sweetgeorgia

Moving forward on all fronts

I am inching towards completion of many, many things. Yes, indeed, that is five pairs of socks at my desk. Not including the two pairs that are currently in my knitting bag. I don’t think this is the ideal situation, but things are the way they are. I knit two rows on one then two rows on another… two rows is about all my attention span can handle right now. Having finished a little February baby sweater for a friend (she’s due anytime now!), I’m satisfied with just working on simple stockinette socks… that have been in my in-progress bin for the past five years.

There is this handwoven scarf on the loom that is distracting me… the kettle-dyed colours of Malabrigo plus the texture and groundedness of the tsumugi silk weft and making me very happy. I have maybe 10 or 12 inches more to weave and then it will be cut off and washed. It seems silly that after all the expense and space of getting a 44″ wide 8-shaft loom, I end up weaving 9″-wide scarves in plain weave. Nothing makes me happier. Maybe one day, I’ll become one of those pattern-structure weaver types and lust after some computer-driven crazy shaft loom… but not likely.

Actually for three days in March, I’ll be attending Jane Stafford’s weaving workshop, “Pushing the Boundaries of Plain Weave”. It’s hosted by the Greater Vancouver Weavers & Spinners Guild and about 14 or 15 students will be doing a round-robin style workshop where we’ll all weave on each other’s looms and take home a complete set of samples. I’m really looking forward to experimenting freely with my very beloved plain weave.

Yet another plain weave scarf from both handspun warp and weft. It’s hand dyed blue face leicester handspun in the warp, 2-ply and about DK weight, plus very fine merino laceweight weft (the same yarn I used to knit the Lotus Blossom Shawl ages ago). Seeing as how there is about 10 cm of snow in tomorrow’s forecast, this brand new scarf might just come in handy.

Our weaving studio classes just started last Wednesday and we’re getting the first sampler warps on the looms. Plain and simple Quebecoise wool in bright, happy colours. I’m excited to see these samples start to take shape for the students.

This past month, I’ve found myself at the studio nearly full-time. And even though we don’t open the studio to the public on all days, I’m here bright and early every day… winding bobbins, skeining yarn, receiving orders of natural dyes from Earthues, dyeing yarn, weaving, spinning, knitting, doing my accounting and designing. Hours and hours are spent updating the website and entering inventory. Daily, I get calls to advertise in this medium or that. But even though I am constantly, productively doing things, I still feel like completion is always so far away. Bobbins are full and need to be plied. Those few inches could be woven off. That other loom needs to be warped. And I’ve got this pattern here that I need to finish writing out…

Using your handspun

Sometimes when I’ve spent a zillion hours dyeing the fibre, spinning fine singles yarn, then plying the yarn (ending up with half or even a third of the original yardage) and then soaking and setting the yarn… I feel done. All I want to do is just want to rest and stare at the lovely yarn I’ve spun. My eyes travel along each strand of the yarn, inspecting the twist, the consistency (if any!), and the oh so subtle shift in hue. It’s literally mesmerizing. And then the handspun yarn that I’ve lifted to “too precious” heights ends up sitting there on the shelf for ages, admired and loved from afar. It’s too bad, because handspun yarn calls out to be used.

When you made the yarn, didn’t you have things in mind for it? Didn’t you design it as a 3-ply instead of 2-ply because it would be stronger? Incorporate nylon binder for added durability? Did you strip the handpainted roving lengthwise or crosswise to select for colours? Of course. When you spun the yarn, you designed it for a purpose that was already in your mind. Sure, sometimes it’s relaxing to spin mindless bits of gobbledygook, but most of the time, I have reasons for all the teeny tiny decisions I made during the handspinning process.

Lately, I’ve been going through my handspun yarn stash determined that no yarn is too precious to use. And so some of the very first Navajo-plied handspun yarn that was originally destined for socks is now being knit into Elizabeth Zimmerman’s Baby Surprise Jacket. Actually, my thinking was that this lovely yarn was too nice to be pushed into boots and worn underfoot. Now, I do think that I’ve muffed the instructions for the jacket though… forgetting where I left the instruction book for a few days and trying to figure it out on my own… never a good idea. I see that they have these BSJ “Row Keeper” notes on Ravelry… seems like a good idea. I’ll have to go back and start counting.

Handspun yarns in weaving… I think I had always heard not to put handspun yarn in the warp, but really, it’s about making decisions while spinning that will make your handspun suitable for weaving. Warp yarn needs to be strong (handspun or not, cashmere yarn in the warp REALLY blows), so that it can withstand high tension and abrasion by the reed and heddles. So make your joins in the handspun yarn nice and strong. Plying your yarn adds strength too, although Paula Simmons swears by singles yarn (says she’s never plied in her life). And if you really want to put slubby singles on your loom as warp, maybe try to find heddles that will stretch or bend to accommodate the yarn (like texsolv…).

Yesterday, I received a shipment of the new Schacht Cricket Looms and managed to quickly warp one up with my handspun merino and silk yarn. I know some weavers will turn up their noses at rigid heddle looms, especially one that is tiny and only 10″ wide, but rigid heddle weaving is seriously one of the quickest ways for people to see how weaving works. I was able to build the loom, warp it, and start weaving on it within an hour. It’s a good, inexpensive way to dip your toe in the water and see if the weaving bug bites. For me, it offers nearly instant gratification to see my handspun in woven fabric.

Handspun yarn is beautiful. It’s full of life and precious… but nothing is too precious to use and enjoy.

Second Chances

A while back, there were a couple girls who emailed me requesting special orders of some handpainted yarn. They wanted the “Kill Bill” colourway on some non-superwash wool yarn. Now, “Kill Bill” is a pretty high contrast colourway… it’s deep heavy blacks sharply painted on a bright clear yellow backdrop with distinct blood red droplets. Somehow I knew it wasn’t a colourway that was going to work on the wool yarn… the nature of the colourway and the nature of the wool itself were incompatible. But my desire to please these girls who wanted this so badly somehow overrode the part of my brain that knew this was not going to work out.

Well, it was a bit of a mess. The blacks wouldn’t take in the yarn and the excess kept running out into the yellows, making everything a bit grey/green and hazy… The red dots bled (of course, silly) and ended up being huge salmon-coloured splotches. It was devastatingly ugly. AND then I had to apologize to the girls for the yarn not turning out. All because I was too chicken to say “No” and too optimistic to think it wasn’t possible.

So the ugly abandoned yarn sat in an ugly old cardboard box with some other ugly yarn disasters, never to see the light of day.

Then this year, during the move to the studio, I excavated all my yarn from the old house… the good stuff, the undyed stuff, the old stuff, and the ugly stuff. It became so obvious that I should overdye the yarns or that I should weave them for charity things… or both. The yarn was still fabulously squishy and it was still 100% fine merino wool … in face, nothing was “wrong” with the yarn at all. It was perfect and ready to be made into something.

So, I absentmindedly dyed one skein of disaster “Kill Bill” in fuschia and another two in a kind of spruce green kind of colour. It’s kind of my fall back… overdye everything in hot pink. Hot pink saves the day. If you dye, you’ll know that overdyeing with acid dyes never knocks out the other underlying colour. It’s more like a glaze… so whatever you put on top will still allow the underlying colour to shine through. So fuschia over clear yellow gives clear red… it’s pretty exciting (to me at least). And green over yellow gives… well yellowy green. Maybe it’s the pending holiday season working its subversive and subliminal charm on me, but somehow, I ended up with the cheesiest, most cliché colour combination: holiday red and green.

Luckily, my mother was at the studio and helped me wind the back beam of the loom on Wednesday. It’s best done as a two-person job, but typically in the past, it’s been me scurrying around from the back to the front and back again repeatedly. And the back beam looks perfectly and evenly packed and solid. All my most recent weaving has been mixed up, messed up warps and so seeing this even, consistent warp has been kind of refreshing… and reminder that, yes, I can actually put on a normal warp.

Disasters can be remedied. Every yarn is still a perfect and beautiful thing. It just needs to be cared for and used for its best qualities. There are delicate subtleties in the colour of the yarn that I can’t even describe… they just have to be seen and experienced. Wonderful things can happen when you give things a second chance.

Mixed warp scarves come to life…

Yesterday, I had a chance in the afternoon to warp both the looms with mixed warp scarves. I managed to use up all my handspun laceweight merino/silk singles as weft for this scarf… and so I’ll have to go back and spin more in order to finish weaving this. So here it is for now:

Since the weft is overspun singles, I’m hoping that when I take this off the loom and wash it, it will end up a little bit crinkly. I love the texture of this… nubby raw silks, silk boucle, handspun yarn and hand dyed yarns. It’s back to the spinning wheel for now.

But in the meantime, I’m working on this second scarf. The weft is 20/2 silk dyed in cutch and then overdyed in indigo, leaving a greenish grey colour that is so subtle and interesting. It ties all these mixed warp textures and colours together.

The weaving for these will be done soon and I’ll have to decide how I want to finish the fringe. Hmm.

From wallace+sewell to Textile Futures

Travelling to London has kept my interest partly because their designers, artists and craftsmen are so well supported and encouraged by the local councils that they appear to be able to innovate and create more. So for me, it’s not just yarn tourism… it’s the search for signs of future growth and the pushing forward of an entire textile and craft industry. I’m looking for something more than just the mechanical workings of a traditional hand loom or traditional fair isle designs updated in contemporary colours. I don’t know what it is, but I’m looking.

On the way, I get distracted by shiny, pretty things and some of the most vibrantly coloured, interesting and luxurious woven items I have found in London are designed by [Wallace+Sewell](http://wallacesewell.com/), a pair of weavers who graduated from the Royal College of Art almost twenty years ago.

Located at the corner of Amwell and Lloyd Baker Streets just south of the Angel tube stop, the shop is seriously tiny, but stacked from floor to ceiling with silk, cashmere and wool blankets and scarves. Last time I visited, they had a “pillow” event, so the centre of the shop was piled high with pillows made from their woven designs in all different colours and textures. This time, I think the silk organza scarves were new… and these plasticized fabrics too. This was some of the most intriguing work I saw… very contemporary and very topical. Selvedges from handwoven fabric was compressed with vinyl plastic in order to create a new “fabric” which was then made into handbags.

I love love loved these. Scraps of woven silk fabric laid in quite a thick chunk of plastic making some really interesting bracelets, earrings and brooches. Just some very inventive ways of using up the little bits of extra fabric.

And of course, perfectly sheer and delicately coloured woven silk organza scarves. Not entirely innovative, but still beautiful to see and touch.

Where else in the world is really, truely _new_ textile design and innovation happening? And I don’t mean textile art. I mean functional textile design for use in fashion or interiors. Emphasis on _functional_. Where do we stop just making pretty things and start making things that improve people’s lives in tangible ways? For a while now, I have been following the work and research being done at Central St. Martin’s in their [MA Design for Textile Futures](http://textilefutures.co.uk/exchange/bin/view/TextileFutures/WebHome), mainly because I was interested in possibly studying there (but can you say “hello, life long student loan debt”?), but also because there is no program like it anywhere. Where else do students create interactive wallpaper, light-reactive window shades, and “architectural textiles for localised urban food production and environmental monitoring”. I don’t even know what that means. But when you pair [creative and innovative textile designers with Nobel prize-winning scientists...](http://textilefutures.co.uk/exchange/bin/view/TextileFutures/NobelTextiles) well, we can just be optimistic that our future lives will be benefitted by their new discoveries.