Time for a few more

There are still another 8 days until the wool festival at Mas d Azil, so time for a few more creations!

This one is with a silk warp and merino weft.

Pashminas

A new pashmina design in merino and silk warp, with combinations of linen, silk and lambswool weft. This design has a patterned border inspired by kilim rugs. I ve also added some thicker wool silk in the warp. Because it's not evenly distributed and a lot thicker, this warped traditionally rather than sectionally and has gone on a second warp beam.

 

Second pashima underway with linen/silk warp. I think it might be much more linen than silk and a bit stiff, I ll sleep on it before deciding whether to change it back to linwool.

Reverted to linwool!

Double weave shawls off the loom

The double weave shawls are finished. The second shawl I tried substituting the 1/7 lambswool/linen/silk for 2/16 linwool. Which has worked out fine giving a side which is less slubby. On the final part of the warp I tried 2/10 wool/silk. The colours are amazing and as the 2/10 is too thick to maintain an even pick density  through the integrated areas, the weft opens up which has actually produced a subtle transverse stripe in the finished cloth. It's a heavier, thicker cloth than the linen ones.
Something for next time.

The fringes were knotted in groups of 6 and trimmed before wet finishing. Slightly quicker than hemstitching but much easier on the eyes at 30epi!

Last time I took the cloth to 56 degrees to get some width shrinkage, this time I stayed cooler and left the width almost unchanged.

 

Delicate warp

The two doubleweave shawls in 30/2 superwash merino and 1/7 linen/lambswool/silk are underway. Real problems with the selvedge on left had side with repeated warp breakages. The 30/2 is at the limit for being a viable warp but it has worked in the past on other projects with the same warp and weft. The blues and yellow shades I have used before seem much stronger and less sticky than the red. In the end there was a twisted thread around a heddle eye that was probably exacerbating the problems and the 15 epi reed may also be causing too much friction, I'll use 10 epi next time with 3 ends per dent.

The two faces are in sharply contrasting colours, each face is a separate cloth joined in the little double density squares where all the yarns form a single "integrated cloth". The cloth shrinks on finishing the results can be seen here.

My problems haven't ended there, I forgot to lock the draft in Tempoweave and at some point when returning to weave I will have clicked my wireless mouse to turn it back on (when unused it goes off to save battery) evidently the mouse must have been over tie-up and changed it very slightly...enough to produce long floats on the reverse side of the cloth (hidden from view) in line with the integrated squares. By the time I noticed I had made over a hundred passes of the shuttles.

No alternative but to unweave (I only have enough of the light grey weft to make the first shawl so I could not cut it off). The super fine warp and slubby weft stick together and in the dense integrated squares they were literally feltef together! It took 2 hours 30 minutes to undo. Things are back on track now and I'm halfway through the first shawl. There'll be a colour change on the second.

 

Weaving course pieces

Here are some photos of the amazing fabric Ruby wove on the 4 day course. 

She had never woven before.

 

Weaving course underway

Susie and Ruby, neither of whom have ever woven before, are my guinea pigs for the beginners weaving course. The first day and some of the second was spent dressing the looms but by the end of day 2 they have both made some fantastic designs! Two more days of weaving and learning still to come.

 

Looms arrive at last!

At last the first two table looms (Louet Jane 8 and 16) have arrived. The two smaller Harmony looms are still pending. It took a day to assemble the pair and another half day to build my own stands for each. The Louet stands cost 268 euros each, mine cost 29 euros and are sturdier!

The first course, a trial run with Susie and Ruby starts tomorrow!

The Megado upstairs is now ready to start weaving two shawls in wool, linen and silk.

 

Double width overshot

The blanket is underway. In the video below I explain how the floating selvedges are managed. Because I've added alternate picks of tabby to the pattern, which requires two shuttles, it is easier to do two picks of pattern followed by two picks tabby. As the blanket is woven folded, the two picks equate to one pick across the entire width of the unfolded cloth.

Photo below is straight off the loom, because the cloth is folded I'll have to hemstitch after removing it. The second half of the warp is on the loom for blanket number 2.

 

Fishing line removed, the crease should go after wet finishing

Two more wraps

Two more colourways for my "swirl" design. The combination of lighter colours has made for a subtle pattern, whilst the "less lustrous than silk" tencel, which is also slightly thicker, has altered the design slightly.

The blue and yellow, evokes the "seashore" imagery in the design. The all yellow is less successful.

Next projects

Bertha Gray Hayes was a North American weaver, active in the mid twentieth century and is best known for her miniature overshot designs of which she designed nearly 100 original patterns. I thought I'd use her designs to make some blankets for our yoga studio using some of Susie's homespun wool from our ouessant sheep for the weft and a 8/4 cotton for the warp. 

Because there is a jump in scale (BGH's original designs used 20/2 warp and 10/2 weft) there would be unacceptably long floats if I just used her drafts with these much thicker yarns. Our wool fulls and felts quite easily on wet finishing, so it is the cotton floats that I've reduced with the introduction of alternating tabby picks (as the weaver did in the photo below) in 8/2 cotton .

I ll be weaving these blankets on the Spring II loom as double width. This is a method whereby I weave the cloth in two layers on the loom with a fold on one side and two loose selvedges on the other. When the cloth is removed from the loom it unfolds into a piece twice the width. As the warps tend to weave tighter at the selvedges, it is important to prevent this on the side that will contain the fold as this will create a ridge in the cloth when unfolded. There are a couple of ways to prevent this: Sleying the reed slightly wider adjacent to the fold for a couple of dents and/or adding a tight length of fishing line adjacent to the fold which is woven in, but then withdrawn at the end of the weaving. The tension on the line helps to prevent draw-in.  I'll probably try both together.

More or less the draft I'll be using, but with different colours and heavier yarns, this cloth has two colours in the warp (red and orange) I'll just have a single cream colour. 

As both of the final selvedges for the blanket lie on the same side during weaving and must be kept apart, a special technique must be used to ensure they don't interlock...more later.

On the megado two more "swirl" scarves. Different colour way - sand and white, and this time I m substituting 16/2 tencel for the 30/2 silk, they take the sett. 

Each warp is about 700 ends.

Triple weave part 3

Sorting out the draft for this weave has been a challenge. The main difficulty has been weaving the middle strip of brown wool amongst the other layers without the weft getting interlocked with the warps and wefts of the outer strips and other layers. It took several failed attempts and some extensive rethreading of sections to final succeed. As a consequence it's not the neatest weaving I've ever done, but perhaps one of the more complex. 

The brown red and green strips of wool are thre separate cloths which move from above to between to below the two layers of cottons cloth (yellow and white) which also swap places and occassionally amalgamate.

To develop the draft, it became easier to work with the liftplan and the eventual key to success was to weave two successive picks for each wool strip in turn and using the liftplan to create an escape route for the shuttle ensuring that the wefts were always lying in a position where they were not disturbed by subsequent picks.

I have still to wash the sample which should produce some differential shrinkage and help to disguise the obvious threading error on the lefthand side. After so much fiddly rethreading I couldn't face trying to correct it and the purpose of this exercise was to get the draft to work rather than make something in particular.

Trials and tribulations of lambing

Lambing season is upon us and first up was Sasha who managed a straightforward birth of a male lamb who we called Iggy without any intervention on Tuesday. A couple of days later Truffle had another boy overnight who we named Bonbon. But the following morning he'd vanished. We searched everywhere but probably a fox had jumped the electric fence and taken him...heartbreaking.

Yesterday Inkling had her first baby, another boy we named Nattie. This time we locked mother and baby in the bergerie overnight and will do the same again tonight. 

Today at about 12.30 Trudy's waters broke, but two hours later she still couldn't push the baby out. We called the vet but they had no one available to help. The lamb was normally presented (nose and front feet) but Trudy was too small - this is her first baby. I called my friend Paul in the Mendips who also has sheep and he suggested sticking a couple up fingers up her bum, feeling for the back of the head and exerting a little downward pressure to pop the lambs head out. It worked a treat and once the head was out, in a few minutes later she managed to give birth to a little ewe. Mother and baby are safely in the barn.

Sasha and Iggy

Poor Truffle and her baby that was taken

Trudy and Patchuli

Inkling and Nattie

Tripleweave part 2

As can be seen in this photo the edges of the wool strips when they weren't on the top of the weave were being "sewn" through the other layers at the edges. I've finally worked out a way to avoid this with some changes to the lift plan and separate series of treadling, one for each of the wool strips. 

To be able to weave the three wool strips as a separate layer:

• they each need to each be on their own set of shafts
• there can be no interlocking at the shuttles at the selvedge or a separate selvedge weave - the edges of all the layers must remain open.

I decided to cut off what I had done so far and so wove in a lease stick. After cutting off the weave, I can preserve the tension by tying this stick back onto the front beam.

After wet finishing the this side shows more or less my intention - wool loops, which dive between the white and yellow cotton layers, then later re-emerge of the reverse side. The differential shrinkage giving the fabric some puff and structure. (I cut the wool where it was previously sewing layers together for this picture).

The reverse side as currently woven has the wool strips "sewn" to the other layers at their edges even though they are a separate layer. Some more drafting to correct this, then hopefully a larger sample off the existing warp.

These exercises improve my drafting skills and knowledge even though they may not produce something useable or beautiful at the first attempt. Cotton is much cheaper than more exotic yarns and so is a useful test material for passive yarns.