60 posts tagged “wip”
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.
I am now declaring the spinning for the red leaf wrap to be completed!
That's the red leaf singles for the weft on the left, and the two-ply merino for the warp on the right, finished just now. My next task is warping the loom, so I can take my weaving to a crafting date tomorrow :-)
And I've been making decent progress on the red cardigan too:
Notice that the arm holding the camera is clad in a finished sleeve, the other sleeve reaches the elbow, and the body is considerably longer than in the last photo I posted.
The first sekrit project is what many partners of knitters will have been given today, the heart from Knitty. This was loads of fun to knit, and small enough that R didn't even notice that for a couple of evenings, every time he looked in my direction, my hand 'happened to' cover what I was knitting. The yarns are Dream in Colour Smooshy in dark red, and Lorna's Laces Shepherd Sock in Valentine - luxury sock yarns for a luxury heart :-)
But my cardigan is very progressy :-)
Before:
After:
These are very close to being finished. Double knitting the ribbing is a bit fiddly, but it's a joy to be able to read my knitting again after acres of reverse stocking stitch, even though since it's ribbing I rarely actually need to read it. I have misknit several stitches on the inside sock, knit instead of purl or vice versa, but nothing two minutes with a crochet hook won't solve.
Second pic is the red-toed sock just after turning the heel (the other sock is tucked inside, as it is while I'm knitting).
Third pic, the variegated-toed sock, ditto.
Fourth pic, both socks conjoined, just after the heel turn, with the ends still straggling and the hole at the join still very visible.
Fifth pic, same thing a few rows on and with the round beginning moved to centre back instead of the side. Ends all woven in, and holes closed up reasonably well (how good this looks on the right side is yet another thing I don't get to see until they're finished!)
...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.)
Progress continues apace with these, although they're quite tiring to knit, what with small stitches and having to hold both strands under tension all the time. I love how they look on the wrong side, and I'm really impatient to see what the right sides look like, for which I'll have to wait until they're finished. I'm more than halfway to the heel, and I'm sewing in the ends from colour changing as I go, to avoid it getting too untidy, and to avoid the possibility of finishing the knitting and then being put off by all the ends and never finishing them. I don't mind sewing in ends in small numbers, so this is working fine.
I've also started spinning the red leaf fibre my parents gave me for my birthday. I took some photos of this a week or so ago, but the colours were off so I'd been holding off posting about it until I'd taken some better photos, which I now have!
