12 posts tagged “weaving”
Setting up the loom to weave this took all day on Saturday. Several hours in the morning for measuring the warp threads, several more hours for threading alternate warp threads through the holes on the heddle at a crafting date with Sadie, B and G in the afternoon, and another hour or so in the evening tying on the warp. It wasn't until Sunday that I finally got to start weaving, and it almost feels like an anticlimax after spending so much time in planning and preparation :-)
The fabric looks puckered because I'm deliberately making each row of weft slightly longer than the width of the warp, so that when it's finished and washed the extra length of the weft will, I hope, even out and partly cover the warp, making weft-dominant fabric.
So now I have a decision, I can get on with spinning the rest of it!
I've spent today spinning and then weaving a sample for the red leaf wrap. This is 12.5dpi, with the warp very fine two-ply burgundy merino worsted, and the weft red leaf woolen singles at about 5m/g. The sample is just long enough to go round my wrist, so that's where I'm wearing it, and very pretty it is too.
Next up, spinning some of the burgundy at about 5m/g woolen to ply with the rest of the red leaf sample yarn and then weave at 7.5dpi with that in both warp and weft.
(Note for non-spinners: worsted-spun yarn is denser, smoother and stronger; woolen-spun yarn is loftier, warmer and softer.)
I've just done a brief re-organise of my stash, just moved some things around, and looked at some other things I'd forgotten. One of the things this has shown up is that there's a bigger reorganisation needed, where I get everything out and look at it and check my Rav cataloguing, and so on, which I might do tomorrow.
Looking at it has crystalised my intention to try and work through my stash, rather than buying more yarn and fibre. I have a good selection of yarn for various knitting and weaving purposes; plain-dyed, undyed and hand-dyed fibre; and base materials for several different dyeing and/or blending projects. This should be enough to keep me going for a while! (Exceptions are permitted for making baby things as gifts, because most of my stash is not washable enough for baby clothes. Although I do have enough bits and pieces of sock yarn that I can make quite a lot of baby socks from stash.)
So this seems like a good time to list the things I think I might do this year, some more settled than others...
- Red leaf wrap (red leaf fibre partially spun; plain burgundy fibre still to spin)
- Gothmerino alpaca wrap (need to finish carding the black alpaca with the purple merino, then spin, then weave)
- At least one hat (either a hood or a beret-like thing with space for hair)
- Another pair of long fingerless gloves, perhaps to match the hat
- Make more handspun oddballs (spin up bits of leftover fibre and make up third oddball)
- (Probably) a scarf with the handspun oddballs. Either garter stitch lengthwise, or possibly entrelac or something
- Finish the red cardigan!
- Harden myself to frogging the purple cable one
- Go back to the drawing board on what to do with five million balls of Debbie Bliss merino DK in a rather lovely solid purple
- Design and knit a cardigan for the purple slubby singles currently in swatch; think about writing the pattern up for publishing
- Publish the pattern for the push-me-pull-you socks
- Make socks from the grey shimmery yarn I carded and spun
- Finish spinning the undyed BFL; dye, ply, and sock.
- Learn patterned weaving
- Knit another hat for partner-R
- Finish Henry for large-male-friend-R
- Complete something in stranded knitting
- Spin and weave some silk
This is the end of my new scarf, finished today. It's much more warp-dominant than I was expecting, so the colour changes between the two weft yarns aren't as noticeable as I'd hoped, but it's very pretty, and much smarter and more sensible than the cherry pop scarf.
The finishing is a new thing I've learnt: hemstitching. All my previous scarves have had their fringes secured with knots, which are fine, but this is less bumpy, and the weft yarn makes it a decorative edge as well as a secure one.
And R complimented it without me even having to tell him it's new :-)
...and that the viscose pashminas I'd been using as scarves were not up to the job. Then I realised that I hadn't woven anything for me (the first scarf doesn't count, because it was just a trying-it-out project, and isn't up to being a warm scarf for a number of reasons). My next thought was that the Cherry Pop yarn which had briefly been a mini-cardigan was soft and warm and looking for something to be. So on New Year's Eve, I wove this. All 212cm of it, in one afternoon. Weaving is quick.
Weaving is also good for my stash levels. When I was just knitting, my stash was fairly well under control. Then I started spinning, and my stash started to run away from me: I had fibre to stash now as well as yarn, I was spending less time knitting, and - even worse - the time I wasn't spending knitting, I was spending creating more yarn. Which then went into the stash, sometimes never to come out again. Weaving, on the other hand, uses up yarn. Not only that, it uses it up more quickly than knitting, and in smaller batches - well suited to the relatively small batches of handspun I've been producing.
So the Cherry Pop is now out of the stash and into my wardrobe, and very warm it is, too.
Christmas presents from my parents and from myself (!) have given me new toys heddles to use with the loom, allowing me to weave finer fabric, and do some simple patterning, so currently OTL (on the loom) is another stash-busting project - a purple scarf (also for me :-) made from three different sock yarns - the semi-solid lavender Ripples I bought at Ally Pally, the purple CTH leftover from Clessidra, and the purple-variegated Filcolana leftover from Bellatrix. I'm finding wielding two heddles to be fiddly - it's difficult to get a clear shed (space between lifted and lowered warp threads, through which to pass the weft), so I've temporarily shelved plans for patterning until I get the hang of producing plain weave this way. When starting to weave it, I wasn't entirely happy with how the colours were blending, but then I caught sight of it while glancing past, when I wasn't thinking about it, and suddenly it looks lovely :-) The warp is Ripples, each end is going to have the CTH as weft, and the middle section will be Filcolana.
(The red flower-patterned
thing in the background is my ironing board. Almost never used for ironing, but often used as a crafting table - it's wide enough for the loom to rest against, and it's height adjustable, which makes warping the loom, and using my sewing machine, much easier.)
The second is a last-minute Christmas gift for R, which I partly wove in front of him on Christmas Eve, figuring (correctly, it turns out) that he pays no attention to what I'm making unless I talk to him about it. There are stripes in the weft - plain dark grey Jaeger merino and black tweed YSL - but they're much less obvious in the flesh than in the photo.
Next up (pictures three and four) is the finally-finished Clessidra. I don't think I'll use the riverbed sockitecture again, because I don't like how it fits me, but I love the socks and am going to wear them to a crafting date tomorrow :-)
Picture five is R's blue socks with a reknitted heel after he wore a massive hole in one of them. I think I've still got some of the blue, but I'm not sure where, and he didn't mind them being mended in black.
The last pic is my new sock project, double knit socks which I'm knitting wrong side out, so I don't have to move the yarn backwards and forwards (near side is English-style purl, far side is continental-style knit, so one strand in each hand, which is fun). The downside of knitting them this way around is that I can't read my knitting on the wrong side, so whether I'm increasing or not on any given row is a bit random but because I'm knitting them at the same time they'll match anyway so it doesn't matter, and I'm planning a short-row heel so there's no other increases or decreases to keep track of. I wanted to use different yarn to make it easier to keep track of which stitch belongs to which sock, so these will end up non-matching stripes - once I've finished the toe I'll break the yarn and swap them over, and keep swapping them at random intervals throughout (must remember to break yarn to do this, so I don't end up knitting the two together).
My first ever weaving project, in progress (made from Knitwitches sock yarn):
This is the next batch of black alpaca carded with purple merino. More than half of the fibre is carded now, and it's going much quicker with the drum carder than it did with hand carders :-) I've actually spun one batch of this, but I don't think I've taken any photos. It's about 5m/g, and will either stay as singles or end as two-ply, depending on what I decide to do with it. It's probably going to be another woven wrap, but at the moment everything looks like a weaving project to me, since the loom is spread across the library floor in pieces having been varnished at the weekend. I'm resisting the urge to assemble it for as long as possible, because I can't start using it for another week and a bit, so barriers are good ;-)
The grey-pink alpaca for my MiL's Christmas present is finally all spun and plied. The first picture is a closeup of two balls of singles ready for plying, and it's really just another excuse to show off the macro capabilities of my new camera! The second picture is of the finished yarn, about 500m of two-ply. I spent some time the other day swatching from my sample of this yarn, and I didn't come up with anything I liked, so this is starting to look like a weaving project as well. Of course, weaving it also means the finished item (a scarf) will be larger, since weaving uses less yarn than knitting, so this is solidifying into a plan.
