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.

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!

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!

Design Seeds is my new favourite place to look at colourways.

Pale Pinks from Design Seeds

Poppies from Design Seeds

Aged Tones from Design Seeds

Door Hues from Design Seeds

Feathered Hues from Design Seeds

Dusk Bloom from Design Seeds

To recap: my client had this inspirational photo.

Using the Fibonacci Sequence for striping and colour changes,

I’ve been winding the warp for the Peacock Baby Wrap:

Here’s the warping board straight on:

To conserve space in my studio (which is also my bedroom), I installed the warping board over the light switches.  (This actually makes them easier to find in the dark).   The thing behind the warping board is a child’s counting toy from Ikea that used to belong to Farmertot.  It’s got 100 beads in sets of 10, and it perfect to help keep track of the number of threads as I’m winding.

There’s a sticky note above the warping board to the left.  Here’s a detail of it:

This is the number of each thread of each colour (Brown, Green, Teal, Blue, Purple).

If it’s not evident on the sticky note, there is more green and blue in the sequencing, because they are two of the three colours that are striped into and back out from.  (The teal, in the middle, is brighter, and I needed to reduce the number of threads to fit the width of the cloth, so it has fewer threads, but because its value is lighter than the other colours, I think it was the perfect place for a reduction.

I have a new client who wants a baby wrap (looks like I’d better get the one on the loom back off!) This one is two greens in the warp in a Fibonacci sequence . . . it’s for a friend who is a geeky geek. Here it is, ready to be cut off the loom (ooh! look at all that cloth!): My new client has this inspiration photo: And likes this kind of colour blending: It’s going to be so pretty! Some colour progression ideas (please ignore the colours used): A (Fibonacci Sequence) and B (Scattered Sequence) A (Fibonacci Sequence) and C (Plus One, Minus One Sequence) C (Plus One, Minus One Sequence) and B (Scattered Sequence)

WIF of partial Fibonacci Sequence