sweetgeorgia

Nefertiti Wrap

Back in January, I had the delight and pleasure of meeting Miriam Felton, designer of the lovely Icarus shawl from Interweave. She told me that after TNNA she was going to embark on turning her knit design endeavours into her full time livelihood. I was so inspired and encouraged to hear this and wished her well. So when I got back from TNNA, I pinged her on Ravelry and said that I’d like to send her some yarn… see if she’d like something to play with. I ended up sending her a few skeins of CashSilk Lace and she ended up making this…

It’s called the Nefertiti Wrap and takes about 2 skeins of CashSilk Lace. I do love the diagonal design to it… and also how it’s not a single lace pattern throughout. One lace patterns flows and melds into the next. Very very lovely.

I’m thinking about Nefertiti this afternoon as I collect my things and thoughts, on my way to speaking tonight for the Coquitlam Weavers & Spinners Guild. Public speaking always makes me intensely nervous, so I hope I don’t lose my voice, insult anyone, or make any other major gaffs… I’ll be talking about natural dyeing among other things. We’re starting at about 7 pm at Place des Arts. Fingers crossed that everything goes well. Yay.

Weaving and stilettos

Waaaaay back in June, Irene took this photo of me weaving on my blanket at Place des Arts and I just got a copy of the photo today. Stilettos and floor looms… I can’t imagine it any other way

Not my loom.

Ok, so the ultimate irony is that on the day that I got my loom I actually drove an hour (each way) to use the other loom at Place des Arts.

Yep. Weaving class is officially over but I missed a couple classes because of my dad’s exhibition and going to Vegas… so I’m a little behind and haven’t finished the Great Big Green Blanket (GBGB). Last night, I spent about two hours in the Fibre Room working on the blanket…

After about two hours, I found myself relatively comfortable with using the massive ski shuttle that I had originally found a little unwieldy. It really was the best solution though. I had tried using a boat shuttle and it just wouldn’t hold very much weft — and winding bobbins is significantly less fun than throwing the shuttle.

I also changed the tie up under the loom so that I could “walk” the loom. Basically all this is is tying the shafts to the treadles in a sequence that allows your feet to alternate (like you are walking). For example, my pattern is 12, 23, 34, 41. If the treadles are tied up in that order, I press treadle 12 with my left foot then treadle 23 with my right foot. Then I need to scoot over or cross over with my left foot so that I can treadle 34. That’s stupid. So, I changed the treadles so that they are ordered like this: 12, 34, 23, 41. That way, I go 12 with the left, 23 with the right, 34 with the left and 41 with the right and I never really need to change my position. You could also order it like this: 12, 34, 41, 23 so that you walk the two outside treadles and then the two inside treadles. Whatever you fancy. It seems to speed things up considerably or at least make treadling less awkward…

All I needed was maybe one more hour to finish weaving off the entire blanket, doing a little hemstitching and then cutting the blanket off the loom. Just one more hour! I’m delighted at how fast it is going. This is instant gratification, people. Instant.

The Great Big Green Blanket Project

A couple weeks ago, I dyed a giant skein of brushed adult mohair (980 ypp) in shades of robin’s egg blue, pale turquoise, pale greens and chartreuse. I left it sitting out in the living room, trying to decide what to do with it — my living room is a warm, apple green colour and it wouldn’t match, really. But Michelle was over and really liked it, so I offered to weave her a blanket. Her living room is a cool, pale green colour with super dark chocolate brown furniture, so a big, fluffy green blanket would be perfect for keeping warm while knitting during the fall or winter months.

Now that my fuschia silk scarf is nearly done, I started warping for this blanket. The warp is Briggs & Little Regal, a soft and cushy 2-ply wool from New Brunswick. This is their “Bleached White” colour that I’m going to dye to match the mohair. The colour samples are from a binder I borrowed from Place des Arts. The binder is full of Kiton Acid dye formulas and samples — the closest thing to the WashFast Acid dyes I’ll be using. I don’t expect the results to be dead on, but it’s nice to have a rough guide.

I got to use a warping mill during class last night. Very fun and much faster than a warping board. The warp is approximately 450 ends and 3 yards long. It will go on one of the 45″ Leclerc looms (must be a Nilus?) at the school. I prepared the warp in five groups — 75, 75, 90, 90, and 120 ends each. This way, I can dye each bundle a slightly different shade… some pale green, some pale turquoise, etc.

Hopefully this won’t be overkill — handpainted weft in mohair, solid dyed wide stripes for warp, and plain weave throughout (10 epi). Either way, I’m very excited as this will be my first time using the big floor loom…

A little less tomato juice, a little more “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”

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.