sweetgeorgia

Tangled up.

I’ve been making warps. Many many warps. Mostly because I have a lot of yarn lying around… naturally dyed, undyed, synthetically dyed, commercially dyed… omg, that’s a lot of yarn. Rather than using handpainted yarn throughout the whole warp, I’ve taken to mixing it up with a bunch of other solid coloured yarns.

The six-yard warp will end up as two 2.5 yard scarves or shawls (I haven’t decided… there’s still a lot of handpainted yardage remaining that I want to use up)… each one will be woven with a different coloured weft.

The bamboo was dyed in a pot with a bunch of other fibres and took on so much less dye. The dye pot was a mix of cutch, cochineal and iron in various combinations with silk and bamboo in the pot. I probably wouldn’t wear any of these colours on their own, but optically blended together, they become more interesting. The weft will likely be plain undyed bamboo, and then the whole piece will go back into the dye pot. Maybe more cutch. We’ll see.

Finally, this is the silk yarn that came out of the same pot. Unplied DK-weight silk yarn to be woven with some 2-ply cutch-dyed silk yarn… it might be overwhelmingly cutchy brown. Hmm. But luckily everything can be overdyed and re-worked. In fact, I dropped a small plain weave silk sample that I wove last year into a cochineal dye pot earlier this week… and you know, I LOVE it. Multiple dyes, overdyes, piece dyeing… I want it.

Done.

During a quick visit with Irene last week, I picked up a big ol’ ski shuttle from her and finished off my Boheme Blanket. Just a couple hours of uninterrupted weaving time allowed me to complete the yardage, hemstitch the ends, full and brush the whole blanket. Similar to Michelle’s GBGB, this blanket measured 41.5″ x 84″ before fulling and 36.5″ x 69″ after fulling in the washer.

There was a bunch of warp ends that didn’t make it into this particular blanket and so I’ve tied them onto the loom already, randomly spacing them out. I’ve dyed more Briggs & Little wool in dark brown which will fill in the gaps. I like to think of this next blanket as the sister blanket to the Boheme Blanket. It’ll be brown overall with the mohair and warp in dark brown… the leftover warp from the Boheme blanket will lend a couple flashes of fuschia in the midst of all that brown… Kind of like when you take a chunk of bread dough and save it to incorporate with the next bread baking session. The subsequent loaves have more depth, more flavour, more maturity… Taking a chunk of one warp and distributing it into the next blanket might be a little haphazard, but I like to think of it as growth and learning as subsequent projects unfold.

Flying. Fleeting. Finally.

Finally. I had the chance to pull that tsumugi silk off the shelf and weave something from it. The DH’s birthday was on Friday and I wove a silk scarf for him… not prissy, not fussy. This silk is raw and slubby… a little rough and weathered. I guess, like him.

The scarf is woven from four different colours (charcoal, dark navy, oatmeal, espresso) in a stripe pattern. I just randomly designed this on the warping board, sometimes running two colours together at the same time to create a more blended effect. A simple two-yard warp x approximately 200 ends, set at 20 epi and woven in a 2×2 twill pattern.

Now that the silk scarf is off the loom, I’ve put on my most favourite warp… the cotton warp dyed in procion. This, I’m looking forward to seeing.

Starting again.

It’s been months and months… and finally, I feel like I’m getting back to it. I’ve started weaving the blanket now, and it’s pretty slow going since I need a proper shuttle (I need a ski shuttle, asap). I’m using a stick shuttle at the moment and it’s clumsy for this width of fabric to say the least. But any progress is good progress.

Now, if I could just keep from passing out in the late afternoons. Jet lag bites.

I owe you.

I’m in Vancouver for another four nights and then I’m off again (this time to traipse around London). In the meantime, I owe you so many things starting with my photography presentation from WAY back in March… so here are the bits and pieces:

• Photography for Textiles 2007 Notes (1.18 MB)
• The photos that accompanied the presentation (Quicktime | 2.2 MB). Some of these are awful, awful photos meant to illustrate the evils of on-camera flash, incandescent lighting, bad composition, etc. The series starts off with a few shots I took during studio classes including some food photography shots… and ends with a few photos from my favourite snap-happy bloggers: Jared at Brooklyn Tweed, Cara at January One, and Adrian at HelloYarn.
• The photos that ran on a loop during the Q&A (Quicktime | 2.6 MB). These photos are all mine and all yummy.

The cute little mention of my stilettos and weaving in this past issue of Handwoven magazine reminded me that I was supposed to blog about Catharine Ellis’ woven shibori workshops. Ooops. Now I’m hanging my head on that one… I ended up coming home from Fiji without enough time to do the preparation work for the workshops… so I didn’t attend. I did, however, carry Catharine’s book all over Fiji with me in preparation for the workshop… but attending the workshops meant weaving actual yardage or warping up a table loom beforehand. Ahh well. Her lecture at Heritage Hall was quite inspiring, as she showed photos and projects from the last 30 years of her weaving career. Experimenting with one variable at a time in a very scientific way, it’s like a do-it-yourself PhD in weaving. I know for certain that I can’t be that methodical. No PhD for me.

Check it out, Louisa wrote up her experiences at Catharine’s workshop…

Speaking of Fiji, I did take notes of the teeny bit of weaving I found in Sigatoka… these are the notes that I just re-discovered on my laptop:

2007-04-19

We got in the car and just started driving… our destination was Pacific Harbour, about 2 hours drive away from Nadi town. The closest town centre to Nadi is Sigatoka, about 45 minutes south. We stopped just to look for water and snacks, but ended up wandering into La’s shop. La has been weaving professionally for the last ten years, weaving mats. When I told her I was a weaver too, a smile spread across her face with understanding and appreciation, saying simply “when you find something you enjoy, you just have to do it.”

For the mats, she determines how wide she wants the mats to be and then begins weaving down the length. At the very end, she finishes the two short ends of the mat, sometimes incorporating different colours in a variety of patterns. The mats take at least a day to weave.

Tapa cloth is made from pounding mulberry bark into flat sheets. The sheets are then screenprinted with a dye made by boiling the mulberry bark and mixing it with the red earth/clay that seems to be so readily available. The darker colours have soot added to the mix to deepen the colours. For tapa cloth intended for village chiefs, the mulberry bark is dyed first with the mulberry juice so that it takes on a dark amber colour before it is flattened out into sheets. The Fijian tapa are screenprinted while the Tongan tapa are handpainted. The tapa made in Tonga are also backed with synthetic, fusible interfacing for strength.