Back to the little loom

With my scarf currently sitting on my table loom and progressing, deliberately, slowly so Mary can take me through each step - I need to get my weaving fix. So this weekend it'll be back to the inkle loom.

Here's some bits I made earlier - this jade green band is for a security badge holder that I wear around my neck daily at work. The selvedges are a bit wavy but not too bad and I love the colour.


IBM badge holder 

It uses some stunning Filatura Di Crosa cotton with a lovely golden mixed thread running through it (the yarn came from a thrift shop and sadly looks like it is not currently made any more)


I love this yarn 

This celtic knotwork band is for a belt for my elder daughter. This has pretty good selvedges but the pattern is a little variable in length due to irregular tension/beating. One day I'll weave something perfect.


Emily's belt 

The pattern was lifted directly from inkleweaving.com - thanks Tracy and was woven in #3 mercised cotton which I picked up from Michaels in San Jose when I was over on a business trip last Dec.


Celtic Knots 

Serendipity, Karma or what?

Jon gave me the 8 shaft loom and I am so grateful. I was destined to weave ...

I discover that my local Spinners, Weavers, Dyers guild meets monthly about 4 miles from my home!

Even better 10 miles away Mary Keer runs an informal weaving workshop every other Thursday. Mary is a wonderful tutor with lifetime of knowledge and has a huge weaving studio next to her maginficent thatched home.

Better again, Mary is an avid yarn collector and is happy for students to help themselves at cost, so suddenly hundreds of yarn and colour combinations are within my grasp.

I could go on about the studio, the work the other students are doing, the equipment (including a 16 shaft dobby loom) etc but will save that for another time.

However, one last 'even better', Mary's workshop is in the village of Cheriton which also hosts one of my favourite pubs - The Flowerpots. The Flowerpots brew their own beer and have won many, many prizes at UK beer festivals. What better than a quick thirst slake after a long evening at the loom?

It's my destiny to weave - I'm sure of it.

Oh - by the way, the vest project is now on hold. Firstly my chosen yarns just didn't work and secondly I'm letting Mary teach me properly and take me through the whole weaving process with something simple. So the next loom project is a simple fairly plain scarf - still with 268 ends (24epi) its the most ambitious thing to date!

When will I ever learn?

Talking with my mother on the phone she said she'd love a little piece just to see what I was doing - so I thought I'd try my hand at overshot for the first time. I poked around the weaving archive site http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/weavedocs.html and found a pattern (in the monographs on miniature patterns by Josephine Estes) that I thought would work with the nice 4 ply weight mercised cottons I'd got from the local hobby store.

Then I had a bright (not) idea - why not use that white wool that I was going to use for the vest as the warp? Why not, because it's got a crimp in it and very difficult to get an even warp tension, that's why not. But a little stupidity has never stopped me trying.

Initially I tried to weave the overshot just using the selvedges to hold the repeated weft throws but with the stretchy warp that was impossible (and with my almost zero skill level a pretty ambitious thing to even contemplate). A disaster made worse by the fact that the pattern was for a down shed loom not the up shed on my table loom. Fortunately it didn't take me long to realise all I needed to do was raise exactly the missing shafts not the pattern ones and also that weaving a row of tabby every other weft would provide the essential stability.

It's not even and the selvedges may yet be declared a United Nations disaster area but if I can persuade Liz to do a bit of judicious hemming it might just make something my Mum will cherish - actually she'd probably cherish any old raggety bit that I made.

Still, the pattern's nice.


Mum's little runner 


... details 

Vestina Lente ...

... make vest slowly - it gets worse!

The idea was to use some 4 ply wool and acrylic mix yarn. The warp would be black which had a nice silver strip in it and weft a matching white weaving into a small diamond/flower pattern. So let's try a sample

Problem one - the yarn had a crimp in it so tension on the loom was a nightmare.
Problem two - the small pattern visually turned the white into a dirty grey and the thing looked dirty even while on the loom!

So here's the result of me playing with some colour and turning the piece into something that will make a small bag to hang on the loom to hold tape, snips etc.


Loom Bits'n'Bobs Bag (to be) 

One good thing to come out of this sample (apart from finding out the vest would have looked terrible) is that I managed to put one thread through the wrong heddle so have now discovered how to make temporary string heddles to fix this. Another lesson learned.

The vest - not off to a good start

OK so I was saying to Liz last night 'Why all this fuss about an even tension on the warping board? Everything gets retensioned when beaming, right?' Another lesson learned!

The yarn I'm using for the vest is an acryllic mix and is really stretchy (I'm using up some yarns left over from Liz's knitting maching). Also it comes on knitting balls, not round but cylindrical figure of 8 balls - in this case huge ones. So I'm putting 180 warps of approx 9'6" (3m) on the board and the yarn is coming off the ball unevenly, wrapping around my legs, the table legs, the chair legs and the warping board pegs (wrong ones). I was really glad we don't have dogs, cats or small children for it to find. Still after about 60-90 mins I've got 180 warps and although I know the tension is irregular in places I'm not sure it's too bad and anyway, surely, it doesn't matter too much.

So tie up the cross, put a few choke knots around and lift the warp off the board to watch every other thread shrink back and leave me with this horrible knarly skein of warp - aargh!!

Still hopefully I'll get chance to get it on the loom this weekend and if it looks too tangled all I've lost is my time.

Off to the local weavers guild for the first time - think I'll take something small so just going to warp up the Tornadowood mini-inkle. Hopefully it will be a rarity here in S England and so become a talking point to help introduce myself.

First sample is off the loom!

The photos don't really show the detail. The sample contains several experiments in plain, basket, rib and twill weaves (and combinations thereof) and different wefts: wool, cottons, chenille, angora, plain and nubby yarns etc. There's even a small section of plain weave double cloth forming a little pocket in the middle of the sample.

Well, that was fun. There's a few places where changing weaves or differing wefts have caused the selvage to be a bit wavy and for some reason there are a few unintentional weft floats early on. As the weaving progressed the beat became more even, the mistakes fewer and the edges better defined. I also learned that some twill weaves can leave floating selvages which need a direction change or manually picking up. Also learned not to wind on so far that the fell is very close to the front beam or else beating becomes a strain and hence uneven.


Start 


Middle 

End 

Progress ...

Took a week off, Liz and I celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary in Dublin. Nice, fun city. Found a HUGE ball of white chenille in an Oxfam charity shop so spent half a day sightseeing with a great hump in my backpack.

Almost finished the first warp. Having a great time playing with various colour and weave combinations, particularly twills. Will post some pictures once it's off the loom.

I'm a weaver now!

OK - it's all warped - LET'S GO!!!

Actually weaving's the hard part - it took several headers to get the warp straight (probably means I had it spaced too close on the front bar). Even without worrying about selvage it was so easy to snag a shed with that white plastic shuttle and pickup the wrong thread.

Using a proper wooden stick shuttle made it so much easier, using a boat shuttle easier still. Oh, and now I realise why Deborah Chandlers weaves barefoot, it's so easy to pick up an extra shaft by accident (see white blobs in the fuschia tabby below).

Still it's a learning exercise, on the whole it's pretty fair for a first effort. The two yarns have differing elasticity so the weaving tends to pucker a bit on the darker warps (another learning experience).

Here's me weaving

Me weaving 

and here's the result so far:

weaving 

Yes - the hatpin is holding in a new warp thread to replace the one I broke (I don't know how). Fixing is surprisingly easy. OK the weave is uneven, the selvages are rough but it is weaving and it interesting experimenting with tabby and simple twill but I do need to read the book badly now as I have no idea what I'm doing or what to try next!

Scary time - warping the loom

So let's try follow Deborah Chandler's front-back warping. Holding all those cross threads is really scary - don't even think about dropping them. Sleying is immensely satisfying. The first warp goes in 12 dents and then misses 12 then in the next 12 etc.
Sleying is pretty easy but counting the 12 missing dents is harder - I used the reed hook to go in and out of each dent until I got to the 12th and sleyed the next one and then counted the gap, and then counted it again. Also after each group of 12 had been theaded I pushed them down to the bottom of the reed and checked

• there were 12


• there were no empty dents


• there weren't 2 threads in any dent

Actually I made few mistakes.

One lesson learned - the second (darker) warp I pulled further past the reed and so when sleyed the ends were all 4-5" longer then the first (lighter) threads. This was a nuisance which I kept encountering right until tying to the back beam - I should have sort it out earlier.

I did seem to lose the cross on the first warp but still managed to seem to keep order - the second warp went perfectly.

Threading the heddles was far more mistake prone, Getting the wrong shaft or wrong heddle order seemed to be all to easy. Again I checked every 12 threads for mistakes and there were a few but it was easy to sort out. Once I was sure everything was OK I checked again - paranoia is setting in with this weaving lark.

Once threaded it was easy tying to the back bar and beaming. I had surprisingly few out of order threads and it beamed pretty straightforwardly. I didn't have thick paper and UK stores don't have brown bags so I couldn't use the lack of brown bags as a good excuse to stock the liquor cabinet :-( I did find some sturdy A4 (about US letter size) envelopes and they look like they work fine. Tying to the front beam was again easy - the larks head knot method of adjusting tension in the groups is really easy and I was happy with the result.

If there is one thing I need to be sure of - If I'm going to use this front-back warping method with the cross held in my hand then the phone just has to be switched OFF! I don't want any interruptions. I suspect this took me a good two hours to do - although much of that time was popping out to read the book or watch the video Deborah made - "Beginning Four Harness Weaving". The video is useful but the book
probably covers everything as well if not better.

Whilst sleying and heddle threading I paid tribute to my Ashford loom's New Zealand heritage by listening to a fabulous CD called "Maori" with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and some Maoris singing traditional NZ folk songs, some to more modern accompanyment

Anyway here's the front beam with a header weaved. I couldn't find the stick shuttle so I quickly made one out of plastic - mistake, it's a pig to weave with, it's zen nature is to snag anywhere it can.

Front Beam 

And here's the back beam - this is a nice photo - it looks so neat and tidy!!!

Back beam 

Lets make a Warp

For a first project I'll follow the example in Deborah Chandler's book, 2 yards of 10" weave at 12 ends/inch in 2 contrasting colours. Well I decided on 2.5 yards just to give me plenty to practice with and as an excuse to use up some more of these particularly unmanly pink wools Liz had left over from machine knitting days. The warp will be soft candyfloss pink and vibrant fuschia pink - lovely!!! Actually this was a deliberate choice - this first weave is not likely to be perfect (there's an understatement if there ever was one) so why not deliberately choose colours that help focus on getting technique right rather than worrying about trying to make a good end product?

So check the yarns for size, wrap around a ruler for 1" (harder than it sounds) and count the ends - 24 - exactly right.

Making the warp was easy. My warping board has 3 pegs separate to the rest so making the cross was pretty natural - I didn't forget once. Got interrupted a couple of times with phone calls so glad I used counting threads every 10 warp threads. The 2nd warp I removed the end from the board before tying up the cross - whoops. Just needed to be careful to tie it without disturbing the threads.

Probably took 30-40 mins or so - hard to tell with the interruptions

Here's my warping board - the 'cross posts' are at the top - you might just make out a faint blue wool thread still on it which was my thread that showed how to warp 2.5 yards.

Pics 

Festina Lente

At last - enough time to go out and knock up a simple raddle. The garage workbench is littered with tools and rubbish so there goes 15 minutes. However a quick search finds a great piece of wood which is just a couple of cm longer than the loom. Careful marking ensues and then I discover a total lack of suitable nails. Oh well! I use a small nail to make ding points where the larger nails will go when I get them and call it a night.

Small World

On getting the loom home on Sunday I had it set up on the stand in a trice; checked it all over in case anything had worked loose. A pleasant evening shared between TV and the first chapters of Deborah Chandler's "Learning to Weave" and I was chomping on the bit to start. Unfortunately on Monday the day job intervenes and so Monday evening my tasks are a) build a raddle, b) measure a first warp. Well, that's what they should have been but a call from my neighbour with a computer problem blows that away. Usually his problems are minor and often require just a little software tweaking and a bit of user education but tonight it's serious - he has a weird problem that looks like a power-supply failure. Luckily I have a spare one (doesn't everybody?) and so he was sorted.

What's all this got to do with weaving? Well, talking to Don and his wife June it transpires June used to weave. What's more her teacher was none other than the great Hilary Chetwynd herself (of "The Weaver's Workbook fame - which, by coincidence, I was reading just as Don called). Turns out Hilary used to live only a few miles away in the village of Cheriton.

To begin at the beginning ....

Oh no not another start-up blog! What's this one all about?

Well, I've had an interest in weaving for quite some while now. Last weekend I was donated an entire weaving studio: 32" Ashford 8 shaft table loom with floor stand and pretty much everything I could want to be able to start weaving. I feel I owe it to the donator and, maybe, other beginners in this fine ancient craft to document my progress, share my exasperations and idiotic fumblings and glory in my successes.

Woah! That's not starting at the beginning. Many years ago now (probably near 20) I saw a 4-shaft table loom in junk store in Bristol and bought it without hesitation. My first weaving folly, it was old, delapidated and needed more tlc than I could find time for. A couple of house moves later and it still lives in the attic.

Here's a picture of the new loom