Industrious Weekend...

This weekend was Carlos' birthday weekend.  (His actual b'day was Friday, 4/25).

 

I had two big goals for textiles this weekend: to go to CNCH for the Vendors' Hall, and to clear enough space in the garage behind the loom to make room for the AVL Warping Wheel to have a spot.  Both were achieved!

 

On Saturday morning I went to CNCH (Conference of Northern California Handweavers) and made a beeline for the Vendors' Hall.  It didn't seem as full of vendors than it had been twelve years ago (last time I came to CNCH) but what was there was very nice.  I saw Sandra Rude's wonderful booth, and also spent a bunch of time hanging around the Ryukyu Textile booth, where I bought a little bit of Linden tree bast yarn.  It's fragrant; it smells like an antique piano soundboard.

 

I also happened to get two wonderful skeins of metal-wound silk thread from John Marshall - one silver, and the other gold.  The skeins were oh so slinky, but skeined thread is liable to get tangled, and the gold and silver threads were very fine, so I decided to try and wind them onto bobbins ASAP.  I did so, yesterday, with very few tangles and no loss at all.  Only broke once in the winding. 

 

Once the silver and gold thread was bobbinned, I relaxed.  Hanks of gold and silver are very sensuous to handle, but the thought of getting them tangled really bothered me, so I wound them off. 

 

Immediately below please see the two little skeins displayed in a bamboo box.

 





Here's a photo of the silver thread at 30x magnification:

 

And below see the happy photo of the Warping Wheel in its dedicated position behind the loom, ready to wind.  

 Here is a microphotograph of a single gold thread, at 30x mag.

Overlays.

It's funny, but every time I weave something, when I draw the finished cloth from the loom, I always get the feeling that I've woven it before.  Not a general feeling of familiarity, but a specific one.  Every piece I've ever woven, from my first backstrap-woven warp-faced belt, to the cloth of gold I finished last week, has been accompanied by a curious, sharply specific feeling that I've woven the same piece before. 

The Runner is Finished: Next Project!

The silk dresser scarf/table runner is completed.  I finished weaving it the other day, and took it with me on a brief trip to Drytown (!), CA this weekend and worked on it in our motel room.  I darned in ends, basted a fine silk thread at each end to prevent raveling, wet-finished it, and pressed it. 

 

Of course, I could not help but weave a couple of samples near the end of the warp, as I always like to: more gold thread, more pretend gold thread, etc.  The gold thread samples came out sumptous, of course.  Particularly nice was the interaction between the gold thread and the bright green moegi color, which I hadn't expected.  And of course it looked royally beautiful with the madder red silk.

 

 

 

Over the weekend a friend asked me if she could commission something small for her upcoming wedding this autumn; of course I said yes - to be asked to provide beauty for such a wonderful occasion is always a privilege and a pleasure.  She has asked for 'something small, something that can be hidden in or attached to my bouquet-'.  I'm thinking a tiny reticule purse, or some such, or even a fine silk ribbon.  Perhaps...white silk shot with silver thread, or gold!

Of course, now that the most recent project is completed, I am feeling happily impelled towards the next project.  Next will be the attempt at making nice silk satin, and after that, Noemi's scarf.

A project finished, and a new beginning.

 

I finished weaving the watermelon warp last night.

First photo below shows the last of the watermelon warp coming off the warp beam. It may take weeks to get the warp onto the loom, but the weaving part is always astonishingly fast. Also..., I tend to sink into a meditative state while weaving, and what seems like ten minutes of weaving might actually encompass the passage of three or four hours.

It was a happy thing to draw all the newly-woven cloth off the cloth storage beam last night at 10:30. I'm always like an eager kid when it's time to unroll the new fabric.

Once the project is off the loom, though, the loom looks forlorn. It was all bright reds and greens, splendid and sparkling gold thread, much clattering and thumping and constant motion, the whir of the shuttle, the soft bell-like clang of the iron weights...but now the cloth is finished and off the loom, and what felt like a kind of joyous festival is over, and the room goes quiet. The loom light is switched off, the new cloth folded up and taken upstairs for wet-finishing and pressing.

As much as I love the moment when the cloth comes off the loom, a warp beam emptied of its threads is a sad-looking thing, and my mind turns inevitably to the planning of the next project to go on the loom. I love the cloth I weave, but it's the weaving of it that is the big deal for me; the 'becoming' of a project, and the processes surrounding it. It is a kinetic thing; a process always in motion.

 

Penchant for diamonds



After I posted a photograph of the dresser scarf as I weave it to Facebook, my old friend Peter sent me the first photo below - it is a photo of my first tablet weaving ever, done in 1986.  I'd been weaving for years by then, but by backstrap loom and floor loom; I'd never done tablet weaving before.  You can see plenty of rough spots and errors if you look below!!  

 

Peter has been wearing it as a wristband since 1986.  Wow.

 

You can see that I have a penchant for red thread, and diamond patterns!!

 

Below here is an incidental photo of the dobby chain with its pegs in placement for the elaborate 16-harness point twill I've got on the loom presently. 

Yesterday evening I finished sleying the reed, then tied on, and finally redid the dobby chain, adding twelve more dobby bars and the pins.

I finished that all faster than I thought I would, so I started weaving.  I wove a brief header using the slightly darker green silk as weft, advanced the warp a bit, and started the weaving of the dresser scarf proper. 

It has a nice three-dimensional relief look to it, which will tone down significantly after the textile is removed from the loom and it is wet-finished and pressed; the threads will bed smoothly.  

 Above you can see the beginning of the weaving, and the draft and tie-up (which here is used as the peg plan).

The colors are wonderful together.

Fridee

Still not sleeping well!  I think I got a total of two hours last night.

I finished the threading last night, and got about a third of the way into sleying the reed before I started dozing at the loom!  It is always a great feeling when the threading is done, and also when the reed sleying is done.  I love those moments.  Always, when the threading is done, I hop off the bench and sing and perform a happy dance around the perimeter of the loom (last night it was an ABBA song.).  Same with the sleying of the reed.  Silly to some, but I started this tradition back in 1978 when I first wove.  The song changes through time as do the steps of the dance, but I always dance around the loom singing then.  

I don't do this when the weaving is done, but rather unfurl all the cloth that's built up on the storage beam in delighted anticipation.  I have been known to drape the newly-woven web around myself and prance up the stairs in it as though wearing a prom gown.

Tomorrow morning, early, I am off down the Penninsula to Woodside, where I'm doing a presentation on silk-reeling for a group gathering at Amazing Yarns.  Part of me really wants and needs to sleep in, but once I am up I'm okay, and it should be great fun.  I do enjoy giving these presentations. 

I'll finish the remainder of the reed sleying this evening, and maybe even get to doing the dobby chain and the pegs.   If I don't get to the dobby chain tonight, I'll do it tomorrow after I come home from the presentation in Woodside, and will hopefully be able to do the initial rows/troubleshooting then, and then get on with the weaving of the dresser scarf in earnest.

I put enough of the warp on so that in addition to the table scarf, I can weave a little extra of this ornate medieval design to make the crown of a hat or some such.  I may use gold thread!!

threadles





After I got home from work yesterday, Carlos was off at a band rehearsal, so I skipped my usual cooking hours and made a beeline straight downstairs to the loom to continue threading.

 

I got almost all the way through the threading, with just about 130 ends left to thread.  Carlos came home and came downstairs to say hello; I was just going to plough through the last bunch and then go back upstairs, but I realized that I'd been sitting for about four hours threading, and really needed a break!!  Time passes swiftly at the loom.  Although I'd rather have finished, I got enough sleep (unusual for me) and woke up this morning in almost no pain!!   So I'll continue this afternoon when I get home...I'm fairly certain that I can not only finish the threading but also sley the reed and tie on.

I have to add twelve dobby bars to the chain already on the dobby, close it, and then totally redo the 'tie-up' (dobby pins).  This is a pretty fast process.

Threading

I really wanted to watch the new episode of Bones last night, from 8 - 9PM, during time I would have otherwise been downstairs at the loom.  Add to that a slightly later dinner (though finished in time for the beginning of Bones) and at 9:00, after the program finished, I was feeling ready to slink off into bed.  I decided instead to surmount my slothy urges and go back downstairs to thread heddles with the watermelon warp. 

I got about a third of the way through the warp in just an hour.  Not bad.  I threaded on all sixteen harnesses this time since it's a sixteen-harness pattern.  A straight draw makes threading easier, though since this was the first time I threaded all the harnesses on this loom, and there are sixteen, the 'reaching-in' was more of a challenge due to the depth of the harness ranks.  I need to get a seat that is slightly lower than my weaving bench in order to not hurt my neck!  That said, I did manage to thread by craning my neck low and peering in.  Pulling out the heddles to be threaded before threading each bunch of sixteen also helped a great deal in keeping the heddles in order; I arranged them in an oblique row, marching backwards or forwards depending on where I was.  This also made the threading feel like it was going faster than usual.  For the red silk thread, since it was warped in pairs rather than singly (and remains in pairs at the porrey cross riding across the lease sticks) it went quite fast!

Tonight I'm hoping to have enough time to continue with the threading.  Possibly, if I can spare two hours, I'll probably finish it. 

I didn't count the heddles on each harness, assuming that there were enough to thread with my 12-inch warp; however, there may indeed not be quite enough on all harnesses, which means I might have to add some heddles to harnesses that are already loaded with threads.  I don't think that this will make it impossible, but it might make it fiddly.  Hopefully, mounting additional heddles onto each harness can wait until the beginning of the next project.  I have plenty of heddles - the ones that came with the AVL, and what looks like a probably equal number that Tien brought for me - the painted heddles with the color coding system. 

For the pattern I am planning to weave for the dresser scarf, there is a 'treadling' sequence of 32 sheds before a repeat, so I will have to add twelve dobby bars to the chain I already have on the dobby, and totally redo the pegs (the 'tie-up'). 

I tested the loom by adding several more of the harnesses to the dobby chain, adding the harnesses from among the 'back eight' I had not used for the inaugural warp; I wanted to feel the weight of lifting eight or nine harnesses at a time instead of four; and was pleasantly surprised.  It is heavier, and will be even heavier than that once the warp is tensed, but it is still manageable and kind of feels good to treadle. 

My first website turned sixteen.

http://www.dance.ne.jp/~uruziam/


Back in 1998, when I lived in Japan.

All I knew how to do was to code by hand.  No WYSIWYG.  This was the beginning!

Warped dresser scarf.

Early this afternoon, after we came back from our garden up the hill, I beamed the dresser scarf warp.   

This was beamed from short warp bundles, wound last week, before the new AVL Warping Wheel had arrived.  It wasn't ideal; the warp wasn't always properly tensioned, but it's a short warp and it's not tremendously slippery yarn as silk goes, just 30/2 spun silk.  The not-ideal stuff will disappear with the use of the Warping Wheel; that's why I got it.  :-)

I love the colors together.  Watermelon.  The red is that mysterious change-in-every-different-light-conditions dye, madder.  One second it looks like rust, the next like coral.  And it smells good.

The whole setup went very well, overall. It's important to get down a good process for mounting warp without the WWheel, also, because there is a non-sectional beam and there will be times when I want to wind the conventional beam with one yarn and another on the sectional.

 It'll be fun to use the Warping Wheel, though.  First warp for that one will probably be a sample warp, likely a fine organzine (for weaving satin).

I'd really like to better understand double weave and color blocks.  From there I'm envisioning tallitot woven in double weave, satin color blocks, point twills over part of a warp and not others, and a point twill woven double weave block arragement alternating in satin blocks.  I will have to think about the take-up differences in that case; I might have to offset the point twill blocks with say, lustrous broken twill blocks instead of the satin.

The AVL Warping Wheel arrived!  

I assembled it while watching reruns of Game of Thrones with Carlos.  

Glee.

Old friends, and a new warp.



Quite a number of years ago I had sent a small book of weaving samples to a friend in Texas.  At some point, he and his partner moved to a different house, and it seems the sample book got misplaced during the move (I know that feeling too well).  Well, he and his partner were cleaning a storage room in their house when they came upon my old sample book, and sent it to me via USPS Express.

 

I received it the day before yesterday.  Opening up the sample book was like a time capsule going back quite a ways! 

 

In the photo immediately below, there is an index card with three silk fabric samples on it that I wove.  They are all in the W-draft I used on my new AVL recently, but woven monochrome and at a much, much finer sett.  The samples below are also dyed post-weaving: indigo to the left, safflower with a bit of indigo in the middle, and safflower to the right.  The pink color in the middle from the safflower tends to be quite fugitive: when it emerges from the fizzing (yes, fizzing!) cold dyebath, it is almost shocking pink in color...this intensity fades rapidly over a period of days to a softer pink.  After all these years I'm surprised that the pink has survived even this well; the red colorant present in safflower (which contains three dyes: one strong, colorfast yellow; one fugitive yellow, and a fugitive red) does not survive well either through time or when exposed to light.  That said, it was enclosed in sample book inside a box, so it wasn't exposed to light at all. 

 

The color to the right, a peachy color using the colorfast yellow AND the fugitive red safflower dyes together, is hideous.  When it emerged from its dyebath, it was this same nauseating color of Circus Peanuts (which are candy, not peanuts).  In other realms and times and contexts I am certain that it is a perfectly lovely color - say, in seventeenth-century Venice, it was probably very much in fashion; but for me the association with Circus Peanuts candy is too strong; this color has been too heavily-laden with unpleasant associations, so I can't stand it!

 



 

Next photograph down shows a single tzitzit tie from a tallit I made in 2002.  I made an error in several places, and one of the woolen strings actually broke (it doesn't show, but this renders it invalid, so I had to cut it off the tallit and affix another tzitzit in its place).  The very cool thing about the tzitzit in the photograph is that a single long string, the 'shammash', was dyed using t'khelet dye, a somewhat controversial dyestuff whose (animal, not vegetal) origins are still argued today; at one point more than a thousand years ago, the mitzvah requiring this blue thread was no longer able to be fulfilled because the exact knowledge of the source of this dye (was the 'hilazon' animal a Murex?  was it a squid?) was lost, and rabbinical authorities officially excused the Jewish people from having to fulfill this particular mitzvah.  Since that time, or at least until fairly recently, the shammash strings of the tzitzit - the one that appears blue here in the photo below - were made undyed.  From what I understand, there have been several attempts to re-create the t'khelet blue, with mixed results, but what appears to me to be the best claim is the one used by Beged Ivri in Israel, and they are the makers of the tzitzit strings below in the pic. 

 

I think that it is a lot like indigo in its molecular structure. 

 

When I bought the blue wool t'khelet strings years ago, they were dark indigo blue in color, and crocked onto the hands (crocking means rubbing off on) and stained the rest of the undyed tzitzit threads after use, and also bled into the precious and costly handwoven silk of the tallit fabric itself.  So I wondered at the time if it would behave itself and stop crocking if I did what I would usually do with indigo: wash it separately with soap until it stopped bleeding, dry it, and only then regroup it with the undyed threads of the tzitzit and then perform the ritual winding of the wraps and knots.  It worked.  Not only did it work, but it lost a great deal of color - now it was light blue, but not just 'light blue'; it is almost turquoise in color.  The photograph below is basically faithful to the real hue. 

 

Another tallit I made using the t'khelet blue tzitzit thirteen years ago is still in use, and the tzitzit, handled every morning while its wearer dons her tallit for minyan (the tzitzit are examined before donning the tallit every morning, to make sure that they have not come untied or are otherwise invalidated), are still bright heavenly blue. 

 

There is still controversy about the t'khelet, and mainstream rabbis often prefer to suggest using the undyed versions, and since there is still uncertainty about rekindling this mitzvah, the matter not having been halachically settled yet, they say it is better to avoid using  the blue strings until they are sure it is true t'khelet, and until they are certain about the identity of the animal known as a hilazon. 

 

But not everyone is quite so strict about it.  For me, even if I can't confirm the identity of the original animal halachically, I am still amazed and delighted at the beauty of the blue shammash, and it very much puts me in mind of the mitzvah of t'khlet when I see it and touch it.  My own tallit does not have the blue strings; but perhaps one day I will attach a new set of tzitzit to it, and use the blue.

 

 

Next photo is a small swatch of some quite fine linen I wove twelve years ago.  I used a combination of huck and tabby, and wove firmly.  I wove this linen with the warp sprayed with water, and the weft soaked in water before putting into the shuttle; the results were better; a dense, tightly-woven web.  I love linen, and enjoy weaving it; but I have found it to be challenging to warp due to its total inelasticity.  I would also not try to weave linen like this on the AVL: you really need a really high tension for linen to not look sleazy after the weaving.  Someday I'll have space to set up both looms, Granny Cranny and Millicent the AVL, and will use Granny Cranny to weave linen, and rugs.

 

The linen in the photo is very fine: the sample you see below is about 90 epi (it was woven at about 80, but draw-in and wet-finishing seem to have contracted the textile).  This photo got pretty close to the linen.  It's a very tiny sample, only a couple of inches by a couple of inches.

 

Below is the new warp. 

 

These are the same yarns I used previously: 30/2 spun silk from Treenway, dyed with madder to make the red, and dyed with Osage orange and indigo (indigofera suffruticosa in this case) for the nice 'moegi' green at the selvedges.

 

Until the AVL Warping Wheel arrives and is assembled, this one warp I am putting up in the conventional way.  It's warped on a warping board, but only in 2" wide sections, which will fit in the spaces on the AVL's sectional warp beam.  I do not like to chain silk warps if there is any chance of tangling or getting out of tension; rather I use a kind of modified Peggy Oesterkamp method of winding the warp under tension.  Oesterkamp uses 'kitesticks' but here I have used toilet paper tubes, one inside the other for added strength, and it seems that the warp is sufficiently snug.  I've used this method for years and it works.

 

The AVL Warping Wheel, though, will be a whole new chapter in warping for me.  For keeping warps under tension (ideal for tangle-icious silks!) and speed of warping and also for not having to buy a spool rack and then spending tons of time winding the many, many bobbins.  I'd like to 'graduate' to small-level production (I'm talking: tallit warps for maybe 10 tallitot at a run).  I love to work in exploratory series of things and would like to keep doing that. 

This is the warp for my sister, the 'dresser scarf', which will actually be the runner on top of the cabinet where my brother's ashes are enshrined.  It's an honor and a pleasure to weave such an item.