weave4fun

This has been a long summer. During the summer here the majority of the student body goes off to work or stay with parents or to placements or on holiday. I have become rather attached to my house and wanted to work to gain experience so I decided to spend the summer. For two months so far, and one yet to come I am working two jobs. In the first instance, I have been employed as a wandering dogsbody-type in a large mill in Peebles known as Robert Nobles, the RN is actually the name of the apparel fabric brand, and when working for the design team I have been working entirely with the Replin team, who are responsible for high performance upholstery fabric for rail and air. When I'm not working with them, I'm usually in the lab helping out with fabric analysis, counting ends per inch, measuring yarns and so on. It's more interesting than it sounds ;) In the second instance I have been working for the college repairing the handlooms in the weave shed on the remaining ...

I've been working like a MotherTrucker recently (got that off a mate one facebook, it's pure gold isn't it?) and not been having much time to think about college work or that. I have however been keeping myself active at the weekends (if I allow myself to get into a low energy condition it's difficult to get back up and leads to unpleasant mondays) by making kumihimo braids. It's kinda fun and it makes lots of useful stuff. Very good for getting rid of small amounts of posh yarn as well. Kinda time consuming, but it's not like i've got anything else to do at the weekend except cleaning and reading, so it's nice. Good for the hands. You'll notice a shaggy rug as well. I'm keeping quiet on what I'm making this with for the time being as they're potentially an economically sensible product as the materials are cheap and they don't take long to weave. They're also much nicer than any rag-rugs I've ever made. I just need to ref...

I was having dinner with a freind from college on Friday (it time out i know how to use chopsticks despite never having done so before, which is a nice surprise) and we got onto the subject of Japanese crafts which reminded me of Kumihimo which I was briefly interested in a few years ago. So I decided to make a Marudai, which is a circular braiding stand with a hole in the middle for the braid to go down. It can be emulated with a piece of card with slots around the edges, but that seems inelegant to me. I bought a secondhand coffee table from a furniture store down the street and drilled a hole in the top, after subjecting the front room to a metaphorical representation of the English Civil War. Now I am constructing the Heart Braid from Paulette Adam's website

I needed a wallet, then a freind who was clearing out her house gave me some scrap leather which she had leftover. Then I bought all the appropriate accoutrements for stitching leather and here we are

I've done lots on the dobby control box. I was originally thinking along the lines of using solenoids as the pull, but for various reasons I have decided to go with servo motors. you want reasons? you got 'em. 1: servos are plentiful on ebay, solenoids are not 2: servos typically come with female connectors ready to plug into a board, solenoids do not 3: servos are widely used by the R/C people, thus giving me a huge wealth of community feedback and knowledge. Solenoid, though apparently simple, are more difficult for an amateur to learn how to use 4: solenoids need to remain powered constantly while a lift is waiting, servos do not 5: solenoids get hot, servos do not Anyway, now that i've finished slagging off solenoids (i love them really, i make my own out of paper and wire in preparation for the day when i finally crack, go completely off the rails and decide to hand-make 400 solenoids for my own jacquard liftbox) and praising servos to the sky, I should say a little th...

Whoop! Well, that's that warp done with. It was starting to do my brain in. I was getting a LOT of false lifts. When you just tie 8 lags onto a barrel, sometimes one or two of them take it upon themselves to twist slightly causing some of the shafts to not lift the first time. Which is immensely aggravating. But hey ho. Here's the final samples then. And my dog, who will do anything in her power to lie somewhere other than in her bed    

Had a wee holiday. Been back for a week. Took me ages to get threaded up but I got it done. Sadly the sett was all wrong. Far too dense, was causing it to be a very difficult warp to weave. Also, I like a balanced sett, especially when doing tartanish cloth, where it's fairly essential. So I cut it off and resleyed it at 60 epi, 30 for each face and got rid of the stitchers so each layer was completely seperated. It's much better now I think. In this picture you can see a weave that has 4 seperate lagchains, loaded on seperate barrels so they can be changed over relatively quickly. Also, my dog, in the woods, asking politely if I would please throw the stick, whenever I find time. No hurry like.