Two little nice things

1) Can't recall where I read it, otherwise I'd give attribution, but I was blog-surfing last night (other blogs, that is) and was reading a weaver's blog...in one particular passage she wrote "...and the warp on my loom is a stream, that flows towards me, and is the future."




2) This morning when I came into the office I happened to be introduced to a quilter who had made a quilt for use inside our intensive care unit.  It was beautiful, and I was so impressed and honored to meet the quilter that I pulled a sample swatch of the current warp on my loom out of my backpack and gave it to her.  It's all cotton and has areas of different colors and patterns, and I wondered if she might enjoy using it in a future quilt.  She was pleased.

Japanese Indigo Harvest II, and The Virtuous Greedy.

Yesterday I stopped by our garden in Brooks Park Community Garden to water and check plants.

The first thing I saw was that last two weekends' steamy hot weather had been very agreeable to the Japanese Indigo (Polygonum tinctorium) plants and that they had grown very tall and very big of leaf.   I plucked all the branches with the biggest leaves, but even after that there are still a great deal of up-and-coming leaves growing below the big leaves. 

Now in the direct sun, unshaded by the large leaves up top, they will grow nicely.  I left the garden with about 4 lbs of fresh leaves/stems. 

I also noticed that someone had neatly dug out all of our artichoke plants, every single one, leaving tidy square holes where they'd carefully dug each plant out by the roots.  Now, as irritating as it is when someone makes off with a vegetable I've grown, I usually assume it was taken by someone who was hungry and who needed to gather food.  I've seen a couple of people there, all elderly, mostly women, and I try to 'remember to leave enough for the gleaners'.   But someone actually decided to dig up and take all my plants, as if they were going to transplant them.  There's something very unwholesome about people like that.  Acquisitive people who feel entitled to let someone do a lot of work, and then swoop in and steal it.  Social parasitism.

 

It's been with us for eons, probably, since there have probably always been people that opportunistic and lazy and greedy.   Peter, the manager of the community garden, told me that he'd seen a 'wealthy, expensively-dressed woman' arrive in a fancy, brand-new luxury car, stride confidently into the community garden (the gate is unlocked during the day), and basically go 'shopping' at all the plots where there were vegetables and fruit.  I seem to recall him saying that he confronted her politely, but that she ignored him and kept taking things, and then strolled to her car with her loot.   She is not one of the gardeners; she is not starving; she is a thief.

There's a kind of indecent, acquisitive greed afloat in this country...which, actually, is enshrined as an American virtue.  It has a similar energy signature to that of bullies.  People who like to take other people's stuff.  I've always recoiled from people like that, even as a kid.  I recall my mother expressing admiration of people who were canny and manipulative and acquisitive..."...now there's a man who knows how to live...a real wheeler-dealer...I bet he buys fur coats for his wife," she'd say. 

Gross.  Even as a kid I knew this was not the way I was going to see things.

OK, rant over.



Picture above shows the progress on the kitchen towels.  The first towel is already inching its way towards the cloth-storage beam on the AVL. 

I'm looking forward to finishing this project up and getting ready to mount the Compu-dobby on the AVL, so that when weaving friend Tien comes over on the 15th, we'll only need to hook everything up to a computer and then troubleshoot. 



Anyway, I was yacking about the beautiful huge indigo leaves I'd picked yesterday...

I went home with my backpack full of leaves, and when I got home I dumped them out into the bathtub.  I rinsed them in cool water, let them drain, and just before I went to cook dinner, I sat on the floor of the bathroom tying bundles of the indigo at intervals along a cotton string.  It turned out to be heavy!  Several spiders were apologetically banished from the leaves, an endeavor Carlos helped me with by transporting the spiders in a cup with a piece of cardboard over the top to locations outside. 



And here we are, bathroom festooned with garlands of drying Polygonum, which will turn dark blue while drying.  Hopefully (and it's looking likely, at this point) I will have enough so that in the autumn I can set a fermentation vat with the dried/composted leaves.  

After the Weekend

I wove a good bunch this weekend.  Started and have very nearly finished the Next Towel, that is, the pink one.  Looks good!  Thinking of possible doing the next one in rich royal (synthetic) blue, but I was thinking about it...the kitchen towels are to be as good as possible, and to be potentially used with serving food and not just wiping things.  So as much as I love the colors of blue, I just could not bear the idea of a nice challah coming to the table covered in a bright royal blue cloth.  I think instead I'll weave one all creamy white, and the last one purple like the first.


Lubricating the loom with Sslip has resulted in quiet, smooth action. 


I've targeted 8/15/15 as the day for Tien to come over and help me get the Compu-dobby going.  To this end, as soon as the current warp is finished and the thrums removed, I am going to re-install the physical components of the Compu-dobby, and find an old PC that can handle the software.     I'm mainly worried that something along the way will not work, such as the software not being compatible with the computer, or the magnet not working, etc.  But I had the same feeling about the mechanical dobby - I was sure I wouldn't be able to get it working correctly, but I did get it working correctly and perfectly. 


It was warm and beautiful today.   Somewhat hot in the house but nothing like last weekend, though neither did we have the Dramatique sunset of last weekend's steamy weather.   The cool is so nice, though.  Amazing marine ineffable fragrances wafting in from the nearby Pacific...they defy description but are so much a part of the refreshment of my daily life.

More

I wove for quite a while yesterday evening while Carlos was at rehearsal.


I got further than I thought I would; almost done with the next kitchen towel!


Anticipating August 15 as the day when weaver pal Tien comes up to help me activate the old Compu-dobby.  I love love love using the mechanical dobby, and I enjoy all its creaks and clicks and thunks, but getting more dobby bars is an absurdly expensive project, and I would not be able to afford too many more, and the system for connecting the wooden dobby bars is quite different from what it used to be, and I'd have to stop using the old dobby bars in order for the new ones to be mounted.  It all adds up to a pain in the neck for a loom that has its own Compu-dobby already.  After having seen online photographs of the amazing things people can make using advancing twill liftplans, etc., I'm pretty confident that with these 16 harnesses I'll be able to make some pretty nice stuff.  Hopefully big curvy twills!


I anticipate the Compu-dobby to be louder than the mechanical ones, because IIRC the solenoids really make a loud sound when the pins are activated with each new shed.  We'll see.  On the other hand, there will be no creak as the dobby wheel rotates, nor will the pins strike the strike plates in the same way (directly perpendicular, rather than rotating by on a cog-wheel).  So the sound will be somewhat different.  I'm excited!

Onward

I didn't weave last night - too tired, too involved in meal prep, and too indulgent of television.  ;-)


However, I *did* weave quite a lot the night before last.

I went downstairs, having fixed the three twisted warp threads (by twisted, I mean that they were threaded in proper sequence, but somehow I ended up having sleyed them in the wrong dent).  And when I went to weave, it all looked better but I kept having a weird problem with one floating thread on shaft #8.  I separated the thread out and looked through the heddles and cross sticks to see what was happening.  And I lubricated the dobby head and upper rollers as well, and even looked at the chains below to see if there was something else causing this.


Then I realized what it was: another warp thread sleyed into the incorrect dent.  Fixed it, and it's looking fine now.  I noticed that there is another place where there's a warp thread missing somehow (I just missed one heddle on one harness while threading).  This is also an easy fix, though it entails adding a warp thread and attaching it to a weight hanging off the back beam.  I think I can drape it over the back beam roller, and pin it into the web after threading and sleying it.  It's not that big of a deal, and after wet-finishing it would be minimally visible, but there's something about leaving it unfixed that smacks of sloth, and I don't like that.  So I'm going to wrap it around an old film canister and weight that with a few large metal nuts.  Then the web will be flawless.


I also added another 5-lb weight on the weight array suspended from the cord that keeps the cloth storage beam tight.  That seemed to help!  Also, brushing and retying the warp bundles really did take care of most of the odd loose threads.  Annoying, but it was my own omission of the brushing that caused it, and luckily it's a known quantity, so it can be fixed.  And fixed it was.  Just that little bit of extra care did the trick!

This time I started using the temple only about 1/4 inch into the weaving, after about six or seven weft shots.  The result is that I don't have the usual little bit of draw-in that I have had in the past when I start using the temple about three inches into the weaving.  Much more consistent this way. 


I also adjusted each of the shafts so that one or two heddles on each side are now pulled over the top hook - since the AVL requires heddles near the edge of the shaft in order for the pull against the lower springs to be consistent (and not tilt), and because the aforementioned heddles had been creeping towards the center of the shaft and causing weirdness and skipped threads, I drew one or two heddles over the hook.  On the top shaft slat, the heddles are on the outside of the hooks; on the lower shaft slats, they are on the inside of the hooks, so that they are rather 'trapped' in position, and will not creep.  I noticed an improvement as soon as I resumed weaving. 


Other little things to watch out for: when the side wires of shafts get caught on adjacent shafts; when heddles get tangled; cables jumping off the pulleys up top when more than 9 shafts are lifted simultaneously; the cloth storage beam apron getting caught on either the lower sprung parts of each shaft or caught on the green cables coming off the treadles.


And squeaking.


It was getting very loud and squeaky, so I put more Sslip compound on the metal shafts holding the wooden rollers, and it was much quieter!


I think I might use a piece of paper to lubricate between the upper pulleys that carry the cables, and as much as I can on the metal axles carrying those pulleys.  Also the abutting sides of the dobby fingers.  And generally - I find that little tiny lubricated places make for easy lifting of shafts and a smoother process altogether.

Weaving has started on the towels

I'll upload photos this evening.


Saturday was just too darn hot to do anything at all.  Heat really knocks me down.


Yesterday was also hot, but the garage felt nice and cool, and no one was doing laundry, so I had the place to myself downstairs.  I opened the door to the back yard and there was a slight through-breeze that made everything so much more comfortable.


I finished threading, sleyed the reed, tied on, and started the weaving proper.


I need to add another 5-pound weight to the weight pulley.


I don't much like the pattern, or the interplay between the pistachio and the pink.  Although I do like pink and light greens together, the color values of these two yarns are too close, so it's not popping. 


I think tonight I'll re-peg the dobby using a different draft. 


There were some tension problems as well; I think I need to return to the hairbrush technique before tying on.  Cotton is much harder to keep in even tension than either silk or wool.  Not as unforgiving as linen is, but still pesky.


Still, though, it doesn't look horrible.  Tonight I must tend to the re-pegging, perhaps brushing and re-tying some warp bundles, and trying other wefts too.  I have a feeling that the creamy Swedish linen wet-spun 2's will look good with the pistachio.  Also might try some silks as weft, for instance the leftover dyed muga from Carlos' scarf project.


I plyed several hundred yards of the wool I've been spinning.  Looks pretty good. 

The Beauty of the Thread Cross.



Warping the Pistachio

I'm having trouble uploading images to this blog from this computer, but it seems that it's only related to this particular browser...and I'm not able to download a new browser to this computer, so maybe I can write the blog post itself and upload the photos for it from the computer at home.


Yesterday I finished winding on the pistachio mercerized cotton warp.  The process went more smoothly than it has previously, as I learn little adjustments and tricks to help keep the tension beautifully even.

Now it's on, all nine bouts, and the next step is to lay in the lease sticks and start threading.  Threading should be quite expedient, since it's the same number of ends, and the same grist of thread, as the last warp.  Different pattern, though.


Saturday (and part of yesterday, when I wasn't warping) I manage to fill the second bobbin for the overtwist 2-ply worsted wool for the cap cloth.  It's spinning up well.  Tonight I should hopefully have some time to ply it, and then block it (since it's overtwisted).  I'm about halfway through spinning the warp for the cap cloth project.  Weft will be easier (once I source the merino) since the weft will be woolen-spun singles.


Onward!


Kitties this weekend were great fun.  Also very hard to catch when one is trying to get them back into their room...