weave4fun

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...

Not much else to say. Sometimes you run out of heddles, or perhaps you have to add one after you're started warping due to a threading error, so here's how I do it.

Hold onto your seatbelts, this episode is action packed.  There's Yarn! There's twist! There's measurement! Precision! Science! And Good Old-Fashioned Textile Testing! What more could you ask for? What's that I hear you say? An explanatory video of the Boyd yarn twisting machine? Well of course good people, that you shall also have! Right after this commercial, for science, precision and textile testing! This is the twist measurement machine This is where the twist is measured. You can widen the gap, but currently it is set at one inch. The twist comes up on this readout. First place one end of your yarn in this little pointed clamp, and fasten tightly. Then take the yarn through the other, open, clamp, over the little guide wheel and through the little eyelet. Now, to keep it taut, you attach a little weight. Bigger weights for heavier yarn, but this is a very light yarn, so we use a litt...

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...

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 * * *

Very auspicious isn't it? I apologise for the video being on it's side. I haven't used this camera to take video properly before, that's my excuse. Anyway, that's an 8 needle, 200 course strip of knitted fabric, the yarn is six ends of really-rather-fine 2 ply silk/steel (1 ply silk, 1 ply steel) run together. when it's scrunched up together it's resistance changes and the little LED gets brighter as it's being fed more of that juicy current it loves so much (I = V/R, innit) I have also used these to create press pads by seperating bits of this conductive fabric with non conductive loosely knitted wool fabric. when pressed the two layers puch through the intervening layer and make a contact. it's pretty cool. Tonight I connected some of these sensors up to some square wave generators I made last year. Now I can make an array of hideous squealing sounds by squeezing these things. If I want to make any deeper sound I'm going to need mu...

Getting ready to put as large a warp as possible on my 4-shaft bigloom, it occured to me that since buying the thing, i've never counted the heddles. So i did, and it turned out they were unevenly distributed across the shafts, which isn't much good is it? So, i took the frames apart, recounted all the heddles along with the spares and find i have about 1000 metal heddles. Which is nice. Making a warp of 30epi, as i tend to do (based on 2 ends per dent on a 14 dent reed on my table loom), that should give me a warp of a width of, ooh, let's see 1000 % 30 = 33.33' So, about 2 and 1/3rd feet or so. which i suppose ain't bad. but if i want to ever consider weaving silk i'm gonna need a lot more heddles like. Now, as i'm in the mood, i might as well calculate the metreage of a 4m warp of 1000ends which isn't difficult, that's 4 KM of yarn. not bad. Am i wittering? Maybe Anyhow, I'm making a warp with blue and grey yarn running concurrently, to make a...