course, the Boyd isn't actually designed in any way to bind fibre into a twist, but it's a wee hack I guess. How are these made? Well, these are what's called Siro yarns. What this means is they're folded yarns made of singles which are practically unspun. In effect this means that when you remove the folded twist what you're left with is roving.