Fiber in the Hands of an Angry Spinner

I imagine I am not alone in this:

The great euphoria of finishing a weaving project is over, and now I am staring at an empty loom.

On the one hand, there is all the fiber potential in the world — right there. I can warp fiber in my studio onto the loom. I can make the double weave waffle weave blanket I’ve been promising Michael. I can start the awesome lunch-bag-and-napkin project that’s been rattling around in my head. I’ve got silk and cotton and wool, alpaca and tencel and mystery poly-fibers — it’s all right there. And then, there it is again: an empty loom.

An. Empty. Loom.

This is where it’s appropriate to use the word “looming” in a conversation about weaving. There it sits, looming in the corner, reminding me that I’m not weaving anything right now. It’s like that ream of blank paper that looms in the future of writers . . . all potential, no work. I’ve started skulking past it, hoping that I can just ignore it. But I can’t get to my bed (or out of my bed and to the bathroom, or out of my room and to the kitchen) without passing it.

And my post-project euphoria shrank with the last project — over-washed.

You may recall it, almost 33 inches wide when it came off the loom:

It spent just a few minutes too long in the rinse cycle. Alas. It is no longer very big, and it is sadly, sadly, very thick.

I like what happened with the colour mixing:

But now I have to figure out what to do with this thick (think “boiled wool”) cloth . . .

. . . and what to do with that empty loom.

Especially for my friend, Chris, who has knitted a (giant Palouse?) worm with unnerving accuracy:

from Vanilla Knits

I’ve been working on getting down a waffle weave . . . my first attempt (not pictured) ended in not-a-waffle-weave when I mis-tread the entire piece in some crazed new-weaver euphoria.

Some project history:
I’ve been playing around with colour wheels, and thought that it would be interesting to use waffle-weave to create a mix of colours. I usually use graph paper to dink around with designs:

(Some are prettier than others):

My idea was to use the waffle-weave to enhance the colour. I thought it would look cool to “box in” each of the coloured squares with white, grey, and black. I didn’t have enough space on the loom to do two reps, so I added a stripe of boxed-in-colour to the mix. In retrospect, I think I would have ordered it: colour, white, grey, black.

This project got off to a rocky start when I realized I had chosen a really bad green for it, and that fixing that would require re-warping, but not fixing it would be worse.

You can see the “wrong” green in the sample on the right. It’s too light and it’s too heathered. (It’s also too felted — the poor sample got felted about to death, and the waffling is consequently completely lost). The sample in the middle is pretty well fulled (and not felted to death), and the final project, on the right, is not yet fulled.

Based on the samples, I decided to twist the fringe before fulling this time. I’ll update when it’s fulled and let you know how that turned out. I’m kind of partial to the “wrong” side of the cloth:

Come to the Spokane Weaver’s Guild meeting tonight at 6pm at the Orchard Crest Retirement Community, 222 S. Evergreen, Spokane Valley, just south of Target.

Happy Birthday to Eli Whitney (1765) — inventor of the cotton gin.
Check out his at the bottom of .

Come to the Spokane Weaver’s Guild meeting tonight at 6pm at the Orchard Crest Retirement Community, 222 S. Evergreen, Spokane Valley, just south of Target.

Want to get away from the hustle and bustle of Black Friday?
Join us for Black Fiberday, a mellow day of creative work, learning to needlefelt.
Make Handmade, Local Gifts, Custom Created by: You!

Click here for the printable .pdf poster

Where? Argonne Library
When? 25 November 2011
Time? 10am – 2pm
Who? Anyone, ages serious 5 years – playful adults

Here’s how it works:

Every hour, on the hour, Jen will demonstrate how to needle felt.

1) Get a fresh needle
(practice safe needle-felting — don’t share needles!)
2) Make 2D creations
(great for making pins or embellishments).

or

3) Add another dimension with 3D ornaments
(pictured here).

RSVP to: Jen@angryspinner.com

Holy Cow! The roofers are almost done!

(It’s not really anywhere near my last post about the dome . . . we haven’t done anything with the interior . . . but we’ll soon put it to bed for the winter).

Here’s the dome this morning . . . I should have gone up yesterday, while we had gorgeous sun streaming from the heavens, but here is the northside:

And the front of the dome (the three roofers are in the pic, standing over by the excavator):

Come to the Spokane Weaver’s Guild meeting tonight at 6pm at the Orchard Crest Retirement Community, 222 S. Evergreen, Spokane Valley, just south of Target.