Fiber in the Hands of an Angry Spinner

We’re at:
19911 E. Foothills Rd.
Newman Lake, WA 99025

Directions to our house from Trent:
Take Starr Rd North at the Exxon Station in Newman Lake.
Starr Ys.
Take the Y to the RIGHT (east), onto Hauser Lake Rd.
Take the first LEFT (north) onto Muzzy Road.
Muzzy will take you up into the woods, and then back down. If it’s clear, you’ll be able to see large red barns in the distance. Stay on Muzzy to those barns.
At the barns (Thompson Creek intersection), Muzzy becomes W. Newman Lake Rd.
Stay on W. Newman Lake.
In about a mile, you’ll pass Cougar Ridge and Snowy Lane.
The next road is Foothills Rd.
Make the RIGHT (west) on Foothills Rd.
Our gate is almost exactly a mile on the RIGHT (north) side of the road.
It’s a double gate, but because it’s open, you won’t be able to see the number markers.
If you make it to a set of trailer houses, you overshot my house by a mile. Come back.

Directions to our house from The Valley/North Spokane:
From parts north or from the Valley, but including almost 5 miles of gravel road:
Take Forker Rd. north (either from Evergreen at Trent, Progress at Trent, or Sullivan at Trent from the Valley or from Bigelow Gulch from the north). Right (east on Forker), follow the road for 4.5 miles, you’ll go down down down and the road signs will tell you the road is now curvy and you’ll wonder what they thought the first 3.5 miles were), past a collection of trailer houses, then down down down, and then up a large hill. Just as that hill crests, our gate is on the left (north) side of the road. If you get to a stop sign, you overshot by almost exactly a mile. Come back.

If you take directions from Google or any other GPS coming up out of the valley via Forker Road, do NOT — I repeat — DO NOT take Scribner Road. That way ends in tears and a locked gate. Turn onto Foothills directly from Forker; your GPS will adjust.

Call me if you get lost: 509.280.4785

A few weeks ago, I attended a dye workshop with Liz Moncrief at the Whatcom Weavers’ mini conference, Fibers and Beyond, in Lynden, WA. I haven’t dyed cellulose fibers or worked with fiber-reactive dyes before. This was a two-way split warp that I inverted on the loom, to give the middle stripe. I first tried weaving it with the same yarn in a third colour:

(Click to view larger).

But as you can see, it was too much gold, and it muddied up the colours. So I went searching through my stash and found a brighter gold that was thinner and let the warp shine through:

(Click to view larger).

It was just barely dry when I entered it into the Spokane Handweavers’ Guild Annual Sale. I regret to inform you that I did not take a photo of the finished piece, which sold the first day of the sale before I returned from Las Vegas.

This is a shame, as I was especially happy with the trim — I added in thin gold strands, twisted the fringe, and finished it with a Common Whipping in the gold thread.

This awesome thing happened this week.

I presented “A Color Vocabulary” yesterday at the Cross Border Weavers in Colville yesterday.

The first half are the slides, the second half is the slides again, with my notes.

Click Here to View A Colour Vocabulary.

I went to the Figure my Figure meeting for the Guild’s 2016 Yardage Challenge — how to figure out how much you need to weave for the pattern you’ve chosen.   These are my notes.

First, you’ve got to pick a pattern.  The upside to a pattern like this one is that it has many pieces — many pieces tends to mean that each piece is not super-wide, and that means that you can weave your cloth on a smaller (narrower) loom.  Most patterns have the yardage labeled for 45″ or 60″ cloth — and if your loom’s that wide, bully for you, but if it’s not . . . well . . .

Next up, take all the pieces out.   What you’re looking for is to find the largest one that is the widest across:

Measure it at the widest point.   This, plus the selvage, plus shrinkage, is your minimum width.

Our intrepid weaver’s guild president, Sarah Laudenbach, a long time seamstress, suggests tracing all your pattern pieces on to tracing paper, and using the tracing paper pattern for your garment, keeping the original for reuse.  If you use (or cut down your) tracing paper to the maximum width of your cloth on the loom (minus the selvage, minus shrinkage), you can’t go too wrong.

Remember, you have to line up the pieces with the grain.  Check the arrows, and get everything going in the right direction.  When you get everything traced, and before you start cutting the tracing paper, measure the length of the tracing paper.  This, plus shrinkage, is the minimum length you need to weave for your pattern.  Weave more.

A trick for lining up the pattern with the cloth: measure from the grain line to the edge of the cloth in several places, so you know that you’re straight with the grain of the cloth.

If you are using cloth with an obvious pattern/stripe/grid, you’re going to need more cloth, because you’re going to use the little dart-arrows in the pattern to line up with the lines in the cloth.  You may need substantially more cloth to do this, if you have a long repeat.

Before you cut your cloth, it’s a good idea to trace the pattern of the cloth onto your pattern piece, to make sure the cloth pattern falls in the right place.

Sarah suggests drawing it in on the whole thing.

I don’t know about you, but I’m still not feeling super-sure about this whole thing . . . weaving yardage, no problem — cutting my cloth . . . . eek.

Can I tell you just how terribly delighted with how this scarf turned out?  It’s 60/2 silk, sett at 60 epi, handdyed lilac warp, creamy natural silk weft, with silk thread embroidery.

I’m particularly pleased with this addition.  I knew that one of my normal angryspinner.com tags would be entirely too heavy for this piece, and I was wracking my brain trying to figure out what to do — of course — more embroidery!  I think it’s pretty subtle.

But what I really want to talk about is this ^  — the work.  There’s a number of different ways folks get their fringe to line up.  I started with pinning the hems down with these beautiful, thin, glasshead pins.  I used a ruler to hold the fabric in tension and straight while I pinned into a cotton towel-covered foam block.

I decided how long to make the fringe, and placed a second ruler along there.

I started each knot off the pin.

Lasso it over a pin, then place the pin.

Pull gently to tighten.The shaft of the pin puts the knot in just the right spot.

Finished pinning.  I then use a rotary cutter and a quilting square to cut the ends (not shown — I didn’t have quite enough hands to do the work and photograph it).

Finished fringe.

I know I haven’t been posting about what I’ve been weaving . . . I couldn’t. But I’ve been working deep in the background of this project — weaving things to help the teams make decisions on what to bring into production: Project Jacquard

I wash, dry, and steam press my wraps before they go out. Before you send a piece of cloth this big through the washer to finish it, it’s best to baste it along the rails. I’ve determined that basting by hand with a high-contrast thread is the best way to do this:

Steam pressed, hand-hemmed, and ready to go:

On my in-house model:

In the woods:

In the sun:

The Peacock wrap meets its baby:

Mama and baby, all wrapped up and ready to go!

I’m so glad you liked it!

After the loom is threaded, the threads must be brought through the reed in the beater. In this case, most of the threads are brought through in pairs, for 16epi, except the ones on the selvedges, which are, for one inch, sett at 24epi.

The ends are then bundled and tied on to the cloth beam, then tensioned to make sure that they all have an even tension, allowing for perfect weaving. Then, scrap yarn is used to spread the bundles back out to make nice cloth. Here, I’ve used a sage yarn in the weft.

I suspected it would be pretty, but the real weft, black, is spectacular.  (Click on individual photos to enlarge).

The first yard!

Finally!  All the warp threads are wound, and placed in the raddle, which allows them to be spaced  on the warp beam for back-to-front threading and sleying.  Back-to-front is really the only way to thread this particular loom, because the Louet Spring allows you to remove the beast beam *and* the beater, and to sit, nicely upright, right inside the loom for threading and sleying.  It’s rather fantastic that way.

Each thread gets its own heddle — so this means that every single thread is threaded through its very own eye.  In this case, we’re talking about 547 threads (16 threads per inch for the cloth, 24 threads per inch for the rails) and several hours of work.

Knotted in bundles on the other side to prevent ensuing tragedy like cats or dogs or small children pulling them back out of the heddles:

(I don’t have cats or dogs or small children at this point, so this must be just to prevent myself from doing something stupid).

Next up: sleying the reed!