weave4fun

my house is almost empty now. i have no looms. so i'm weaving on a frame. you could say i've got piles. knotted piles. sounds painful doesn't it? i'm practicing on the little frame before i make something on the big frame. i want to make a big square piece out of two length sewn together, for sitting around on the ground on. i haven't done any weaving for a while and it's nice to do something simple, with equipment that anybody can get hold of. i won't be able to keep a loom in my new house cos it's tiny, so i have to learn how to weave this way. i think one could make quite substantial rugs by sewing strips together. we'll see. -andrew

The one with the green is going for £50 The one with the lamp thing is going for £30 cos the end-finishing is cruder and i don't know what the design's all about These have a lovely feel to them, as the base fabric is 100% wool. They're very soft and pliable. I'll have some larger mats ready for next month. then i'm going to get on with making a few hammocks. I'm bored of making scarves just now oh, as it goes, does anyone here have any suggestions/examples of a good way to roll a blog and a shop up together into one package? I don't really have time to learn to do a load of new programming, so it has to be fairly simple. I'm sure i could create paypal, ebay, folksey (what's that american one called, i can't remember) accounts and so on and link to them from one central place, but it seems somewhat inelegant. It makes more sense to try to encourage people to buy in one place rather than having myself scattered over 10 different auctions. i could ...

but that's what it makes me think of. the little bit at the top is supposed to be a candle flame or something, but it looks more like a little upside down cross. it was going to be a boring experiment in circles, but then i got bored. then it was going to be a question mark containing the eye of horus. then i decided i couldn't be bothered thinking that hard. so there you go this is 5epi, which gives me 2.5 knots per inch. the knots are slightly wider than they are tall. i think if i cram the warp a little bit more, say 8epi, then it might get close to square, which is my goal, so i can plan pictures on a square grid and work from that. the red stuff is New Fez rug wool from texere. the brown and the white stuff are both berber rug wool from the same company. i'm interested in where it's sourced from (north africa maybe, being berber wool, bit obvious really). it's not the most consistent yarn i've ever used, but i like it nevertheless. it's rug yarn obvious...

Is very time consuming, but i do enjoy it. you get a very satisfying, tactile, squeezy thing. this all happening in my new decluttered front bedroom which is now a combination loom, art, computer and tea-drinking room. on the left there you may notice a fuzzy thing on a red box. it's not a 2 dimensional caterpillar, but just a wee initial mucking about with the pile thing. this box isn't perfect for the task given, as you may notice that, apart from the picture being 90 degrees of rotation from true, the sides of the box aren't straight at the bottom. and there's no elegant way around that. i could also use the recycling box from the council, but then i wouldn't have anything to leave my recycling to gather dust and spiders for months on end in. and wouldn't that be awful. the other thought that this gave me was that if you treated the rectangular plastic box as the basic unit of tat storage when travelling, then you've always got a loom handy, cos you carry...

Well, it's been a little while. this is only a narrow warp really. have to do sums to figure out how many ends there are. damn, i've forgotten long multiplication. 16 x 24 = 384 ends i am a slave to the calculator on my phone. in much the same way i am a slave to my lighter. through intellectual and physical laziness i'm using some of the stuff i got from those folks down south. i just thought to make stripes of blue and green seperated by fine lines of yellow, and i got this when i wove with even picks-to-ends pretty chuffed i reckon. this is a good long warp though, and i really have very little of the blue left. maybe not even enough to make one full scarf length in this style. i'm not really sure if i have that much green either to be honest. the only of those colours i have a lot of is the yellow and using yellow as a dominant weft in this fabric would be a bloody awful idea i reckon. i probably have some other yarns that are "close enough" so never mind....

i'm having a bit of fun, making samples for curtains. i figure it's nice for the sun to shine through, as these aren't insulation curtains, but decorative curtains. the sett here is 8, 16 and 32 epi. the weave looks most even in the 16 epi sections, with the 32 epi sections having quite a steep diagonal twill line. the thing is, na dmany of you will no doubt have come across this, that if one gives it a firm beat, it tends to beat the whole weft right down to the fell, causing a waving fell, with the close-sett sections pushing themselves forward. quite a hideous effect in my opinion. so one needs to keep a very light beat, that only press the weft down the fell on the close sett without putting any pressure on the loose-sett sections. it's not easy is it? the changing of beat isn't particularly noticeable in 32 and 16 epi stripes, but in the middle it's very noticeable. with groups of weft threads bunching together, giving quite a variation. i don't think i...