End of the Year Report

Several of the blogs that I read have a year end review of their work, so I decided to put together what I did this year.  It was fun to do, I had to do some additional photography, but I think I got all my projects included.

January

Stitch Sampler

Shawl Sampler

I took a class in Russian Shawl knitting and spinning.  I learned to spin on a Russian spindle, knitted some beautiful pieces, and instead of knitting a shawl, bought one from the teacher!

 February

Knitted a scarf for a friend

Knit and felted a bag

Hand spun and knit socks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

March

Left over hand spun for second pair

My favorite self striping yarn for socks

A new sock pattern with lace at the toe

 

Here I used self striping sock yarn to weave a scarf then added gold beads.

 April

 Although this picture shows unfinished socks, I finished this pair of St. Paddy's Day socks.  My sock knitting is usually done at work between taking phone calls.

May

Loved these fingerless mitts on the cover of Knitting Traditions.

Finally finished the weaving to make the Pin Keeper on my Bobbin Lace Pillow.

  June

Again my favorite sock yarn in rainbow!

A hat to match the hand spun, woven scarf

July

Over dyed some shirts

7 yards of shirt fabric

 

 

Fabric for the film set

Two gray blankets for the film set

First try with alpaca for pillow tops.

August

First try at the corespun rugs

Second corespun rug, I love the colors.

Moses look a like fabric for the film

Socks from work in Harry Potter colorway.

Ground loom for film set

Second warp weighted loom

Third warp weighted loom for film

Me at the film set with the first loom

September

Second warp for rugs

I got some with stripes

A couple that the yarn was varigated

and a wonderful white cloud with a pillow.

October

I put a dummy warp

on my Baby Wolf loom

and just kept retying new scarfs

in different colors

and different yarns.

Got another pair done at work

Wound a space-dyed yarn to give Faux Ikat!

 November

Kept adding new warps

to the dummy warp

for a total of eleven warps.

I usually wove two scarves

on each warp, some were

identical twins, some were

fraternal twins, you can see

some of the similarities in the

pictures, but I finally decided

that I had done enough scarves.

My last pair of  work socks.

First pair of unemployment socks

Knit some Soot Sprites...need to do more of these.

December

20 yards of warp yielded nine beautiful rugs from the core spun yarn.

Finally finished the knit shawl

A new table mat for the kitchen.

Head band test for my sisters headband.

Bag from a single strip of weaving.

Loved the hat pattern, had to knit it, love the wearer, too.

Wow, I managed to do more that I thought.  Of course, not working for a couple of months gave me more time at the looms.
I don't know what the new year will bring, but happy crafting to all of us.
  

It's January in a new year. Do you know what your Looms are doing?

I have been weaving a lot on the warps that were put on my loom last month.  And I have been getting started on the painting I wanted to do on my time off. 

The first two months of my severance has been spent enjoying the time and holidays with my family and friends.  But for the last two months, before I really start looking for a job, I will be trying to finish some of the list of projects that I had wanted to do.  

I have been painting the stair risers and side trim.

Refinishing under the bathroom cabinet from the water damage.  We replaced the sink and the faucets.

Just started the primer, you can see the water problems.

Primer coats finished, It looks a lot better.

And I want to paint the wall along the down stairs to put up some pictures.

 

 

Fixed the wall damage and primed the spots.

But back to the topic at hand...What are my looms doing?   

I have been getting some weaving done since the job loss, so I am pleased with the work done this past year, but there is still LOOM work to do.

The Big Mac (Macomber) is working well in a semi-tidy studio.  I am proceeding on the long term project of weaving a Tea Towel Calender.  Here we see hand painted, linen blend towels for October.

 The Baby Wolf sits in the corner of my bedroom with the December towels of the above calendar project.  This threading will be tied to a second green warp for the companion towel.

The Baby Mac sits in it's temporary space in the livingroom.  This is the second of the three warps that were wound for the class time.  I already wove off warps one and three.  I don't know where this loom is going to call home...

The Bergman sits un-sanded, un-oiled, and un-warped.  This is the loom that is replacing the Baby Mac in the livingroom...when am I going to get it done?  I have all the equipment to do it, the sand paper and oil are even hiding behind the right panel.

Dorothy is stashed in the storage room.  At least there is a different warp from the last January's picture.  This loom holds a warp until I need to put a new one on. I use it for class examples and to have a loom the students can try a new technique on.

And my poor Rigid Heddle and Inkle looms stashed in the closet with my class notes and examples.  The RH still has the same warp on it from last January (oh dear), but at least I have moved it out of the family space.  I need to get that sample done.

Teaching and Warping

A friend of mine was not able to take a private lesson last week, and I was able to fill in.  The student was interested in getting back into weaving and improving her warping.  So in our class, she warped my Baby Mac three times in three days.  She also wound on a 6 yard hairy linen/cotton slub yarn on my Big Mac and I warped a towel warp on the Baby Wolf to use for weaving and tension correction helps.

I wove the first warp that night after she left for the day.  It was a short warp for a runner.  (She was not interested in getting a project out of the lessons, she just wanted to improve her process.)   I wove a table mat to go in the kitchen.

Table mat woven but not washed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Third warp for a one strip bag.

The second warp was narrow and long.  I just took it off the loom after the lesson was over, there wasn't time to weave it.  I will put it back on later to weave.  The third warp was also narrow and long.  I want to try to make the one strip bag from donisdelis.blogspot.com.  She has a great little bag that she folds so that there is no cutting.  I have been interested in that bag for a while but I did not have a strip of weaving to try it.  These pieces may be a little stiff because I was using 3/2 pearl cotton for these warps.  We will have to see what happens.

The warp on my Baby Wolf is a UFO, one of the "100 projects to finish"!  I am thrilled to get it on a loom to weave.  It is a fairly easy weave.  The worse part is the single shot of boucle that I have to weave every 20 or 24 shots.  You can see the shredded and tucked in ends on the left in the picture.  I usually trim 3 or 4 at a time.  After I weave the towels on this warp, I am going to tie on a green warp and do the companion towel.

This pattern is from an old Finnish weaving book that I have.  The lace blocks were only about a half inch in the book, because the structure is for a summer dress fabric.  I enlarged both the size of the blocks and the size of the yarn.  The structure ends up being a 3 thread huck lace.

The last warp is on the Big Mac, and is another UFO and "100 projects".  It is another towel.  This towel is just plain weave with stripes of painted warp.  I painted yarn for the stripes about 3 years (or more) ago...

Winding on the warp with a raddle.

Weaving the towels.

Repairing a knot in the warp.

I noticed a knot in the painted warp, and I always paint a couple of extra warps for repairs.  I pinned in the extra warp about an inch and a half before the knot and wove until it was about an inch and a half past the knot.  I put a small safety pin in the selvedge to mark the knot so that I can cut it out when the towels are off the loom.  This way, you will hardly be able to see the repair and I will not have a knot in the weaving.

Tonight when I walked upstairs and looked out the window I saw a beautiful sunset. 

Nice way to end the day.

Emptied a Couple of Looms

I have been getting a lot of weaving done, but only on a couple of the looms.  Unfortunately, the Dorothy and the Baby Mac are still waiting.  I need to work on them this week to clear out some space for the holidays.

On the Baby Wolf, the dummy warp held up well and I managed to get 12 warps tied on and woven off.  I did two scarves on each warp. Because I had small amounts of each color, I needed to put on many small warps instead of one long one.  But that way I got a lot of different colored and designed scarves.   It was fun to design to fit the colors and yarns that I had.  One series was in natural alpaca colors and I wove about 12 scarves.

This picture shows a nice selection of the natural colored scarves.  I wove a short length, for under a coat,  and a longer length, to tie fancier knots.

The colored scarves also came in two lengths (I call them men's (short) and women's (long).  Although anyone can wear them,  I guess I call the short one men's because that is the way my husband likes to wear his scarves and I like to loop mine around a couple of times so I need a longer scarf. 

The Baby Wolf is now empty, but I want to put a Christmas towel on this week.  I don't plan on finishing it for Christmas, but I just want to weave one of the projects that have been sitting around for years waiting for me.

I wove off the shawl for me on the Bag Mac, but I have not gotten around to twisting the fringe or anything.  I just wove it off, folded it into a bag  and put on 20 yards of rug warp to weave rugs. 

I had not put on a "sectional" warp for a long time.  In fact, I'm sure this is the first one that I have put on this loom.  (I did quite a few on my old loom, but not as many really long warps since I got this loom.)  Needless to say, I had some problems.  It seems I am still not able to count!  It looks like I wound different amounts in each section.  I was trying to wind 27 wraps on each section (my beam is 3/4 yard in diameter).  Oh well, at least I got the rugs all done and did not have to re-warp to finish.

The first section ran out at the end of the eighth rug.  Since rug #9 was leftovers, I only wove a 2' x 4' rug, so I pulled out that section and several others on the two selvedges.  But as you can see from the picture by time I was done with the ninth rug, my poorly measured sections really showed.


In weaving the rugs, the Macomber is a heavy loom, but I ended up adding weight to the beater so that the loom worked harder and I did not have to.  I wrapped five pound ankle weights on each end of the beater.

I think that my looms have used the weights more than I ever used them for exercising.


Because the rugs were so thick, I could only weave two rugs before the cloth beam was full.  It was almost touching the shafts.

There is only about an inch between the rugs and the shafts, not enough for a third rug.  I did not want to waste warp on tying knots, so I glued a dowel on the warp, cut in front of the dowel and then laced the dowel onto the cloth beam rod.  That way I only lost a couple of inches at each cut, and maintained the tension.

  Above you can see the black/tan yarn for the hem, then blue and white waste yarn, the dowel and then purple and white waste, ready to cut then start the hem for the next rug.  I put white glue in a double row about an inch from the hem.  When it is dry I cut between the two rows of glue and lace the dowel on.

I managed to get 9 rugs woven with the materials provided by the spinners and got them in the mail to the owner to give as Christmas presents.  This is the heavy corespun llama/alpaca fiber from the growers that Spinderella spins up and I am weaving rugs for her.

This series was for 3' x 5' rugs.  There are 8 rugs that size and a bonus rug that I made from the leftovers of the "bumps".  (The yarn comes in bumps of about 200 yards.)

Here is a picture that I took of the group of rugs.

I was really pleased with the rugs.  When there was 2 or more "bumps", I wove a solid colored rug.  Then, I started designing stripes with the remaining colors.  I love the shaded colors like the third rug from the left.  The fleece was different shades of color and when it was spun there were changes in the colors.  This gives the rug a shaded effect. 

I also liked a couple of the striped rugs.  The main color on this one was a larger bump, so I just added the dark stripes from what was leftover from the dark stripe rug.  

 

A couple of times I mis-figured the amount of yarn for one stripe rug and used the remainder on another rug.

It was a nice weaving experience and I hope I will get to do it again for another fiber grower. 

I need to Get Some Looms Emptied

I have been looking at four looms that need to have warps woven off for various reasons.  

The Dorothy has had a double weave warp on forever.  It is a narrow warp and do I really need to weave it or can I just trash it...I have problems with that.

The Baby Mac has the leftovers of a workshop this summer with Robyn Spadey.  The workshop was wonderful and I enjoyed weaving several great structures.  My loom has corduroy left on it.

The Baby Wolf has the dummy warp from the previous post.  I have continued to weave scarves and the dummy warp has behaved just great.  

The Big Mac needs to have the Faux Ikat woven off so that I can weave the rugs that need to be done by the end of the month.

I want to take the workshop with Judie Eatough that the guild is having.  Since I am not working now, I have the time and I would love to spend 3 days with my weaving friends.  I don't want to take the Dorothy, so cross that one off the list.

The Baby Mac will fit in my car, so I decided to work on it.  I invited my weaving study group to come and weave a sample of corduroy so that I could empty my loom.  They did a pretty good job, but there was enough left for a good sample showing different densities of pile...

Meanwhile, we got a new car...yea, I can now travel my Baby Wolf and then I could do an eight shaft pattern instead of a 4 shaft.  So forget the Baby Mac and put more time on the Baby Wolf.  I have been doing great with the scarves, but I do not want to take off the dummy warp until they are all done.

I have become pretty fast with the weaver's knot

Number 10 warp looking good

I'm getting lots done on the scarves, but I also have to be working on the Big Mac to get the shawl off and get started with the rugs.

For my Faux Ikat technique, I wind the commercial hand painted yarn so that the colors "pool".  It is pretty funny because I hate to have my yarn pool in knitting, but I work hard to get it to on the weaving.

Here's the warp on the loom.

 I decided to use a plaited twill for the structure and found a ten shaft one that I liked.  I ended up using twelve shafts because I did not have enough heddles on shaft one and two.  But it worked out well.

Aurora Borealis

The finished shawl looks great and I love the structure.

In fact, I liked the twill so well, when I found another skein of painted warp when I was cleaning up, I decided to tie it on the ends and weave another  shawl.  This one is for me.  

Here's my warp wound, in the bag and ready to take to the loom

When I started tying on the warp I realized that this is a different yarn, instead of three plys, this one is two ply and I have more ends when I finished the warp.  I had to add warp ends to the loom (twice because I obviously can't count) and I had to use all my repair heddles and even add string heddles to get the full width threaded.

Here you see the pink I added first then the blue that I needed.

 Because this yarn is thinner, I also needed to resley, but that is quick.

Beautiful warp ready to find a good weft for it.

My workshop came and I did not have a loom empty.  I attended without a loom and found that I got help with my weaving program and am able to look at it and feel I can use it.  Before I felt every time I started working with the program it was an exercise in frustration.  I took the lap top and worked on my program.

Judie is one of the top teachers in the nation about weaving programs and she was more that happy to help me get started learning my program.  I got to spend the three days with my weaving friends and watch the samples that they were doing...some really cool designs.  I  had some of my beginning weaving students learn some fun new stuff.  But I came home early Saturday with a cold that I caught from the Mr.  

Today I feel better after spending 24 hours in bed.  Maybe now I can get one of these looms emptied!!!

I'm not supposed to be the dummy when using a dummy warp!

I know I'm not supposed to be the dummy, but with this dummy warp I sure have been.  

I made a commitment to weave some scarves.  I have two weights of yarn, decided on two sizes of scarf, and need to do two patterns (due to the colors of the two yarns).  I planned for the fine yarn to be woven in a Dornik twill, because I have two colors and white of that yarn.  (I will use a color and white for each set of scarves.)  For the heavier, I have several colors, so I plan to do stripe sequences in straight twill.  This will give a good variety of scarves and will test the weights and the time it takes me to weave them.

After thinking about the problem of putting on several different colored warps, I decided to have a dummy warp so that I would not have to re-thread each time.  (A dummy warp is one that stays on the loom and I just retie each color of warp on the already threaded ends.  It will save time and effort as I weave the four to eight different warps.)  I will keep the lease sticks in the dummy warp so that I can use the center section for the narrow width scarves and then add the side warps when I do the wider scarves.  I even figured out that with the eight shaft loom, I can thread a straight draw ( shafts 1 through 8) and weave the straight twill scarves, then change the tie up to do the dornik twill (without having to rethread the dummy warp)...I though I was so smart.

And it started out so well.  I found some old yarn in one of my storage bins (yeah, a little de-stash) to put on a 2 yard dummy warp.  It was only 120 ends for the widest scarf in the fine yarns that will weave at 12 epi  (the heavier yarn is 10 epi so it will only use part of the dummy warp).  I decided to start with the narrow fine thread warp, so I only threaded the center warps on the dummy.  I wound the warp for two scarves and started tying it on.  I was surprised to find that I had too many warp threads in the scarf...quick check and I realized that I had planned for 20 repeats of 4 threads and I wound 20 repeats of 8 threads...!?  That's ok, I can just weave a second set of scarves with the warp.  


My next surprise can when I tested the wash-ability of the yarn.  It was labeled super-wash wool/alpaca/nylon.  But with the sett I used, when I threw it in with my delicate machine wash, it really felted down.  It still feels real soft and it is not stiff at all, but it is really smaller than I wanted.

Great pattern, but not quite right.

I decided to just label them hand wash and continued with the weaving.  I ended up with two scarves that will be great.  I will just hand wash them to close up the weave some, but not as much as the washed sample.


Next problem is to put on the second half of the warp that I had wound in error.  I decided to make this warp wide for the second size of scarf.  This size is more of a men's design where you just fold it over under the coat.  Since this size is wider and shorter, I figured that folding the warp in half would work.  I just needed to thread up the two sides of the dummy warp so I can tie on the full width.


First BIG whoops, when I threaded the center of the dummy warp, I didn't leave a number divisible by 8 on each side.  In other words I only had 22 threads to fit into 24 heddles that I needed for the dornik pattern.  The extra two warps were left at the other side of the threaded ones.  So...I have to re-thread the dummy so that I have shaft 1 through 8 on all the repeats...Only 120 ends so just a short while, but isn't that why I put on a dummy warp...so I didn't have to rethread?


I tied the warp on the first half of the ends, and proceeded to fold the warp and tie the other end of the 5.5 yard warp to the remaining dummy ends.  Next BIG whoops.  About an inch in I found that I had tied 3 tan ends instead of the four needed for the pattern.  

"I'll just add another end after I wind the warp on the loom."


Several minutes later I realized that with the color and weave pattern that the dornik twill is, I had thrown off the whole pattern by putting 3 ends on the one section...


After I wound the warp on the back beam, I rethreaded the warp to have the colors and the threading match for the pattern.  Wait, I rethreaded AGAIN?  Where is this dummy warp saving any time or effort.


Who is really the "dummy" here?