Big change

The first loom I owned was a $70 find in a secondhand clothing store about 4 years ago. It was a 4 shaft 40" jack loom; it's rustic character indicating it may have been homemade. All it needed to become fully functional was some new tie-up cords and I was able to teach myself to weave on it without too much trouble. However, when I realised I wanted to weave forever, ie. it wasn't going to be just a passing fad, I coveted a bigger and better loom.

Enter an 8 shaft 40" Mecchia (made in New Zealand) jack loom courtesy of a local weaver who had downsized her home and didn't have space for it. I love this loom. It's easy to use, and is rarely without a warp on it. The only downside is that it's only 40" wide. I want to make throws from my handspun but only having a 40" reed means the finished item ends up at about 36" and that's too narrow for me - I like them at least 40" finished. After making two double width throws I vowed never to do another again (they're so painfully slow) and placed a wider loom on the long-term wishlist. Not having the finances for anything more upmarket, I figured a simple 54" 8 shaft countermarche would be adequate. While there had been a few for sale out of my local area, the logistics of travelling to look at them before buying, then having to arrange shipping, reassembly, and so on, meant I was prepared to sit tight until something suitable came up in the local area.

Enter the 60" 8 shaft Mecchia with dobby, sectional beam, tension box, three box flying shuttle and standard beater, plus numerous other accessories! This loom was advertised on a national fibre craft mailing list and it was local. I didn't know the owner, who turned out to be a wonderful woman in her eighties who was well-known and respected amongst older weavers, but she hadn't woven for some time. My immediate thoughts when I read the advertisement was that 60" width, flying shuttle, etc. was overkill in terms of what I needed, but as I'd only ever seen photos of a flying shuttle I was curious to see the real thing. I phoned the owner, asking if I could visit to just look, explaining that I wasn't interested in buying. In typically generous weaver spirit she was more than happy for me to simply look. You know how the story ends of course - after not much more than 5 minutes at her house I decided I had to have it, and it now takes pride of place in my 'studio' downstairs.

Initially I was on a huge learning curve as I'd never used a loom this large, let alone one with a dobby or sectional beam, so I spent a couple of weeks tweaking things and playing with sample warps to get know the loom before I felt confident enough to put a real warp on.

It was with some fear and trepidation that I decided my first project would be a 'patchwork' throw, using homegrown wool I'd spun and dyed several months earlier, and a draft from Thick 'n Thin - The Best of Weavers. Remarkably the whole project went without a hitch, and I'm really pleased with the result. (It looks a bit rumpled in the photos because it's just come out of the washing machine after fulling.) Finished dimensions are 44" x 72" - just the right size for a nana-nap on the couch or some added warmth in bed on a cold winter's night.


















I've yet to try the flying shuttle set up, but that's going to have to wait a while as I want to make another patchwork throw, again using handspun and dyed wool, for a local exhibition in 2 months. Once that's out of the way and I've honed my floor diving skills (retrieving dropped shuttles!) I'll embark on my next adventure.

Eye Candy

Each summer our Guild holds a retreat and about 25 women abandon home and family for an uninterrupted weekend where they can play with fibre to their heart's content. This year the theme of the retreat was 'Dyeing with a Difference', and one of the 'different' things we did was Dartmoor Dyeing.

Dartmoor Dyeing is a little easier to do than explain, but briefly, it involves a full greasy fleece and 4 dyepots of red, blue, yellow and jade, or a mix of blue and green of some description. The greasy fleece is divided into 3 equal parts; the first of these 3 divisions is further divided into 4. Each of the 4 pieces put into a different dyepot and after simmering for about 30 minutes the fibre is removed from the pots, rinsed well, divided into 4 again. One piece of each colour is set aside as a control colour and the remaining pieces returned to the dyepots but this time to a different coloured pot to the one they originally came from; ie. one piece each of red, blue and yellow goes into the jade pot, one piece of blue, yellow and jade into the red pot, and so on. (I did say it was easier to do than explain!). They're all simmered again for 20 minutes or so, removed from the pots, rinsed and put out to dry.

The dyepots are replenished with more dye and vinegar (using the same water) and the same process is repeated with the 2nd of the initial 3 divisions; more dye replenishment and the final of the 3 divisions is done the same way. What you end up with is a feast for the eyes - 48 piles of glorious colour ...















The left column are the results from the red pot, the next from the blue, then yellow and jade.














And a close-up of 2 of the results which show the effect obtained by using a greasy fleece (in this instance, very greasy, having only been shorn the previous day). The left one was first dyed in the red pot, then in the yellow; the right one was red first, then jade. The variations in colour are the result of the greasy parts of the staple resisting the dye in the initial simmering but the drier tips taking it up well; then on the second run the grease has been boiled off and the second colour has been taken up.

It's been a while ...

... but I haven't been idle. One of the fibre groups I belong to has an exhibition at a local gallery coming up at the end of October and the theme is 'The Garden Party', a short story by New Zealand writer, Katherine Mansfield. The timing of the exhibition and the theme were chosen to coincide with the local Rhododendron festival. No doubt there will be lots of flowers amongst the exhibits by the felters, tapestry weavers, embroiderers, etc., but other than slaving over a boundweave I couldn't come up with any bright ideas as to how I could depict flowers in my weaving. So I've opted for weaving a couple of scarves in flower colours, and have ideas for two wraps which will hopefully represent phrases in the story.

So far I have Wallflower, which is my first attempt at a painted warp and the first time I've used tencel in both warp and weft. What glorious stuff it is to work with. I dyed the warp purple and bronze some time before I knew the theme of the exhibition, and it had been lying around waiting for inspiration as to a draft. The draft is from Carol Strickler's 8-shaft Pattern Book, p. 52, #219.

I took this for show and tell at a recent group meeting and much to my delight/amazement one of the members told me she just had to own it, so it'll go into the exhibition with an NFS tag.



... and Hellebore (winter rose). I adore these flowers with their wines, dusky pinks and lime greens and chose the colours from my stash of fine wool before I'd decided on how to weave them. While flipping through some old Handwovens I'd been given I came across a project using almost exactly the same colours. Try as I might I couldn't kill the plagiarist in me, so that's what I wove. However, I'm pleased with the end result as I see winter roses every time I look at it.





Cream puffs are mentioned in the story, and this is a dummy run to test a draft adapted from a Handwoven project. The warp is 110/2 wool and the weft a firmly spun, but not particularly overtwisted, wool single. I'm relatively happy with the result, but will tweak the sett in the real thing (which will of course have a cream warp) so that there's a bit more 'puff' in the finished item.

The bottom inset shows the weaving on the loom; the top a detail shot of what happens when it hits water. Note to self: adjust colours on photos before cropping and pasting them as insets - the main scarf is the accurate colour (according to my monitor).

The 4th item I plan for the exhibition will be an earthy shawl, to reflect the context of the story line which inspired the idea: "... one of those women's shawls even." Hopefully it won't be another 2 months before I get to post it here.

Progress

It's a month since I made my first post but that's not due to lack of wanting. I won't tell how many interim attempts I've made to post again. So many ideas about what to write. Blogging's a breeze, right? Just type away, throw in some photos, and you're laughing. However, for someone who hasn't had to write much more than half page business letters in a decade or so, writing lengthy concise, coherent posts isn't an easy task. Add to that the infuriating unwillingness of Blogger to play ball with Netscape, which is my preferred browser. Adding text isn't a problem, but when it comes to uploading images, the minute I hit 'Done', Netscape shuts down completely. My html skills are far too rusty to contemplate using that, so IE it is and Mr Gates has another hostage.

Part of the reason for starting my blog was to keep a personal record of my weaving journey, but doing it in chronological order 3 years down the track would be an impossible mission. So, I've decided to just throw things in here as the whim (and memory) takes me.

Since I couldn't bring myself to use my precious handspun for experimentation, my initial weaving efforts were mainly in harsh heavy wool in garish colours, scavenged from the sales table at guild days. As mentioned in my first post, there are very few active weavers in my area, so I was pretty much on my own, except for a large pile of books and lots of bookmarked websites. My primary objective in those days was simply to master basic techniques such as consistent beat, straight selvedges, etc. and there was no particular end purpose to what I wove. The large rectangles were really only fit for burial in the recesses of a cupboard, but before they made it there my colour blind cat decided they were warm and snuggly and to our mutual delight they have become functional items.

For the record, because I feel obliged to maintain the tradition of including the occasional gratuitous pet picture and you will therefore see more of him, said cat's name is Magic. His official name is Black Magic, because (a) he's black, and (b) because I got him from a cat shelter the day New Zealand won the Americas Cup in 1995 in a boat with the same name. He isn't particularly interested in raw fleece, but he goes nuts over freshly washed, so in keeping with tradition, the obligatory pet picture:

I have 4 sheep - Petal, Clint, Sooty and HiHo (he's silver!) - which are shorn twice a year. Their breed is indeterminate (some Romney and Perendale in there somewhere, two pale grey, one chocolate brown and one white), but because they're still young and very healthy their fleece is wonderful quality. Photos of them will no doubt provide relief from the cat photos as my blog progresses.

So every 6 months I acquire another 4 fleeces, each of which weighs about 3 kilos once skirted. I sell or give away a couple, and keep some for myself. As I don't have the time or stamina to wash and card 3 kilos of raw fleece myself I send them away to be done professionally. However, I can't wait to see what each will be like, so wash a small amount by hand and spin it up. I'm not sure who gets more excited about this - myself or the cat. The cloud in the above photo is some first shear lambswool which I'd handwashed and laid out to dry in neat rows of staples. Several minutes of apparently exhausting padding and drooling later it was rearranged into bed shape.

I'm feeling a bit less frustrated by the mechanics of getting this blog to air, and while the formatting still needs a bit of tweaking (the font keeps going feral on me), I'm going to post it and gather my thoughts as to what to post about next; but before I go I should add some weaving content.

Once I got past the heavy, clunky absolute beginner stuff I dived pretty much headlong into fine wool (110/2), weaving a few mainly twill scarves which turned out well enough for other fibre people to buy them. Colour me gobsmacked. I guess we're always our own worst critic, but once I got over the 'shucks, why would you want to buy that, with it's missed/extra picks and a couple of dings in the selvedge?' I realised I'd found my fibre niche and was encouraged to travel further. And so came my shibori phase.

I read a review of Catherine Ellis' Woven Shibori, bought the book and away I went. This is the front and reverse of a 16/2 cotton scarf; tabby background, reversing point twill pattern (the black polyester threads which are later removed).

The end result, and a close up.

If you're into weaving and dyeing, haven't yet tried shibori, and aren't afraid of random or unexpected results, I heartily recommend it. It's F-U-N - and we're all entitled to plenty of that.

Finally!

Three frustrating days after deciding to join the masses in blogland, I've finally cracked it. It seems blogger doesn't like Netscape, for the set up part at least. After god knows how many attempts at creating a blog and not being able to get past entering a name and url I bit the bullet and switched to IE which obligingly let me do so. So here I am.

A bit of background on me: I'm a comparative novice in the spinning and weaving world, having only started spinning about 5 years ago and weaving a year later. The spinning came about when I realised that the fleece I got from my small flock of sheep (all 4 of them) was far too good to toss into the shearer's sack, so I held on to it, thinking I'd give it to a spinner - if I ever met one. I didn't, so the obvious move was to learn myself, and I joined a spinning group. I love spinning and once I'd got wool figured out, I delved into other fibres - silk, alpaca, mohair, etc; discovered dyeing, and pretty soon had a sizeable stash accumulated. But what to do with it all ...? I'm what could be called an adequate knitter, but I've never been passionate about it. It's always been a necessity thing for me - armed with a pattern and the stipulated yarn I could turn out an acceptable result, but knitting for the sake of it had never interested me. Someone suggested weaving, but since I'd never had any real association with a weaver that didn't spark any interest at the time, so I simply carried on churning out more yarn to satisfy the urge to create. Then one day I was prowling around a large used clothing store and tucked away in the corner was an old 4 shaft jack loom which had apparently been 'thrown in' with a collection of donated clothing. While it appeared a bit 'rustic' (ie. possibly homemade) the frame was solid, the reed and wire heddles were in good condition and the asking price was ridiculously low, so I bought it, still not considering using it myself, but rather that someone else in the guild might be interested in it. It sat downstairs for about 2 months until curiosity got the better of me; I got some books out of the library, searched out web sites, figured out how it all worked, and that was the beginning of the obsession. My current loom count stands at the original 4 shaft, a 42" 8 shaft Mecchia jack loom, a 24" 4 shaft table loom, and the most recent acquisition which was given to me, a 42" 4 shaft Loman countermarche (a New Zealand made loom popular about 25 years ago). I've yet to try out the latter as I first have to find a new home for the original jack loom so I can move the Loman from the garage.

I'm largely a self taught weaver as a result of the local weaving group having become more of a coffee and chat group; the majority of the aging members having disposed of their looms when they downsized their homes. While they're all very knowledgeable and generous with their advice, the days of hands-on weaving occurring at the monthly meetings are long gone, and workshops in the local area are few and far between. Fortunately I'm resourceful by nature and unlike many I know have no problems learning from books and websites, but I do yearn for the encouragement of and inspiration from other weavers, and fibreholics - all of which leads circuitously to why I started this blog. I've recently discovered blogs by the likes of Sara Lamb, Charleen, Terri, to name just 3 WeaveRing members whose blogs I've found contain a wealth of information and inspiration. In addition to the ooh-aah factor contained in these blogs, it also occurred to me that a blog was a great way to record one's own fibre journey, and to learn from and share with others on theirs.

So there - that's why.