Waste no Time



 

It's been a novelty to have the loom up and weaving so quickly. 

 

I decided that after the failed organzine warp, I'd indulge myself in using the biggest, fattest, fluffiest yarn I've ever used.  12 epi!  I first sleyed it at 15 epi, but it was so dense that the yarns were abrading each other, so I re-sett at 12 epi and everything fell into place nicely.  I wanted it dense enough so that the diagonally-running float threads of the point twill would come together like satin, and they did.

 

It was pure bliss weaving downstairs yesterday.  Happy to have the day off, happy that the weather is springy and gorgeous, delighted to have the garage door AND the back door open for a zephyr crossbreeze.  Beautiful Gregorian chant on the radio.  A warp that is easy to see, and the quiet harmony of everything chugging along as it should.  It took me all of 40 minutes to thread the whole warp, another 25 to sley the reed.  Add 45 minutes or so for pegging the dobby and tying up.  Then the weaving began - and neither threading nor pegging errors.  Wooood!

 

Immediately below are the tidily-beamed wool threads for this warp.  Only six yards.  Looks fluffy but it's actually well-beamed and the threads are beamed at the appropriate width within each bout.  It all looks so creamy and gorgeous I buried my face in it; for a moment, though, I had forgotten how old this wool is.  I can't recall where I got it, but I've had it for at least ten years, and it was old then.  It smells like...well, old wool, old wool that has been sitting around in not the best conditions, but it's still clean enough to use.  There are tender parts on the wool that mostly came to light during the warping, when there was sufficient tension on the yarn so that if there was a weak spot, it'd break.  One broken thread so far on the warp, which was repaired.

 





 

Here's a pic of the weaving after about five minutes into it.  It's another medieval point twill, this time woven in huge fluffy wool.  Of course the repeat is much more giant than on a fine silk, so it's very dramatic to see.  Looks like a coffered ceiling I saw in Florence at the Laurentian Library years ago.  I think that if I were to steam press this, the three-dimensional effect would go away, so when it's done I'm going to try and retain this quality - perhaps wet-finishing followed by steaming and blocking, but not pressing. 

 

It is entirely the tension of the yarn combined with its positions within the pattern, and its energetic interaction with the other threads that causes this amazing coffering.

Finally here is a quick shot I took just before I started weaving the header.  It's the AVL loom, all loaded with the warp and passing elegantly through the heddles and thence to the reed.  In front I tied an antique basket which friend Liza gave me so long ago - I can't remember if it's French or Japanese, but it is an openwork basketry handbag.  I've used it for a number of things, such as for flower-arranging, but I realized that it would be perfect for stashing my precious handmade hardwood shuttles.  One of them, which actually belongs to my friend Rosemary, is a Jim Ahrens shuttle which he himself made many many years ago.   The other two are Bluster Bay shuttles which Terry made for me - one is tensioned by freestanding hooks, and the other one - my Dream Come True shuttle, the one made of marblewood, has a Honex tensioner.   Nice.  I strung up the shuttle basket to the left, tied with an acid-green habutai scarf I dyed at Tien's not long ago.  The brilliant color makes for a very cheery note in the dim garage.



Wool on the loom

Since I haven't finished dyeing the green silks for Noemi's scarf warp, I decided to be daring and uncharacteristic of myself, and so I have wound a wool warp onto the AVL.  I didn't have nearly enough for a large blanket, but there is enough for a small one.  Point twill, I think, and I'll edge it in silk habutai when it has been wet-finished.

The wool is sett at 12 epi; I may have to re-sley into a 15-dent reed if the 12 turns out to not be dense enough.   On the other hand, the fulling of the wool might also be enough to make the proper density.

I have the warp about 18 inches wide and six yards long.  It's all on the warp beam; next step is to slide the crosses onto the lease sticks, mount them on the wires, and begin threading the heddles.

It's slightly comical to only need to thread 216 heddles and the warp is eighteen inches wide!

Pop, pop, pop, and now I have the crossmaker...

So much for the test warp of cochineal-dyed organzine.  I got it threaded, I got it sleyed, and then I started to weave it.  Each shed popped several threads right before my eyes.  Turned out that the warp was more tangled than I had thought, at the back.  Too many invisible threads I couldn't see.  I gave up after more than half the threads popped on the third shed.  I trace the breakage to tangling at the back, but there may have been other factors too.  I *have* woven with this same organzine before, and got nary a broken warp thread.  Everything about this warp either challenged me or just failed on me.  Obviously each failure has a cause, but something about it just exhausted me, and so I've removed the warp from the loom without trying to spend too much troubleshooting time.  I have projects to weave!  I *think* that the organzine just had too many tension problems - plus the tangling - and that winding the warp without a cross was just silly.

Next will be the green scarf for Noemi.  And I do have enough wool for a big wool blanket (amusing myself at the prospect of weaving 12 epi for the blanket) so that might be a satisfying thing to do while I dye the ranges of green silks for Noemi's scarf. 

Bizzy Fun Weekend

I went to Tien's on Saturday, with the idea that we would get her fly shuttle set up onto her loom, Emmy. 

Turns out, it seems, that some parts are missing or misplaced, and consultation with the experts is indicated.  I had thought I'd be able to suss it out just fine, since I have a fly shuttle set up as well, but mine is an earlier model, with one detent, and has a far more straightforward design.  For Tien's, which has two detents in order to work with two shuttles, there is a sprung return for the fly shuttle's pickers, which must return to the extremity of the shuttle boxes in order for the drop boxes to rise or sink; that sprung return was mysterious!   I felt a little guilty for saying 'sure, I can help!' and then not being able to.  Learning curve.

We also inventoried some amazing paper sheets covered with lacquered gold or silver leaf and cut into fine strips for use as weft in weaving.  They are amazing objects, gorgeous in their own right.  The smell of the sheets, which date from the early '70s, was mesmerizing.  One whiff and I was back in Kyoto.

Yesterday I went to Berkeley to have lunch with a friend and to see the new work she's been doing.  She is working meticulously on scroll-mounting, as is done in Japan, and it was a treat to see the beautiful things she's made.  Driving back into the city was nowhere nearly as bad as I thought it would be; yesterday was the annual Bay-to-Breakers race, always a fun event that shuts down several routes through the city as the hordes of participants make their way from the Bay to Ocean Beach seven miles west.   Once coming off of the Bay Bridge, the freeway in the city was a parking lot, so I took the 9th Street/Civic Center exit.  To my astonishment and relief, there was zero traffic beyond Stanyan Street, though I did see people returning from the race still clad in their costumes.  It was still light when I arrived home.   So tired, though!!  I fell asleep through much of last night's Game of Thrones episode (darn: I'll just have to watch it again!) and didn't wake up at all in the night.  Alarm jangled me awake at 5:57AM, with me feeling not as rested as I would have liked.  Thank heaven for coffee...

The visit with Liza yesterday provided much fuel for inspiration...

AVL Warping Wheel Cross-Maker has arrived.

I decided to go ahead after all and purchase the cross-maker attachment for the AVL Warping Wheel.  While it is perfectly possible to warp the loom using the WW without the crossmaker, I am working at such a level of fineness that just using the masking tape method to keep the warp ends in order for the threading does not really work well. 

Once I got to the threading stage, I realized that I rely on the sense of touch much more than I knew.  Without the porrey cross to refer to by feel, I had to squint and look closely at the underside of the masking tape to discern thread order.  When I would identify the thread I needed and pulled it from the masking tape, it would bring two or three other threads with it, which because it's slippery organzine, would quickly slink to the back of the loom and hang limply off the warp beam.  The thread being almost invisible to my sight because of its fineness, I would then have to get up off the bench, go to the rear of the loom and try to reach over the warp beam to reach down and pull up the errant threads, which I could not see.  Not a solution!!

So with the cross-maker I can make a porrey cross on any warp, and once it's beamed, slide the lease sticks through the cross and suspend it between the warp beam and the rear-most harness in the usual way.  With this totally fine organzine I can wind from four bobbins and have four ends in each crossing - I can still order the threads by feel that way without tangles.  Even in organzine.

Curve, learning.

I've finally gotten the very fine organzine test warp onto the AVL loom.  I did it with the AVL Warping Wheel - and there was a learning curve with that.  In the effort I did manage to Thoroughly Shred One Bout, and it had to go into the silk waste bag.  It was only one 3-yard long, 2" bout, though it was a loss of about four hundred yards of nice cochineal-dyed organzine. 

Lordy, how I hate to waste silk.

Luckily, there was more than enough to replace the bout, and they're all onto the warp beam now.  I started threading the heddles, though I will also announce here that I've decided to buy the cross-maker for the Warping Wheel after all.  Let's just hint at that, saying that deciding to make the inaugural warp on a brand-new WW without the cross-maker at 80 epi of super-slippery gossamer organzine in insufficient light was NOT a great choice. 

Coupla things:

1) get a stool that is the correct height for threading the heddles.  The weaving bench is too high.  On Granny Cranny it was the right height so I could see to thread, but on the AVL the harnesses are slung rather further down, so using the bench entails feeling for threads rather than being able to look for them. 

2) consider winding warp from more than one spool, okay?!


I do have to say that while I was winding each bout, 160 ends in all for a 2-inch bout of Nearly Invisible Silk Yarn was a kind of test.  I got much, much faster at it as I went along, which started to reveal to me the beauty of the Warping Wheel and how it can pay for itself, ultimately.  The first bout of 160 ends took me nearly two hours; the second and third, about 45 minutes, and the last bout took me about 18-20 minutes.  It really would not make much difference in time if I had wound 25 yards vs 3 if I had been winding from the same number of bobbins.  I imagined what it would be like to wind a 12-yard warp of 30/2, and in the amount of time it had taken me to wind the 6"-wide, 3-yard warp of organzine from a single bobbin, I could wind a full-width warp (45 inch) from four spools.  That's darned encouraging!!

Slothing...

I haven't totally finished winding on the very fine silk organzine warp yet.  I have just one more bout to wind, but for this entire week, probably because of the exhaustion brought on by the fallout of something that happened at the medical center last week that came out of nowhere like a stealth asteroid and hit us all directly in the emotional places, I have been massively tired. 

After all the pieces were picked up, no one had been physically injured, but it has taken me more than a week to get over it.  Even my usual solace - playing with string - wasn't helping.  I just needed to sit and process and get over it.  It's good that I have had the opportunity to do so, and to recognize the need for taking time to recover. 

This weekend I'm planning to return to the warp.  One more bout, and then it's onto threading the heddles again.  I'm also going down to Tien's this Sunday where we will try to mount the new fly shuttle mechanism onto Emmy, her loom.  It'll be good for me to see this through, especially concerning the micro-adjustments that will undoubtedly be necessary.   The AVL loom I bought from my weaving friend in Oregon has a fly shuttle, but I haven't yet attached it because there is not quite enough lateral space in the garage to accomodate the extra width and the allowances it would require.  One of these days, though.

I confess that I have also been slightly depressed after the completion of the last project - the altar runner commission.  I had so much fun doing it.  It was also a project that involved collaboration with my family, which was especially nice.  After it was off the loom, I had the kind of feeling that I used to have in high school after the Drama Club would strike set after a play - sad for the dissolution of a wonderful momentary collaboration, happy to have been lucky enough to experience it, and then sad because the 'set' was 'struck'.  An empty loom is a sad thing; an empty loom when you have neither energy nor drive for a little bit is even sadder. 

The solution, of course, is to move onto the next project.  This of course is the crimson (cochineal-dyed) bombyx mori organzine warp, which will be a sampler for using various wefts for satin weaves.  I'm also planning to weave in a bit of the silver and a bit of the gold from John Marshall. 

Another upcoming project is to make 'a little something' for my childhood pal Terri for her wedding in September.  She's given me quite a lot of leeway in figuring out what it should be, and I've decided to weave a nice silk to be used in making a petite reticule bag for her to carry in procession.  While I'm not decided firmly on that, I'm playing with color ideas.  One idea: White bombyx mori organzine warp with wefts of white bombyx mori tram and either the silver or gold threads as well for parts of the weft.  Or, in the guise of 'something blue', a medium-light blue (indigo) warp with the silver weft.  Small item, but made of the very best materials. 

And this is my favorite approach to a project: making little heartfelt things for people I love.  And one always wants to use the best of the best materials for that. 

On another note, and speaking of the best of the best, at CNCH I bought a little bit of yarn made from the bast bark of the linden tree from Ryukyu Textile.  It is quite rustic and quietly gorgeous, and has a sublime, subtle beauty even more beautiful than the finest gold thread.  I *could* weave it as weft for something, but it occurred to me as I looked at it that it would also look very nice worked as netting, or perhaps I should learn to make Sprang.  A netted grocery bag, like the ones used in France, is a neat idea, and I think I have just enough of the linden yarn to make one.  I also bought some very handsome indigo-dyed ramie at  CNCH, from the same folks, and it might make a nice combination with the golden-brown linden yarn.  We shall see...

 

 

 



I did get a lot of fibery things done this weekend, though they are mostly of the invisible variety.  Well, not entirely invisible, but...

 

From the kilogram of 30/2 I got from Tien on cones, I wound numerous smaller hanks.  Each hank is 400 yards.  This is a significant though manageable size; Diderot mentions in his Encyclopédie that the skeins should be kept 'mince' (thin) in order to reduce tangle and loss, so I'm trying this out as a method.  It's not much work winding into the 400-yard skeins.  They are piling up, glossy and beautiful!

 

I also started warping the satin sampler warp onto Millicent using the AVL Warping Wheel.  Amazing.  While it's true that I was using the WW in what may well be the least advantageous way, that is, winding a very short warp with a very high epi with a single cone, even in this way it is still the best way to go simply because the warp stays under tension.  The same steps would be used to beam a warp of 25 yards that would be used to beam a warp of 3 yards, but the design of the WW is such that I get to totally skip the scary uncertainty of moments during which the warp is not under tension.  With slippery and fine silken warps, this is of utmost importance.

 

Below is the draft I've decided on for Noemi's green scarf.  I've also decided that since I have enough silk, I am going to weave a run of these scarves - five in all, for now, and see how they sell.

 

 

Finally...a photo of young Tom Jones.  Just because.