Time to plan and play

The Royal GeelongShow is over for another year and while there are still plenty of projects on foot, there are no pressing deadlines at the moment, so it’s a good time to stop, tidy the studio, take stock(of the stash and the ideas) and think about what might be next.

I finished 2 of the 4 entries I had planned for the Geelong Show, so feeling a recurring theme here.  One was my first attempt at weaving with handspun.  I had a braid of wool, silk and angora bunny from Charley, spun finely and plied with some very fine silk.  The contrast was an 85/15 Merino/silk blend, again plied with the fine silk.

The yarns behaved perfectly, better than some store bought ones I have used.  There were no broken ends, shredded warps or other problems.  I used an advancing twill and there was a bit of a conflict between the stripes in the warp and the advancing twill.  In some lights the twill is hardly visible but when there is less light it just pops out. I'm not sure whether I should have spun the weft thicker, used it double or chosen a braid with less contrast in it - maybe a bit of all three.

The handle is great and the judges gave it a second prize and the E Marion Long Memorial Award for the best exhibit using a variety of colours – thanks Charley!

The other entry was a narrow silk scarf in huck lace.  I had a nice hank of mulberry silk, planned the warp and weft using the measurements on the label but at the last moment, just before I wound the warp decided I should do a rough measure – length of hank x number of ends.  Imagine my surprise when instead of the 1200 metres I thought I had, there were only about 550 metres.  It was back to the calculator, fortunately as the yarn was thicker I didn’t need so many ends to the inch and I ended up with some left over as I had made the warp a little on the short side.  Fortunately with the Toika loom there is only about 12 inches of waste at the end, or 12 inches minus the fringe.  

The judges liked this one too and it was awarded to Marjorie Donnan award for the best article using any natural fibre.  So a successful event all round and nice to see the Geelong Guild celebrating their past members

I’ve been making slow progress on my Weavolution Halloweave tapestry but got the colours selected at the weekend in daylight and I’m now 2 rows into the coloured part, but not showing up very well in this picture

I’m in the process of putting a warp for a cotton scarf on to the Toika loom.  The warp has been maturing in the stash since at least 1999 and cross has been mislaid along the way.  Next after restoring the cross, will be a run of tea towels for the next market, the last for the year and for Christmas presents.

I’ve also finished the backpack from leftover fabric, and got it into the mail today, that’s a good feeling.  I was surprised how much work there was getting all the straps, tags and pockets made but once that was done it went together very quickly.

Here’s a picture of the clematis flowering profusely on the back deck

Helen

Many balls in the air

I wonder why I feel I have too many balls in the air, even though Friday was a public holiday – for a football match that was played yesterday, not on the day of the holiday – and I thought I would catch up a little.

The Geelong Show is 2 weeks away, and as yet there are no actual finished articles, though one is close and I still think I have time

I have finished the bulk of the sewing, 2 small shirts and 2 small pairs of pyjamas, just want to turn the left over pieces into a back pack.

The Hawthorn Craft Market was on today, there was a new batch of tea towels finished,

also the chenille cowl which was woven in time for the last market but still too damp to sew. I’m very pleased with it, now it’s finished.  Spring seems to have come early here and even though my model looks pretty cool, it was too hot to model it in person, let alone entice someone to buy it. 

A couple of sales including a tea towel from the last batch but none of the new ones.  There were not huge numbers there, maybe it was the long weekend, maybe they were hungover after the football yesterday or out celebrating the victory – it is the Hawthorn Craft Market after all and Hawthorn won the game – or maybe it was that Daylight Saving started this morning so they missed an hour’s sleep.

I decided to take part in one of the Weavolution Halloweave teams.  For a long time I have admired woven tapestries but decided they were not for me and then I started to take more of an interest.  When Spotlight had small weaving frames on sale recently I bought one and thought I could give tapestry a try, I unearthed some photos from a visit to the Getty Villa in LA which I’d always thought had potential for weaving and when there  was a Tapestry House – Weaving Spells forHalloweave,  it just seemed like the right time. 

So far I’ve put a warp on the loom, unearthed some yarns that should work, found my single tapestry bobbin and a small comb but haven’t put weft to warp yet.

There was an interesting piece in the Halcyon Yarns newsletter this week about Ann Collier, who is an academic psychologist at the Northern Arizona State University in the US, who is also interested in textiles.  She’s been researching why working with textiles or even with hands in general is good for you.  I looked at her academic site and was even tempted to complete her survey but it had already closed.  Seemed like a lot more fun than the traipsing all over town interviewing people with macular degeneration I did years ago when I was studying psychology.

Off to make some more progress on the entries for the Geelong Show, it’s good for me

Helen

New Projects

I have been busy weaving for the Woolcraft section of the Royal Geelong Show, hence the need to keep things under wraps.  I just managed to finish all the items I’d put on the entry form.

The first was a bright rug, that I thought it could be for the very young or even for the very old.  I was inspired by a wrap I saw draped over the back of a chair at work and decided to translate it into a rug.  I was able to buy some red 4 ply wool on special when I was in Bendigo, but it wasn’t quite enough so I added some 4 ply baby wool, a different red but I alternated the 2 yarns right across the warp.  I dyed the brightly coloured stripes on an unexpected day off.

Here it is on the trapeze

and is there anything better than a new warp all tied on and ready to start weaving?  Yes it’s the same warp with all the mistakes identified and fixed, the tie up done and behaving nicely so that I’m really ready to start weaving.

  It wasn’t as straight forward as I thought it would be.  The right sett for the yarn was 15 to 16 epi.  As it was machine washable wool and I wasn’t expecting a lot of fulling, I sleyed it 2 ends per dent in an 8 dent reed.  Although the yarn was all wool, it seemed to think it was mohair.  The ends clung together and the first rug was pretty much a large sample.  I re-sleyed in to 1 end per dent in a 15 dent reed and it behaved much better, not perfectly but much better.

  The draft was adapted from an 8 shaft advancing twill in ‘The Best of Weavers: Twill Thrills.

The next project was the second half of the summer and winter warp.  I had been inspired by Tien’s article in Handwoven May June 2014 and had come up with a point draft with 2 and 3 block units.  The first scarf had a Moorish look to it

and I wrote about it July but I fancied something more geometrical for the second scarf and thought of windows.  Then I read somewhere that it’s good to have a border and so ‘Windows and Doors’ was born.  I experimented with the tie-up on the computer to see what sort of windows I would get.  I found I had a single and two double windows and one of these turned out to have special significance.  In 2012 I went to the Weaving Summer School at the Australian National University in Canberra.  It was a terrific workshop where I got to play on a 24 shaft computer controlled loom for the first time.  

A staff member very generously offered me accommodation in her studio – a studio with a bed and a bathroom – what’s not to like?  When I looked on the internet to find where I was staying I caught sight of a link to ‘Tocumwal Houses’.  During the Second World War at the age of 18, my mother had joined the WAAAF – Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force – learned Morse Code, and with 5 of her fellow recruits had been posted to a big Air Force training base at Tocumwal, just the 6 of them and 3000 young men.  According to the oral history project, when the base was built, instead of typical long rectangular army huts, the huts at Tocumwal were house shaped. 

The idea was that if enemy pilots flew over the base they might think it was just another country town, one with all the houses the same size and shape and a couple of large air strips as well.  After the War, when Canberra needed a lot of new houses for the returning military personnel who were marrying and settling down with their baby boomer children, the huts from Tocumwal were moved across country, about 300 kilometres, and turned into suburbs.  It was a very thoughtfully planned estate for young families with courts along two sides and plenty of open space, accessible without any need to cross roads.  When I looked at the houses they did certainly looked as though they had come from a military base.  I took a few photos

and compared them with some of my mother’s old photos and indeed the windows were an exact match (I think my mother is the one on the far left but not sure why they are sleeping outside). 

Of course I imagined that the house where I stayed was my mother’s old hut.  

So when the tie up gave me double windows, I made sure that one version had the same proportions as the windows on the Tocumwal Houses, right down to the narrow glazing bar across the middle.

Here it is – on

– and off

the loom.  Weaving was slow because of the 2 shuttles but it was worth it and I couldn’t resist adding a knob to one of the doors.

The third project was to use a lovely ball of Juniper Moon Farm Findley Dappled in soft greys, sent to me by my aunt in the US.  It was 50/50 merino/silk and I thought that with a darker grey cashmere yarn from the stash for the contrast warp stripes and the weft, it could be entered in the other natural fibres class.

I wanted to make the most of the wool/silk and opted for satin stripes with plain weave stripes in the cashmere.  I found something close to what I wanted in Sharon Alderman’s Mastering Weave Structures but there was no draft.  Off to the computer and I worked it out, then I thought I had seen the same fabric in Handwoven, checked, and there was the draft in the March April 2003 issue  – the shafts were a bit different as they had put the tabby on 1 and 2 and I had put it on 6 and 7 but the resulting cloth would have been the same.  Weaving must be good exercise for the brain. 

Although the dark grey yarn was labelled ‘cashmere’, I’d bought it years ago and wasn’t completely sure what it was.  Once it was wet finished there was no doubt, it was just so soft.  The satin stripes with their closely sett merino/silk gave it just the right amount of weight and drape. 

It’s now on its way back to the US as a gift for my aunt, I hope she likes it.

The judges liked what I’d done, a third prize for the red rug and blue ribbons for the two scarves.

Helen