sweetgeorgia

Make your own raddle

A bunch of nails and a stick of wood. A raddle is a very helpful and necessary little device to allow you to warp your loom from back to front. It’s designed with evenly spaced guides so that you can roughly spread apart your warp threads before winding it into the back beam. It shouldn’t cost you $90, but if you buy one new, that’s what it’ll run up to… Sure the store bought ones will be nicely finished and perfectly aligned, and it’s possible that they’ll include a fabulous closing top thing to prevent your threads from accidentally slipping out of the raddle.

But we decided to go the cheap route… a $3 box of 1 1/2″ bright finishing nails and a $3 stick of wood from Home Depot. Carina helped me mark every 1/2″ inch along the stick and pre-drilled tiny little holes at the markings. I had the easy job of hammering the nails into the pre-drilled spots. You probably don’t need to pre-drill, but it makes the process a little easier.

We’ve clamped this raddle on top of the shafts of the Baby Wolf, Leclerc Artisat, and also the little Schacht 15″ table loom and put warps on this way. Super handy and fast. I guess I have no excuse not to warp from back to front now.

Warping for plain weave workshop

Last week, I received my warp for the upcoming Jane Stafford workshop and have just started warping the table loom in preparation. I’m going to be using a Schacht 15″ 4-shaft table loom and have started warping from front to back. The warp is destined to be “plain weave with supplementary warp” and came all nicely chained up in a bag with detailed instructions and weft yarns. Looks like most of the yarn is 2/14 linen and 3/30 linen sett at 12 epi. I’ve never worked with linen before, so this is a completely new experience for me. So far, I’ve discovered that linen has a mind of its own.

I’m pretty sure linen likes to be warped from back to front, but I don’t own a raddle and my efforts to make my own raddle from a piece of plywood and spare nails have been delayed… because I need nails, or can’t find my hammer, or some such fuss. Besides, I like sorting out the warp threads and colours first and making sure that it’s all correct before everything gets wound onto the back beam.

I’m also trying to salvage this beautiful cotton warp. It was originally put on the small table loom and then I decided that I wanted to re-sley it for a tighter sett… so I cut it off the loom, maintaining the cross, and now I am just reassembling it on the big Spring loom. It’s now sett at 30 epi for a nice warp-faced look.

It’s finally the weekend, and I have new toe-up socks on the go.

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](http://blog.sweetgeorgiayarns.com/archives/2006/11/great_notsobig.html) project. This January, I’m starting my own blanket project. I fell in love with the [Boheme colourway](http://www.sweetgeorgiayarns.com/look/index.php) — 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?