sweetgeorgia

Didn’t you know… this blog is 98% knitting and spinning and 2% vampire slaying?

Anybody who adds a little slayage to their singing is ok by me, no matter how corny their video is. But back to being a productive grown-up, here’s the weaving in progress…

This is the handpainted silk/wool warp that was overdyed in cochineal. We had a little adventure deciding on what to use for the weft… weaving short sections with some plain weave with silk noil, some twill with more handpainted silk, twill with black boucle, twill with natural-coloured silk/camel… It seemed like most weft yarns would take over the fabric and obscure the handpainted-ness of the warp yarns. Even the plain, natural coloured silks were taking over with their high shine factor… So I finally decided on using a single strand of natural tussah silk noil (not shiny). It blends right in so that the warp yarn really becomes noticeable. But it also helps to desaturate the whole fabric a bit.

The scarf is actually all cut off the loom and finished now — I did a twisted fringe to finish both sides (after ripping out the test weft sections) and washed the scarf in Eucalan. It’s all ready for close ups this weekend.

That basket is full of carded puffs of Gotland now… and I’m still not done carding! Even with an electric carder, the process is still slow slow slow. I think it took me about 2 hours to card 150g of fibre. Maybe I’m being too fussy about it, but I’m flick carding both ends of the staples and then feeding in “cut” side first. But being fussy allows me to do a single pass rather than splitting the first batt and then re-carding a second time. Garbage in, garbage out, right?

The handspun Gotland project is going to be a big blanket woven on a floor loom at Place des Arts. They have a loom that’s already warped and ready for blankets. All I have to do is tie on each of the “ends”. So that’s 450 ends at 10 ends per inch to make an approximately 45″ wide blanket. I will probably do 3 yards of warp. So I need to spin about 1350 yards of DK to worsted-weight yarn for the warp… And then another 2500-2700 yards for weft. I think that’s enough to keep me busy for now.