weave4fun

So, today I present a wee photo essay on picking up and placing the cross in multi-end stake warping. When you first see this done it looks like magic and if you're like me and you started making warps one end at a time you'll be delighted by how much time you save here. The first thing you need is a spool holder with an upper and lower section and an eyelet above each spool stand. You place your first end in the top and your second in the bottom, and so on, for each section of your repeat. If you have a lot of spools and a simple warp you can warp with as many spools as your stand can hold. We have an ex-industrial stake warping rig here at college that has about 100 pegs on it, but there's not often much call to use it as we designers don't tend to work in monotones. Anyway, all this is is an explanation of picking up and placing the cross. I forgot to take pictures of the actual spool stand, I'll do that tomorrow Firstly, get your hand betwee

Before I start with the main body of this post, I thought I'd share this. Don't you just hate the way selvedge threads are always breaking because you don't use a temple because they leave nasty holes in the cloth, are a pain to move and anyway, whatever? This obviously doesn't apply to those blessed by the rolling temple, you lucky people you. Anyway, check it out. It's an elastane yarn that's been twisted with 2 plys of worsted, to make a 2/48Nm yarn with a composition of 97/3 worsted/elastane. The worsted has been competely worn away by the reed, yet the elastane filament holds out. Cool huh? Now check out these awkward guys here. The way this cloth is constructed is that there are 4 main blocks. The black is woven on the first 4 shafts, to make a 2/2 twill, and the colours are woven on 3 seperate 6 shaft blocks. the whites are on 5-10, the lights on 11-16 and the darks on 17-22. The back two shafts have some spare heddles for in case I fe

What's wrong with this picture? That's right, I made a boo-boo. One of those black bars is narrower than the others. It's not supposed to be. So what happened? Yup, I sleyed the same dent twice. I didn't do my checks thouroughly enough, I made a mistake and didn't notice it until I was several inches into the cloth. Thank goodness I'm only designing and not producing, or else I'd have had to cut off, resley and tie on again.   I consulted with a classmate and she concurred with me that the simplest thing would be to simply cut out the extra white ends. That way the black would fill up and look better and the slight narrowing of the white band is not quite as noticeable either. Also, the handle I was going for is retained. So that's good. Anyway, there we are. It's not perfect, but it'll have to do. It's quite possible noone would notice except me. Though I know I'm the kind of person who's going

So, yeah, a lot of rags. The sewing workshop has recently bagged up a great deal of fabric waste, which I have taken, in order that my rug loom may never go hungry. I am currently sorting these rags by colour. I am less than a quarter of the way through what i have the now, which is less than a tenth of what is available and i have a whole sack of black and a whole sack of beige, and half a sack of white and multiple bags of other colours. It may seem a little mad for me to be filling me itny house with all this scrap, but the idea is that at some point in the future I'll be either partially or wholly unemployed (who knows what the future holds?) and this is my bank. When money is rare and time plentiful there'll be plenty time spare to weave rag rugs. Rag rugs from this kinda material are relatively time-consuming to make, but on the other hand you can be a bit more arty with them as you're only working with little bits so you can be a bitty tapestry-like with it

This is how I always try to sley the reed. You can't do it this way on a table loom usually as that's the way they're built, but I expect there's always a way to work this way on any floor loom. Firstly, I've removed the beater and breast beam from this loom in order to thread the heddles. Once the heddles are threaded, I hang the reed in front of the shafts. This reed is 41" wide (I had to cut it down to fit, but that's ok, cos this is the widest of the beaters we have) and my warp is set 40" wide, so I just start, like, a dent or two in from the side, do all the difference it makes. The reed, as you can see, is hanging perpendicular to the shafts (at right angles, if i'm using the right word, i think i am) in order that I can easily get in-about the heddles for to pull out the required number of ends for each dent. Also, not hung so low that my heddling hook has difficulty getting up there. In this instance, I was threading up a pretty c

  To raise money for the New Designers Exhibition, which some of our class will be going to this year in London, we're doing a wee exhibition/sale of work at the Textile Tower House, which is a kind of museum/gallery in Hawick which is obviously focussed on textiles due to the town's long association with the knitting industry. We were all asked to prepare some work to be presented in standard IKEA frames, to make everything nice and simple. These are what I'm sending out, which I took from last year's sketchbook. Just some little collages I did for colour development work in gouache. I think they're quite neat and tidy.