weave4fun

  I got new feet for my dewing machine today. Which previously had no feet at all. I got a regular foot, a walking foot and a buttonhole foot. I've been wanting to do some quilting for ages. These are my first three attempts. They don't look as good on the back, there's a bit of fold-over. I guess it'll take a bit of practice and experimentation to get it right. I also made a cushion cover. I have about 40 metres of this fabric, I made it years ago, if anyone remembers my post about sectional warping when I was trying to use up all the yarn in my cupboard before I moved house or something. It's a bit too rough for pillow-cases, but I've also got rakes of fabric for making pillow cases with as well. Also, I was asked for a model shoot of the cape-thing. So there you are. JK, it's still not finished, but the dog's taken to it nonetheless -Andrew

I've been doing a lot of knitting recently. This being the second semester, we've been tasked with making a fully-fashioned knitted top, to go with a cut-and-sewn jersey dress. I'm not showing you my dress because it's crap. Very little thought went into it, I had limited access to the sewing room, and my skills in that arena are very poor anyway. But that's not what this post is about, it's about the knitted top. And all the other knitting. I bloody well dream about knitting recently. Well, that and colonel Gaddaffi (no shit, I dreamt I took him to a riot, thought it would help him connect with his people) This is the top, as seen when laid out upon my fine and glorious carpet. The funny thing about this top is that it's completely mutated beyond all recognition between initial conception and the putting together of component pieces. What you see here is what has become of "the rib", which was supposed to be a sort of fluffy collar/cuff kind o...

I recently found out how to make wee speakers at the following site: Kit of No Parts It so happens that one of the technicians recently made some conductive yarn for me, stuff that he's been working on recently. So I've been playing about with it. Apparently it could be used for heating in a garment, but i thought I'd use it to make a speaker coil instead. Here's the yarn. See, that's copper wire in it. Very fine, but it weighs up as something like 300 tex, because of it's density in comparison to a normal yarn. This is the magnet i used:  On the left here is the second, larger and neater, speaker coil i made. It wasn't any louder than the first one, which you see on the right. I have attached the first speaker to a wee bit of quilty-bit, and have got the magnet sewn in. It just so happens that the first, messy speaker I made is about the same size as the magnet. I figure it makes no odds making it bigger as the magnet can only be adjacent ...

And one completely off-topic post. But hey, I'm allowed, they overthrew a dictator. Good for them, I'm totally in support of that, it's brilliant. Go Egypt, woohoo, and so on. But back to topic anyway. So, the indecision part of this last few months has been due to having to decide at some point before may whether I'm picking knit or weave next year. Easy decision, surely? Well, not as easy as you'd think. After all, there is a healthy living to be made in machine knitting apparently, in this country even (imagine that! making a decent living without selling my soul or moving to the other side of the world to oversee hundreds of slave-labourers!). And I was starting to get bored and frustrated with the limits placed upon me in the weave department regarding what i was doing. So I have been seriously considering knit, simply for the reason that I'd be able to make a proper living when I came out of I'm honest. But at the end of the day, that isn't...

 Yo-Yo-Yo! 24-shaft weavin in the house yo! i think that's enough pretend hip-hop talk for now, eh? so yeah, here are three of the more successful results of my cotton warp on 24 shafts. i am really beginning to envy the 3rd and 4th years working on compu-dobby systems now. you spend 2 hours weaving and 2 hours making a peg plan, and it hurt my back putting little pegs into little holes. and of course all the little pegs and the little holes are almost imperceptibly different sizes, so not all pegs fit all holes, and sometimes you have to stuff wee bits of yarn in as well to get them to stay. and then sometimes they're not far in enough and they jam the dobby mechanism, and sometimes they're too far in and they jame the dobby mechanism. and sometimes a link breaks and the whole mechanism jams. and sometimes all the shafts lift at once and you can't figure out why. and sometimes shafts just bounce off their strings and you can't figure out why, ...

I am currently in the process of designing a triple layered fabric. One layer shall carry conductive warp threads (one out of every three), another layer shall carry conductive weft threads (again, one out of every three) and a third layer shall lay between them and act as an insulator, keeping them apart and preventing unwanted contact between the two conductive layers. Constructing a treble cloth is a compicated process. The way that a treble cloth is woven is that first the face cloth is woven, then the centre cloth is woven, then the back cloth is woven. This is a draft for a treble cloth. The crosses indicate weaving marks for the cloth currently being woven, the dashes are lifts and are used to indicate shafts that are being lifted in the case of layers that are above the layer currently being woven. Blue is back, Red is front, Green is centre (All three layers are plain weave btw) The cloth is constructed like so 1: Back cloth is woven. All red and green marks are lif...

i've been having fun today, weaving away and making up new drafts.  This is a selection of the drafts i've been making up as I idly whittle my time away, avoiding doing what i'm supposed to be doing in my timetabled class time. Also what I've been doing at home when i should be studying for a test on colour chemistry, which isn't going to be easy. We're also going to get tested on weave structures and processes, but I know most of that and besides it tends to conform to logical rules. Colour chemistry and dyeing and all that though you just have to know. I guess there probably is some logical consistency to it, but probably only if you already happen to be shit-hot at molecular chemistry and physics and biology. Which I'm not  I've also been weaving away (as I say) and have just finished my first sample of a pattern repeat i took from the knotwork book i mentioned before. It's working out rather well, although you can blatantly see the reed lines i...