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.

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.

Hello Sunshine

OMFG, it’s sunny. I may actually decide to leave the house today. I love living in Vancouver, but the winters here are so utterly depressing and grey. But this morning, it’s gloriously sunny and snowy with a big clear blue sky. In this situation, the only thing to do is to seize the opportunity and take some photos.

Besides, I’ve been invited to give a talk in March to one of the local spinners and weavers guilds about taking good fibre photos and I thought I should practice… so I at least appear to know what I’m talking about

Last January, I started Michelle’s Great Big Green Blanket project. This January, I’m starting my own blanket project. I fell in love with the Boheme colourway — all saturated magentas, chocolate browns and teddy bear browns — and decided that I want a blanket like this to put in the living room, against our dark, dark chocolate brown leather couch. Little does the DH know that I’m going to re-decorate our living room to include copious amounts of fuschia…

Anyhow, the warp yarn is dyed here in four colours and will be wound soon. A mix of mohair and wool, it will still be springy like Michelle’s blanket but maybe a little more drapey too. The weft will be a dark, saturated wine colour in brushed mohair (980 ypp). With this project, I am going to try warping from front to back… designing in the reed as I go. I don’t like having to design on the warping board because it’s so sequential and linear. Designing in the reed seems a bit more flexible at this point.

And that brushed mohair weft… anyone ever use an end-feed shuttle for brushed mohair? Hmmm… nightmare in the making?

Here and there.

There’s a coolness in Vancouver that is beyond crisp now. Yep, it’s downright chilly today. Feeling the need to have warm, comfy and cushy Zara sweater NOW.

I’m making progress, yes, I am…

In light of the fact that I seem to have zero spare time these days, I’ve been taking a tip from various knitters who encourage knitting a row here and there throughout the day… That’s three rows in the car, two rows before a client meeting, three more rows while waiting for dinner… It’s amazing what a few minutes here and there can do.

Similarly with my weaving, I was able to warp up my loom with the new handpainted silk log cabin scarf project during the daylight hours. Since I haven’t had time to move my work computer down into the finished (yahoo!) office, I’m still sitting three feet away from my loom… which means that when I have to upload a file that takes 10 minutes, I can turn around and fuss with my loom for 10 minutes.

This is 144 ends (72 purple threads and 72 black threads) spread out neatly through the built-in raddle that is positioned on top of the Spring loom. I’m being extra careful by running a thin strip of painters tape over the top so that stray threads don’t pop out of their spots… or that I don’t accidentally pull a chunk of threads out of the raddle. Yeah, been there, done that.

Those are two lease sticks that I’ve tied to the back beam of the loom — they keep the warp nice, neat and tidy… The last warp I put on was, well, shall we say, put on haphazardly without a tidy cross or lease sticks… and well, let’s just say, it got a little messy back there. So, I’m being good and conscientious here… hopefully it will pay off in terms of a better-tensioned warp and less mess.

And this probably should be filed under “too much information” but, yeah, I’m crocheting the bikini from last summer’s issue of Knit.1. Now, to figure out how to properly do crochet decreases…

In search of simple

Maybe it was exhaustion… or the smell of sheep and vinegar… or realizing that the finished sweater would look terrible on me… I ripped St. Brigid. Gone is the AS aran sweater. I just figured it would look like I was wearing a giant, wooly purple potato sack. Instead, my fingers crave smooth, sleek, minimal… so I cast on for Wendy’s (Knit and Tonic) “Sizzle”.

The yarn is Estelle Mystik DK (cotton/viscose blend) that I bought the day after Jo’s wedding. Really, the wedding was at the Radisson Hotel in Richmond which is right next to Yaohan and the cute knitting shop with all the Japanese yarns… so of course we had to make a quick visit. Besides, I haven’t bought yarn for myself in ages it seems. This yarn is splitty but the viscose that is blended into it lends the yarn a lovely drape and sheen. Of course, it would be ideal if this were silk but there was none to be found at the shop.

In between knitting and dyeing, I’ve been dressing the loom with more 20/2 silk. I had a lot of silk warp leftover, so I combined them all to make a shawl about 15.5″ wide. This will hopefully be my first foray into all 8 shafts — it will be a block twill (I think that’s what it’s called).

I’ve also made several warps in various stages of readiness. The plan is one warp on the loom, one warp ready to go, one warp ready to dye, and one warp marinating in my head…

The purple and black warp is all hand-dyed silk (Cascade from Henry’s Attic, 2000 ypp) that will become a log cabin scarf. This is based on an article from an old Handwoven magazine. The “pattern” calls for an 8-dent reed but I just have the one 10-dent reed so I’ll have to see how I can get “16 epi” out of that reed — I know that either 15 or 17 are possible.

The pile of blank silk is 20/2 Bombyx silk in three different chains, each with 230 ends. I’ll handpaint each one with similar colours and combine them into a 690 end shawl, sett at 30 epi that should give me a shawl about 22″ wide. This warp is 6 yards long — enough to make two shawls. Again, the idea is a block twill on eight shafts.

I know that all of July, I thought “Oh, after the wedding I’ll have more time… after the wedding…” but it seems like that’s not the case. There’s always more work. There’s always more stuff. There’s always too much to knit and never enough time. But maybe it’s not about trying to find more time. It’s about simplifying. Paring down. Minimizing… meanwhile, I just found at least four new things I want to make from Rowan’s Fall issue.

Crap.