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The first really proper thing I've woven since graduation

Woop!


So, this is largely Roslyn's idea. She had the idea of doing a kind of stepped-backwards grade in blocks on a dogtooth weave. As it goes, I misunderstood her and when she said dogstooth I heard herringbone, which is kinda odd, but it's still a twill I guess, so it works.

Anyhow, we talked over it all night. I say all night, I mean till 1am. We didn't literally stay up all night mucking about with pointpaper and coloured pens. That would be obsessive to the point of compulsion. We might like weaving, but not to the point you'd have to call the men in white coats.

So, anyway, this is going to be a sampler scarf. Now I made a mistake here when I was making the warp. One of the blocks is 4 ends too wide. I wove all this then Ros said "is that bit a bit bigger"? So I took the measure and it was, then I counted the ends and it had 32 instead of 28. So that's annoying. Now, this yarn is expensive stuff so I'm going to actually unpick the weft, untie the starting knots on the left hand side and resley leaving those four ends hanging. 

                                                              

I should add I got the yarn from Weavers Bazaar who have an amazing range of wool yarns in various counts as well as warp cottons and some nettle kind of arty yarns. Now, the problem with having such a huge range of colours (really, just so many, if you're in the UK do go and have a look) is that there's just too much choice. What we did was we bought a shade card from them which has all their yarns in stock. But we were still a little stuck, so what we ended up doing was buying some collection packs. This is from a pink and purple collection pack. As we're largely designing with grading colours this is a really cool way for us to buy yarn. Especially as a designer, it's very useful to get a decent range of colours in small quantities.

The only gripe I have is the price, but that's just the way things go when buying from this kind of online shop. I certainly think we'll keep using them for yarn for our designing, but when we go into manufacturing mode I think we'll have to find a bulk supplier for kilogram quantities. The bulk suppliers don't generally have as much range, but I guess the thing to do is find a company with the a range that roughly fits what you're using and go with that I suppose. That'll be a challenge when it comes, but one thing at a time for the moment.

                                                                   

So, we'll try a bunch of different wefts on this scarf, after I fix my mistake here. That's what we're taught in college, but we also want to actually have a scarf at the end of the day so we'll no be cutting it up and mounting it or anything like that. We also want to do these scarves in different colourways, like maybe 3 or so, so we're also trying to find wefts that'll fit into all 3 colourways so the scarves can be woven side by side on the big loom, when it eventually arrives

                                                                          

Anyhow, that's enough for the night. Do you like my little divider lines? That's me being all professional and that. Good, eh?

Also, I dinnae ken if you all know, but I kinda have a youtube channel, not sure if I mentioned it here before. Mostly videos of tablet weaving, with explaining and stuff. And captions for the deaf and those who can't understand what I'm saying because I don't know how to talk for video well.

Check it out, over here

Comments

Meg said…
I could not resist sharing your bouncy fabric vid on facebook...
25 February 2015 at 21:32
Andrew Kieran said…
wow, that's so long ago. I don't even have any of that yarn anymore
25 February 2015 at 22:16
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