Comfort Weaving

After completing a major project, like my jacket for Bendigo, I often feel that it’s time for a little comfort weaving.

What's comfort weaving?  I think it's a bit like comfort food - the familiar foods of childhood, craved and/or eaten when life isn't going smoothly - only in weaving it's the simple plain weaves and straight twills from Weaving 101, often done when while watching TV, and when you want a break from more complex weaving

Over the past 3 weeks I’ve managed to make 4 plain weave scarves, 12 herringbone tea towels and a bread cloth

while binge watching Kitchen Cabinet. It's a local TV programme where Annabel Crabb, a political journalist and keen cook goes into politicians' homes, cake or dessert in hand.  The deal is that she brings the second course and the host cooks the main course.  She hopes that in a familiar environment, distracted by cooking - the politicians who are keen foodies like to show off their skills, those who are not,  just pray that no disasters happen - they will open up in ways not seen in formal interviews.  It works, they do open up and seem much more human, even ones who would not normally get my vote.  It all makes good TV for weaving.

The scarves were just simple plain weave using an alpaca weft for 2 and a boucle loopy mohair for the other 2.  I thought the mohair was the sort of yarn that should be brushed, remembered that I had a little brush just right for the job, and even managed to find it. 

A quick brush raised the pile to give a soft and fluffy surface, just the thing for the cold weather we’re having at the moment

The tea towels are from the warp of leftover yarn I wrote about here.  While width of the coloured stripes was dictated by the amount of yarn available, the grey and black stripes helped to bring it all together.  I used a herringbone draft and wefts in the same grey as in the warp,

natural,

red

and a greyish blue, hard to say which worked best, maybe depends on the kitchen colour scheme. It's always good to get to the end and see all the towels on the cloth beam.

I was reading something about kitchen design recently where the author suggested that tea towels are the ‘cushions of the kitchen’ – an inexpensive accent of colour to make the space look more interesting.  I guess there might be something in it

I went to the Hawthorn Craft Market on Sunday and some additions to the stock were needed. 

I managed to make a couple of sales and learned quite a lot about the new credit card reader in the process.  I thought my limited technical skills were the reason it wouldn’t work but found out later that while there was an updated version of Android on the phone it wasn’t compatible with the card reader as its app had not been updated.  It’s all a learning experience but I’m still trying to work out why I didn’t just enter the card details on to the screen as I do at work regularly when someone has a card which can’t be read

Helen

(Very) Slow Cloth

When I was working on the tapestry project and looking for my one and only tapestry bobbin, which surprisingly, was where I expected it to be, I found a warp.  This was not just any warp but a painted warp from a Guild workshop, possibly a Summer School and I’m fairly sure it was when the Guild was at the Meat Market as I can remember working in an area used for screen printing which had large tables at a very comfortable working height.  

In the 1980s the Government set up the old city meat market as a craft centre.  It was a great venue and I felt a special bond when I discovered that my great grandparents had lived a couple of doors away.  My great grandfather made sausages and where better to do it than close to the back door of the meat market.  The Guild was there from 1985 until 1999 when, with very little warning, funding stopped and the place was shut down.  The Guild has had 2 moves since and despite all this, the warp appeared to be fine and the cone with the rest of the yarn was with it.  It was a white mercerised cotton warp with what I thought were blue splodges on it and I’d seen a scarf on Pinterest recently with a similar warp, woven in twill with the twill lines appearing and disappearing across the dyed parts of the warp.  My warp was very narrow so I added a bit extra on each side.

But what twill pattern to use?  About a month into my weaving certificate, when 4 shaft drafts were still largely a mystery, I had one of the Guild’s 8 shaft looms at home over the Easter break.  What do you do when you’ve got an 8 shaft loom in the house and a few days free, but weave an 8 shaft project, even if it’s way outside your competence level.  I had a look in Carol Strickler’s book and thought that 323-2 on p88 would give me lots of pattern for not too much complexity.  I was too green to realise that there was too much complexity in the illustration for what was involved.   I did what the book said - and got something completely different.

It was a reasonable piece of weaving given my total lack of experience, just not what I had expected.  I had a look in Strickler for the cotton warp and decided that I still liked the 323-2 swatch and that it couldn’t be too hard to get it right with a bit of help from weaving software.  Something made me look at the drafts in Edward Worst‘s Weaving with Foot-Power Looms – just love calling them the Worst twills.  There was a similar draft there as well – the first thing I tried was the Worst draft, tie up and treadling, close, but not quite right, then I changed to the Strickler treadling and it was the one. 

I’ve contacted Interweave press who are re-doing their corrections page, I know I had looked for the correction in the past but had not found it and while they have replied that they are looking into it, I haven’t heard any more

When I first put the warp on the loom I thought the blue areas were just random splodges but as it went over the back beam I realised that they were actually stylised flowers. 

I thought initially that the warp was fine but somewhere in the past 20 years the cross had disappeared.  Fortunately it was quite narrow and still in the raddle so I sorted the warp threads as much as I could.  As it turned out the twill took over and I could probably have woven it off without worrying too much about the precise thread order.  It looks good,

there’s a lot to be said for letting things mature in the cupboard.

Next after the scarf was a run of tea towels for the next market, the last for the year and for Christmas presents.  One of the yarns I used was a fantastic hot magenta of unknown provenance but possibly from a guild sale.  Something, probably Di’s problems, made me test it before I washed it.  I was so glad I did because the dye just ran out of it.  I gave it a couple of hot rinses to get rid of the worst of it and then machine washed them all with a couple of colour catcher sheets.  Fortunately there were no disasters although I won’t be washing it with anything white for a while. 

There’s still enough warp for another 8 or 9 towels so I’ll be able to play with a few more colours.

I have also been playing with solar dyeing and thick and thin spinning, so I put a black warp on to the 4 shaft loom to use up these yarns and some others I had bought.  I’ve produced some nice warm scarves, just the thing for a hot Australian Summer.  One of the yarns was a nice heavy alpaca yarn, various shades of red plyed with black.  As I wove it the scarf looked longer on one side than the other although both sides measured the same. 

I decided that it was just an optical illusion coming from the diagonal lines coming from the twist of the yarn. Despite just being plain weave the final scarf looks as though I have used something far more complicated.   I was happy with the result and went back to buy a skein of the blue,

but couldn’t bring myself to buy the acid green they had as well.

I received my schedule for the 2016 Sheep Show Woolcraft competition today, I suppose it’s not too early to start planning.  I thought the jacket on the back cover looked familiar and then I realised it was my entry from last year.  I guess that’s fame in the Woolcraft world.