Projects

The theme for this year’s Geelong Scarf Festival was ‘Life on the Land’.

My first entry was My Grandmothers Meat Safe. 

Years ago there was a bad storm in my grandmother’s neighbourhood and my parents who were away at the time asked me to check on her.  I told them she would be fine as she was a resilient woman but went anyway.  As I expected she was just fine and told me that it wasn’t nearly as bad as the 1925 Balranald tornado.  

Apparently she could see the storm coming and gathered her young family into the house and started to wash the dishes in a bowl on the table. The storm hit and the chimney collapsed through the ceiling leaving her with a bowl of broken china, bricks and soot.  Then she said ’we never did find the meatsafe’.  Clearly it had been caught up in the storm and was never seen again, probably taking the meat for the evening meal with it.  This was before refrigeration when food was stored in a mesh sided cupboard often covered with wet cloth strips in an attempt to keep the food cool.  The mesh of the canvas weave in the scarf is for the mesh sided meat safe.

The second entry was a man’s scarf using eco dyed yarns from Charly at Ixchel in a Fibonacci inspired block twill.  The colours reminded me of burnt paddocks

The other entry was a fancy twill in fine cotton, hand dyed in blue, similar to a another scarf I'd made in thicker cotton that matured in the stash for a very long time

Although the official opening was last week and the scarf of the year was announced, there have been no further updates and I’d really like to see something of this year’s entries

We just had a long weekend and the next ‘under wraps’ project – for the Sheep Show this time – is under way.  It will be under wraps for a while, but I can say that I remembered with painful clarity the problems I had last year running out of warp.  I bought yarn on Tuesday and it was a little thicker than my original plan.  I redid the calculations, thought for a moment that it would probably be OK, remembered last year and made another trip to the yarn shop on a wet afternoon to buy some more.  I managed to make a wide warp of fine yarn, about 1000 ends, and get the draft planned.  It’s now wound on and I’m half way across with the threading, seemingly with no errors - I do hope there are enough heddles.  It’s a bit cold in the garage where the Toika loom lives but at the last market I had enough sense to buy a pair of fingerless gloves, they’re working a treat, thanks Monnie.

Colours changed to maintain anonymity but they also match the warp, even in real life.

There’s a bird bath outside my kitchen window and if I don’t keep it filled with water the birds gather on the fence outside until I run out and fill it up.  Nothing works faster on me than 2 rainbow lorikeets, one sitting on the fence and one on the rim looking pathetically into the empty bird bath. These ones are probably holding a meeting to see if they can get it filled

As I was admiring them one day

they turned into my next project – tartan tea towels in lorikeet colours.  I had most of the colours in the stash but needed the right green for their bodies.  None of the colours on my UKI or Brassard sample cards was right.  There was a colour on the Webs website that looked better, but I was worried that the yarn in the hand and the colour on the monitor might not be the same.  On my previously mentioned trip to the yarn shop there was a yarn, a combination probably of a slub and a 20/2 that looked just right.  I bought one cone but realised that I needed more so another good excuse for the second trip.  I’ve been to the ‘Tartan Designer’ site and while there should be a wrapping, yarns going over a peg on the warping mill are almost the same.

I just might have wound that warp instead of working on the Sheep Show project. I had worked out the colours by looking at the pictures and estimating 50% green, 50% other colours and more orange and blue than yellow, lime and rose.  The balance worked and when I saw my finished warp chains, I thought they might just get up and fly away. 

Back to the Sheep Show warp

Helen

It’s almost Mother’s day

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost a month since the craft market returned to its old home under its new name – Hawthorn Makers Market.  It was a great day for a market – warm and sunny but not too hot - and plenty of people. There were of course a few teething troubles as we got our bearings in new surroundings but eventually we all found our places and were ready to start trading at 10. 

One of the major problems was with the café.  They just didn’t understand the 9.45 coffee rush where the stall holders have got everything in from the car and arranged to their satisfaction, and there’s a 15 minute opportunity to grab a coffee before the doors open officially.  I suspected that they also underestimated the number of people and the amount of food needed so we made sure we had lunch early.  Hopefully things will be a bit easier for everyone for the market on Sunday.

Wendy and I had a good day with a reasonable number of sales – tea towels this time but no scarves.  Here are a couple of happy stall holders,

thanks to Gerlinde who paid us a visit, for the photo, and another photo of our stall bathed in morning sunshine

Over the past few weeks I’ve finished and delivered my scarves for the Geelong Scarf Festival, but it’s a long wait until they open and even longer to see if they have sold

I’ve made a new shop fitting for our stall.  For the past couple of years we’ve had 3 cardboard boxes clipped together with a black jersey cover sitting on the back edge of the table to raise the display a little and provide discreet storage for phones, cords, stationery, scissors, bits and pieces and of course cups of coffee.  The cardboard boxes are bulky to carry and almost past their prime so I decided it was time for a change.  I already had 2 folding IKEA boxes, some cord and a toggle. I bought a piece of thin laminate and some firm black jersey fabric. I cut 2 narrow pieces from the laminate, just a little longer and wider than the 2 boxes, cut the jersey just a little smaller to make a firmly fitting cover, put a hem round the edge and inserted the cord and fastened it with the toggle.  I’ve now got something that still provides the discreet storage but is easy to cover because it’s flat with the boxes folded. 

Best of all it will probably save one trip to and from the car when setting up the stall.  I’d include a photo of the finished masterpiece but black boxes are hard to photograph so here it is ready to be transported, including the food container which was just the right size to fit between the 2 boxes and also to hold out ‘office supplies’.  It will probably save one trip in from the car and one another back to the car at the end of the day when every extra trip really counts

As it’s Mothers Day next week, I always like to have some potential gifts at the May market.  I’ve been playing with block twill and eventually found this cone of yarn on the bench, almost within arm’s reach.  The warp is fine black wool and the yarn on the cone was a fine slightly textured viscose.  I used the yarn double and finished it last night.  Off the loom it was a bit firm but after a wash, a press, a cold mangling on the stone benchtop and a few minutes in the spin dryer, it feels just the way it should. It's hard to capture the sheen in the picture of the scarf but it shows up nicely in the detail shot - by the way, the waves are from the drape, not from dodgy weaving

I almost hope it doesn’t sell as there’s not enough of the viscose yarn left to make another and as it was probably a mill end, I don’t think I’ll be able to get any more

There's time to finish a couple more bags before tomorrow, I'd better get on with it

Helen

Galaxies

I mentioned back in May that I had been working on scarves for the Geelong Scarf Festival but that they had to stay under wraps for a while.  Once I sent the 3 scarves off, life got busy and I forgot about them until I went to the post office this morning and found a nice cheque from the Festival as all three had sold.  It seems as though my work appeals to the patrons of this Festival as I’ve sold  10 of the 11 scarves I’ve entered over the past 3 years.

I documented this year’s scarves as I made them but wanted to share some of the details here.  This year’s theme was ‘Galaxies’ and I’ve just heard that the theme for 2018 is ‘Life on the Land’, thank goodness they choose nice broad themes that can be interpreted many ways.

First up was a chenille number.  I’d had a skein of random dyed mock chenille for years and I could just see a brilliant milky way under a velvety black outback sky.  I planned the warp carefully as I only had one cone of the black chenille.  I wanted to space the contrast threads further out at the edges and more densely in the middle.  I calculated very carefully and ended up with 20 threads more than I had planned.  I threaded it according to my plan and realised that if you warp alternate dark and light threads – you get stripes, not stars.  I had to undo what I’d done and put the lease sticks back in.  That’s actually harder than you might think if there’s no-one round to help, but with heavy books on the treadles I managed to get the lease sticks back in and threaded it again, this time with an even number of dark threads between the light ones to give offset dots and some illusion of stars rather than the previously mentioned stripes. 

I was sure that the warp was 4.5 meters long, enough for 2 scarves 2 meters long and some loom waste.  I was a little surprised when I got to the end of the second scarf and still had a meter of warp left.  Maybe it stretched, although it was the right length when wet finished, or maybe the 4.5 meter guide string for the warping mill was actually a longer one in disguise.  I was pleased with the end result,

the colours worked eventually and it had that great rayon chenille silky hand.  I hope the purchaser is enjoying it.

For my next effort I decided to recycle some silk fabric from a window display at work.  At first glance it appeared to be an all over print and even as I seamed the edges together so it would hang well as a backdrop, I failed to notice that it was actually a border print.  Sitting at the front desk, contemplating  the join on the back of it one day, I realised that it was in fact a border print. 

I had to think about it for a while to get the best from the design but I cut the fabric in half crossways and started to cut narrow strips from the darker side with the overlocker, unthreaded and with no needles, using the mark I'd put on the machine last time I needed narrow strips.

 I threaded a needle with a length of hairy wool yarn

so that the strips of silk wouldn’t slide off too easily and threaded each strip on, in order, as I cut it and slipped each one off the other end of the piece of yarn as I needed to weave it being very careful to weave with them in the correct order. 

When I was about half way, I measured how much I had used, cut a similar length off the other piece of fabric and started cutting from the lighter side. I find that it's not too hard to cut the strips straight with the overlocker and this was what was left as I cut the last full strip.

I’m pleased to say that it worked so that the colour in my scarf was lighter in the middle and matched at the ends.  Up close it looked like some sort of digital code so it was named 'Messages from afar'

and I hope the purchaser is enjoying this one also.

On other fronts there has been good progress with the small shirts and I've turned the heel on the second of the Catalina socks so it's been a reasonably productive week

Helen

Getting it right

Sorry for the silence but I have been working on scarves for the Geelong Scarf Festival and although they were sent off in good time, they have to stay under wraps for a bit longer.

 

I decided that my stock of tea towels was getting a bit low so decided to try some in Bumberet in 6/2 cotton.  I worked out that I wanted to do stripes of 27 ends, 15 in one colour and 12 in another.  This meant lots of colour changes while winding the warp but straightforward threading and weaving, or so I hoped.  I was working under some difficulty with a head cold but eventually got the warp wound and on to the loom.  There were of course, a couple of threading errors but recently I made a few reusable safety pin and string repair heddles

and these worked beautifully.  I wove the plain weave hem and I was congratulating myself on how well the repair heddles had worked when I launched into the pattern.  With a simple 6 end repeat in the threading of 2,3,2,1,4,1 it should be easy to get it right but, and I’m blaming the head cold here, I managed to insert an extra 2,3,2 or maybe miss a 1,4,1.  The error was just to the left of the centre (of course) and because of the colour stripes there was no easy fix apart from unthreading right back to the error and starting again.  I’m glad I did, the stripes look good, the shed is good, and the 6/2 is a bit thicker than the 8/2 I normally use, so I’m finally making good progress.

I guess the lesson is to check the threading constantly and especially after taking a break.

What else has been happening?  Each May, the traders’ association where I work have a sculpture festival.  We all give up part of our window display and it’s always a surprise when the sculpture arrives.  This year we have Dianne Thompson’s ‘Stars in your eyes’, not only appropriate for an optometry practice, but it’s a ‘winged sheep soaring over a lunar landscape with indigenous names for the stars’, so also very appropriate for someone who spins and weaves with wool.

The weather is getting cooler and I need to work on the loom in the cold garage if I am going to make something for the Sheep show.  In the meantime, the crepe myrtle in my garden is in full Autumn dress

Helen

New Warps, New Year

It’s the beginning of a new year, so it’s a good time for reflection on the past year, a look at what is in progress and plans for the new year.

In 2016 I managed to weave 12 scarves, here's one of the Geelong ones

18 tea towels,

6 meters of yardage for a jacket,

a warp for felted hats/pots,

a band for glasses cases,

just finished, 

and worked out how to use the double harness attachment on my loom.

I also worked on my sock knitting skills and completed 3½ pairs socks, and sent 4 scarves to the Geelong Scarf Festival and sold all of them.

Oh, did I mention that in my ‘spare time’, I worked full time?

What’s on the looms at the moment?

One of the new warps in the title has just gone on to the 4 shaft floor loom.  I need to replenish my tea towel stock for a market coming up at the beginning of March, more about that later.  I thought some tea towels in turned taqueté with a white background and a rainbow of stripes in what I like to call gelato colours would work.  It’s been very hot the last couple of days and it was hard work getting it threaded and sleyed with the help of a fan. 

Fortunately it has now cooled down and it’s amazing how much more quickly things get done when the weather is kinder.  The first tea towel is half done already.

I’m thinking of calling them the paintbox tea towels.

There are still 2 scarves to finish on the second double harness warp, and as soon as the weather is cool enough, I want to get back into the garage and finish the 2 red scarves on the loom. 

What’s coming up in 2017?

I’ve been going to the Hawthorn Craft Market for a while now, initially in the suburb of the same name, then a move to a new venue in Hawthorn and then to the adjacent suburb but still with the same name.  It’s fair to say the some of the customers are confused and some probably think it’s closed.  Every March there is a street festival in Hawthorn and in 2017 the Craft Market is returning to the suburb of its name.  We’re hoping some of our past customers will reconnect with us and new ones will find us.  We’re already praying for a dry, warm but not too hot day with a cool breeze if that’s what’s needed for a successful outdoor market and working on extra stock, hence the need for tea towels.

I’m enjoying using the double harness attachment on my Toika loom and I have some other ideas to try with the attachment.  The other job I really need to do is to fix a problem with a couple of the treadles.  My loom has a homemade system for tying up the treadles, a bit like the 20+ system.  One of the cords on treadle 1 has pulled out and the cords on treadle 4 have jammed, I suspect a fallen pin from a broken warp is the culprit.  I’m sure it can be fixed if I crawl under the loom for long enough.  At the moment I am restricted to 8 treadle drafts, with a straight treadling on 2,3,5,6,7,8,9,10.  It seems a bit odd but the mind does adapt.  Sooner or later I will see a draft that needs the whole 10 treadles and is so good that I will be forced to fix the problem.

The Geelong Scarf Festival is coming up in a few months with entries due at the end of April and after selling all the scarves I entered last year, I’m keen to enter again this year.  It would be great if I could start a bit earlier and not leave everything to the last minute.  Having said that I’d like to avoid the last minute rush, I guess it applies just as much to the Bendigo Sheep Show although that’s a couple of months later.

I have started planning for both events and will need to have a dyeing day in the near future and while I had the warping mill out for the tea towel warp, I wound the warps I need for some of the projects which need to be dyed first.

I think that should be enough to keep me entertained for the next few months, I’d better get back to the loom 

Helen

Engage brain before weaving

I’ve had a cold over the past few weeks, not life threatening, only had half a day off work but bad enough that when I got home from work there wasn’t much energy left to do anything creative.

I decided to put a tea towel warp on the 4 shaft loom, how hard could that be?  Found a draft I liked from Handweaving.net, via Pinterest, #33677 from G H Oelsner’s A Handbook of Weaves. I have to confess that Pinterest is becoming a bit of an addiction.  I’ve heard of stash acquisition beyond life expectancy but I wonder what draft acquisition beyond life expectancy or draft acquisition beyond loom reality should be called.

The draft had a 20 end repeat – 3 contrast ends sleyed together and 17 straight twill background – but as it was mainly twill and I was using 8/2 unmercerised cotton, 24 ends per repeat and inch seemed like a better idea. I planned the warp for 21 repeats, for a width on the loom of 21 inches.  I promptly warped 21 repeats of, you guessed it, 20 ends.  I knew it would be too narrow so spaced it out to 20 epi which was the next big mistake.  

The weft packed in too much, the twill line was flat and it just wasn’t right.  Fortunately I had enough sense to stop until I was thinking more clearly. 

It was too late to add those extra 4 ends to each repeat so I added a couple of repeats to each side, weighted with bottles of water, and sleyed it to 24 epi.  What a difference.  The weft is packing in properly, it's easy to weave and the twill lines are at 45 degrees.  

When I should be doing other things about the house, I keep going back to do ‘just one more repeat’ and I’ve already got more than enough ideas for the 6 towels that should come from the warp.  The back of the loom is not a pretty sight but the good progress on the front more than compensates.  I guess that this really is a lesson to engage brain before weaving - or planning a project, or warping.

There was good news from the Geelong Scarf Festival this year.  The 4 scarves I entered all sold and I received the hoped for, no parcel and large cheque

rather than a large parcel and no cheque.

I did manage to complete another project.  A few years ago when I had cleaned the rust off an old reed and just wanted to make sure it wouldn't leave any dirt on the next project, I warped up the 4 shaft table loom with dark grey 8 ply knitting yarn and made some double weave tubes.  Even though they were named, somewhat pretentiously, Felted Vessel 1 - 4,

and had great dreadlocks around their tops,they didn't sell and ended up at work as very small winter hats for the window display.  They were on display recently when someone came in because she thought they would work well at her work where she has to cover her hair.  I confessed that they were really too small to be hats but we got talking and I agreed to make another run of them.  It wasn't a difficult project, the hardest things were finding wool that was machine washable and not felting them in the washing machine for too long.  My customer was happy 

and I now have some more felted vessels for the collection

Spring has arrived here and with it a burst of activity in the vegetable garden, I’m hoping to be self sufficient for salads,

and also in the garage cum studio where it’s finally warm enough to work without using the heater.

Weavers’ Dilemma

Someone came to see me this week wearing a most interesting top – looked almost as though it had been made from an antique coverlet except that it was in black and white. Isn’t that the dilemma, whether to comment or just try to examine it from afar without touching?  Here's a genuine snowball and pinetree coverlet courtesy of US Archives

I couldn’t stop myself from commenting (and feeling it) and explaining where the design originated.  She was a knitter so understood my textile addiction.  It turned out that it was from a US based company and the fabric had been woven in India in a classic pine tree and snowball design.  The fabric was probably all cotton, and was a double weave, completely reversible, and used with the light side for some parts of the tunic and the darker side for the rest.  Great use of a very traditional design, but despite searching on the internet, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find anything remotely like it. 

I’ve been busy working on some scarves for the Geelong Scarf Festival, completed entries have to be there by May 6, so there’s still 3 weeks to go.  My entries will have to stay under wraps for a bit longer however, not everything coming off the loom is for Geelong.  I wanted to try one of the drafts which give a fake snakeskin effect.  There are 2 drafts on Handweaving.net, 45548 and 45548 Corrected where someone has decided that there are errors in the first draft.  I just thought the first one was meant to look a bit organic and decided to use it. 

It’s a great draft to weave because the small irregularities in the threading and treadling completely disguise any mistakes.  I know there are no major mistakes and while there may be a few minor skips, it would be almost impossible to find them.

 

I had a painted tencel warp, mostly dark gray with white bands that I’d dyed it a few years ago but my record keeping left a bit to be desired.  It said quite clearly that there were 240 ends – 10 inches by 24 ends per inch and that it was 6 metres long.  When I started to put it on the loom it fitted very nicely in the small raddle, the one with 10 nails and 9 spaces,

I wound it on and started to thread without thinking too much about it.  About two thirds of the way across I realised that I seemed to be short of ends, sure enough there were not 240 but only 216.  Having been taught to ‘weave in the centre of the loom’ I knew that I needed to re-thread or it would annoy me for the whole length of the warp.  Not only was the width out but after I had woven 3 scarves, each 2 meters long, there was still about a meter of warp left, enough for panels for a couple of bags or something else if inspiration strikes. Maybe the warp stretched but I don’t think so, just more bad record keeping.

I’m very happy with the results, they do look like snake skin and feel right too, not that I know what a snake feels like or have any intention of finding out.  They have been washed, pressed, rolled on the stone bench top and tumbled in the dryer without any heat.

The theme for the Geelong Scarf Festival this year is ‘Myths and Legends” and I felt sure that I could find a connection to a snake goddess somewhere – surely any self respecting culture would have a deity for a creature with a poisonous bite.  As I wove and the fabric started to look very snake like, all I could think of were Jeremy Lloyd’s poems for children from the 1980s and the villain ‘Hissing Sid’.  If you missed these at the time here’s the late Keith Michell with something to brighten your day 



and the reason why these scarves are now called ‘Hissing Sid 1 and 2’.  

Helen