Fiber in the Hands of an Angry Spinner

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.

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!

The Kress Gallery Show (3rd floor of River Park Square in Spokane) is open until the 31st of January.  Here’s some highlights!  Click on the individual pictures to see them larger.

Some of my cloth begins as grass in my yard.

(I don’t weave grass, though there are folks who do).

The grass is is consumed by my alpacas or goats.

They, in turn, grow out fiber which I shear, clean, comb, dye, spin, ply, and then weave into cloth.

This is slow cloth, in the same way that growing, harvesting, and cooking one’s own food is slow food.

There’s something very satisfying about knowing that you can create cloth – one of the fundamentals of survival – on your own.

Brobdingnagian Jewelry

Like most artists, I’ve dabbled in a lot of different media, from paint to clay to beading to fiber. And that dabbling tends to lead to fusion.

The Brobdingnagian Jewelry is one such fusion. The wire is nine gauge, the beads are solid wool. As you might imagine, assembly took hours with an icepick, sore fingers, and several large pliars.

The Brobdingnagian lover didn’t go to Jared: he went to Jen.

Weaving Yarn and Yarns

This piece was commissioned for First Night 2014, and is the result of community participation. The piece was woven entirely over the course of First Night, with ribbon contributions from revelers. While I planned the rough dimensions and colour scheme before the event, the cloth came together as the night progressed. You can see the waves of people who came by in density of the ribbons. I tried to group families and friends together, but sometimes colour and balance won out. The early evening is to your right, the new year to your left.

About the Artist:

Jen the Angry Spinner lives in the Foothills of Mount Spokane, in beautiful Newman Lake with Farmerteen, the Renaissance Guy, her parents, a few alpacas, and an ever changing number of barn cats.

When she’s not busy fighting fires, homeschooling, or attending Spokane Handweavers’ Guild meetings, she can be found at her loom, creating cloth and half-watching Law & Order.

She can be reached at 509.280.4785 or jen@angryspinner.com

My local weaving guild, the Spokane Handweaver’s Guild, is making bookmarks for the goodie bags for the ANWG Conference in Bellingham in June.

I got the extremely clever idea of taking the cloth I’m currently working on (WA State Tartan in a lovely, thin wool) and using it for the bookmarks. Next, I thought I’d b clever by sewing on pre-sized, pre-cut bookmarks, and decided I could line them up and THEN cut them, saving fraying, and, in theory, keeping everything straight.

It was an awesome idea . . . but I’m still a terrible seamstress.

The detritus of the project:

And the bookmarks, safely tucked into plastic sleeves that are manufactured and sold as “pretzel bags” for people who dip pretzel logs in candy coating and then roll them about in sprinkles:

Fine Threads Study Group 2012 Weaving Notes Jen Garrison Stuber

Pre-weaving notes:

I was inspired to join the Complex Weavers (and then the Fine Threads Study group) by Lillian Whipple’s article on WeaveZine, about weaving letters. The definition for the Fine Threads Study group is a thread that is “fine for you.” 10/2 is the finest thread I’ve worked with to date, this is my first run at it. Earlier this year, I went to Portland for a block workshop with Rosalie Neilsen, and started working with Summer and Winter when I got home, using a 5/2 UKI cotton for the background, and a 3/2 cotton for the pattern. This is my first project on my shiny new 12 shaft Spring, though I have worked on an 8 shaft Spring in the past. I wanted to use the 12 shaft so that I could produce 9-block letters (leaving shafts 1 & 2 for tie-down, and shaft 3 for a border).

Further, I decided to increase the complexity of my weaving by making the background a houndstooth in complementary colours, which I hope will be wildly live, but not vomit-inducing. It took a long time to decide on a block colour (I started with a brown, which ended up looking sadly matte, and also discarded a magenta and a wild teal). I’m not sure the houndstooth won’t get lost with the dots of the pattern thread running through it, and I hope I don’t hate myself for picking something that takes three shuttles. I also hope that I am a capable-enough weaver to make relatively decent selvedges.

CWG reduced to CW

Weaving Post-mortem:

The first major mistake I made was in not winding enough warp. Although I had figured the main project would only take a little more than a yard, and I therefore added two additional yards for loom waste and sampling, I did not calculate a number of mistakes, which included a miscalculation of how long “CWG” would be, a clerical error that resulted in making two sets of “cW” instead of “CW”, and the final undetected threading error that I wove all the way through. I was able to make 7 sets before I ran out of warp, thus allowing me to send the more perfect examples to the study group. I keep meaning to adopt the maxim, attributed to any number of religious fiber artists across the world (including Muslim weavers and Amish quilters) that “only God is perfect,” and therefore the errors are intentional– but that is not the case here.

Yes, I often weave while wearing owl jammies. Doesn't everyone?

The second mistake I made was using a countermarch loom with a skeleton tie-up that did not (and in several cases, because of triple-treadling, could not) account for all the shafts. In the sampling phase, I attempted to remedy this by use of make-shift sword like Thai backstrap weavers use (though in my case, I used a long stick shuttle), but I still caught a number of warp threads. In the weaving, I decided that lifting (or pushing) shafts into place while weaving was faster and more accurate.

But in addition to being annoying and slow, I think several of my errors were still the result of not having a clean shed. In retrospect, I should have tied up the upper-lamms on all the shafts except 1-2 for all the single-use treadles, and figured out some way to tie up as many as I could on the double-use-treadles. I did find Tim’s Rudimentary Treadle Reducer ( http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~timm/treadle/form1.php ), which was a great help with the original tie-up for “CWG” and unnecessary for the final “CW” variation, as I had enough treadles without reducing.

I am getting better at discovering mis-treadling as I weave, and I ended up doing a lot of un-weaving as I went, but generally not more than 6 picks (the scissors and I have become good friends). I have also concluded that weaving software, and not graph paper, is the way to go to document drafts. (Though I confess that drinking a beer while trying to draft with permanent ink pens is not the brightest idea).

All in all, I am pretty happy with the results, though, as I am about to commence cutting my cloth in preparation of sending it, I hold a bit of terror at that prospect. I plan to iron on an interfacing to prevent unraveling, and mount the samples with archival tape. Then, I plan to have a beer.