Concert Announcement!
It’s that time of year again! The Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra proudly announces their spring 2010 concert.
Date: Saturday the 27 of March
Time: 19h30
Location: Beaurepaire United Church, 25 Fieldfare Ave, Beaconsfield
Admission: $10, free for children under 18
Programme:
‘Wasps’ Overture - Vaughn Williams
Symphony no. 83 (’The Hen’) - Haydn
Petite Suite - Debussy
The Banks of Green Willow - Butterworth
This is a gorgeous programme. The concerts usually last approximately two hours, including the refreshment break. There are driving directions and public transport info on the church website, linked above. I usually encourage people who are vehicle-less to find someone who has a car and share the cost of the driver’s admission to the concert among them. It’s more fun to enjoy the evening in the company of others, after all.
Mark your calendars now! And feel free to share the information with anyone you like; it’s a public concert. See you there!
Weaving Experiment No. 2: The Pillow Covers That May Be A Scarf
The idea for this project was to use the lovely Red Heart Collage yarn in the Landscape Green colourway. Yes, I bought this yarn because I loved it, and then had to think up a project. Since one of the things I have from my grandfather’s loom is a pillow, I thought a pillow cover would be nice.
And yes, I am stunned to make the statement, “I love this Red Heart yarn.” Most Red Heart is scratchy and awful. This is incredibly soft and flowy. It’s a two ply: one ply is green, and the other shades from a pale pink through pale blue through hyacinth blue-violet. It’s spectacular. I knew I wanted to see how it would transition in a woven piece.
I chose an ecru linen colour of South Maid crochet cotton as my warp, and never again. The Royale crochet cotton was bad enough because it stuck to itself and a bundle of it wouldn’t comb out or straighten, but apart from the sticking not-flowing behaviour previously exhibited by crochet cotton, a few of the the South Maid strands shredded before I even got them threaded through the heddles. It’s a good thing I decided to thread floating selvedges; I ended up using those as replacement warp threads. I threaded lengths of the Red Heart through the reed for floating selvedges instead. I know now to measure at least five to ten extra warp threads and have them in reserve on the edges in case of fraying or breakage. Also, I’m just going to stop using crochet cotton. I don’t like the finish on it.
There were one hundred and fifty-two warp threads on this project, threaded through four shafts in rotating order. Gah. Making sure everything was in the right place in the right order took a lot of focus and was really energy-consuming. The good thing is I only made one mistake and it involved threading two heddles in a row on shaft 4, which meant I could just pull one out and rethread it further on, leaving the extra heddle loose in the warp. (It’s not a crisis, like missing a heddle somewhere in the middle would have been. Gah. That would require undoing however many threads I’d gone on to do afterwards, and redoing them all in the correct order. I had a taste of that when I threaded the warp for the sample scarf last week, thank you.) It is a pity that the prep takes longer than the actual weaving. Books tell me to embrace it as part of the process, and I’m trying, but it’s not as much fun. I do find it interesting, just not as rewarding. Also, I can totally understand the whole ‘weavers have bad eyesight and backs’ thing.
The floating selvedges were a very successful experiment, and I shall do this again regularly. Floating selvedges are extra warp threads that threaded through the reed on the beater but not through heddles, so they aren’t raised at any time; they stay in a neutral position. You wrap your weft around them, and they stabilize the edges as well as theoretically reducing the pull-in problem.
Due to a not very thorough thinking-out of the warping process, this piece is much longer than I expected it to be. I’d originally planned for a 12″ x 12″ pillow cover, doubled to cover both sides, so a 12″ x 24″ piece of cloth. The first warp I started measuring on Friday night seemed way too short, what with loom waste, so I doubled it. In the end I realised that while I was measuring the warp I was thinking I’d doubled it, but I was also doubling the loom waste, which I’d overestimated to make sure I’d have enough room to begin with. Oops. If I measure carefully I might get two smaller pillow covers out of it, or I could do one side the woven fabric and the other side in a plain material and get three out of it. There are options.
Of course, because I really fell in love with the fabric when I took it off the loom (so soft! so drapey!) and immediately wrapped it around my neck like a big thick scarf, I may have to weave something else for throw pillows.
I am so pleased with this. I’m going to try a small sample square using the Red Heart for both warp and weft next, to see what happens to the lovely colour gradation. The crochet cotton was fine for test runs, but it’s not the look I’m going for now.
Project stats:
Warping: Nine hours
Weaving: Five hours
Finishing: One hour
Warp: about 300 yards
Weft: about 100 yards
Finished measurements: 11.5″ x 56″
Weekend Roundup
Spring hit this weekend, with a vengeance. I wore shoes outside for the first time in months, and a spring coat on Saturday. The boys spent a lot of time going for walks or trike rides (and oy, the boy has so very outgrown the tricycle) or shovelling snow from banks in the yard and spreading it on the gardens to melt there, because we had below average precipitation this winter and the gardens are going to be very unhappy. (HRH was also trying to put the bulbs back to sleep by piling snow on top of them, but I suspect it’s not going to succeed.) As of this morning, our snow was gone in the front and side yards, and it’s not going to take long for what’s left in the back to melt either…
Also, we suspect the boy is on another growth spurt (we’ve given up counting), what with the multiple meals and two-hour naps.
Friday night I measured the warp for a pillow cover. The first warp I started measuring seemed way too short, what with loom waste, so I doubled it. In the end I realised that while I was wrapping the warp I was thinking I’d doubled it, but with two wraps per measure I was actually quadrupling it. Oops. (I wish I could say that it worked out to two pillow covers, but with loom waste it would only be one and a half. If I did the fronts in the woven fabric and backed them in plain cloth I could have three throw pillows, though. It bears consideration.)
Saturday morning the boy let us sleep in for two blissful hours, playing on his own and watching cartoons. I was supposed to take Ceri to some quilt shops to help her choose fabric for her baby quilt, but I got a call saying that something has come up and she’d have to switch the outing to sometime in the afternoon. So I warped half of the loom instead, had lunch with the boys, and picked Ceri up around two. We spent an hour and a half in the first (and, in the end, only) quilt shop, pulling out different fabrics and laying them against one another and having a wonderful time. Ceri went home with all her main fabrics for the quilt blocks, we had tea and cake, and I came back home. The boy decided that he wanted spaghetti for dinner, so I made a sauce. After he went to bed I finished warping the loom, and then wove while HRH played Dragon Age.
Sunday morning we went out and did our weekly grocery order. We also hit the office supply shop and I finally got a new binder for my cello lessons, as the smaller one was chock full. There were earphones on sale and I picked up a pair of red ones, but now I’m thinking I should have picked up a lavender set because it would be less of a contrast with my black and white damask-patterned iPod skin. I’ll exchange them this week.
Sunday afternoon ought to have been skating with the Preston-LeBlancs, but HRH remembered that he doesn’t have a pair of skates, and even if I’d had the energy I couldn’t take the boy instead because we couldn’t find my pair. I couldn’t weave during the boy’s nap because the levers of the table loom go clunk, so I spun some of the llama fibre Jan picked up for me last month instead. It sheds like crazy and even when I think I’m over-spinning it, it tends to drift apart.
When the boy got up I wove for a bit, then took the cello downstairs to practice because I had a lesson scheduled for that night and I wouldn’t be able to play in my office like I usually do since everyone was home. I regret not practising downstairs before, because the sound is phenomenal down there. And the phenomenal sound went with me to the lesson, which was great. We are moving on from Boccherini and working on Webster’s Scherzo now, which is nice for the change, but is also all about the incredibly controlled bow movement.
Dinner last night was a truly delicious pork roast with baked potato wedges and raw veggies. Worthy of mention, anyway.
And through it all, the weather was spectacular. I am reminded yet again how much of an impact the sun has on my mood.
Friday Photo
Here is the boy, modelling the woven scarf. The scarf is actually doubled and one end tucked through the loop at the middle, and there’s a bit of extra bundled together behind his neck.
And now, I dive into polishing the freelance report, and submit it in time for an approval code today so I can invoice for it on Monday. Ha!
In Which She Chronicles The End of the First Weaving Experiment
Wow, I am so very in love with weaving.
It took me about nine hours to weave a test scarf, from setting up the loom up, warping it, and the actual weaving process, to cutting it off and finishing the edges.
Oh, it is a horrendous scarf. It is too long, and the edges are ragged, and I am not as fond of the colours as I was when I bought the thread (although to cut myself some slack, apart from the white, I got to choose between these blues and a ball of pinks, so I took the lesser of two evils; it’s not like I went looking for this colour) or of how it striped. Laid out to block, it looks like a priest’s stole or something.
But oh, the process. I adore it. It’s quick, and tangible results are there, right there in front of you. And there’s still an element of mystery, because when you take it off the tensioned loom the fabric changes, and some patterns will change, too. And really, you only get to see about six inches of what you’re weaving at one time, so the final reveal is exciting.
I taught myself how to read patterns during a break. And I have chosen a pattern to try, and I will do a real swatch this time, and no, I will not tell you what it is, because Ceri and Scott have formally announced that they are expecting their first baby in September, and so I am going to Make Something.
So! Here’s what things looked like at the end.
Look how even this selvage is! I am very pleased. Of course, that’s about five inches of a six-foot-long scarf. And only one side. Still, I like to think Granddad would have nodded at this bit and deemed it acceptable:
Here’s the woven fabric, all rolled up on the front beam:
And this is the top view of what it looked like after all the warp had been wound forward as far as it would go and there was only another fourish inches left to weave (you can see that one blank line where I missed a dent in the reed; it makes me wish I’d missed more here and there, so I could have called it a feature instead of a mistake):
Then I had to hemstitch the ends so they wouldn’t fall apart when I cut the scarf off the loom:
And tie knots in the warp threads to make fringe, which is another way to seal the weave from unravelling. Voila, the end of a scarf! Don’t worry, these fringed warp ends were trimmed to a more sensible length:
The whole thing, taken off the loom, but before washing and blocking:
And now, in all its (questionable) glory, my very first bit of woven anything, AKA the Mile-Long Scarf:
Next? Spinning yarn specifically to be used in a weaving project. I’m thinking browns; I have that woollen-spun chocolate Coopworth around here somewhere…
Stats:
18 epi finished fabric
Five inches wide, one mile six feet long
Approximately 186 yards of warp, 230 yards of weft (I should check this against actual formulas)
In Which She Chronicles Her First Attempt At Weaving
It’s a sunny day; I have no work on my plate. Today, I thought, would be a good day to pull out the antique table loom that’s been sitting in the basement for a year and a half, wipe it down, and give warping it a shot, putting theoretical knowledge I have been collecting for two years into practice. There’s only so much that theoretical knowledge can do for you; someday you have to actually get your hands dirty and figure out what’s what by actually doing it.
So I did. And it was pretty filthy. It’s missing the front apron rod, so I kitbashed one with four bamboo skewers and some packing tape. I needed a stick shuttle, too, so I found a paint stirrer and sawed two notches into it. While cleaning it I looked for any kind of maker’s mark, and apart from the LeClerc name on the reed, the loom looks homemade, possibly from a kit. (This is definitely not a LeClerc loom. The basic design is similar to the current LeClerc Dorothy, but it certainly isn’t one; it looks more like the LeClerc Jano [fifth picture down the page, marked 1936], which is long out of production, but it isn’t precisely that model, either. I suspect someone copied the Jano and used a premade reed in the beater, which is what I was considering doing when I asked HRH if he could build me a rigid heddle loom.)
I’ve been researching rigid heddle looms for a few months, thinking they would be a good gateway drug to the four-harness table loom I’ve got. A couple of weeks ago I realised that the only reason I was looking at rigid heddle looms was because they had only one heddle, which meant that it was the multiple harnesses that were spooking me. And I thought about it, and realised that I don’t have to use all four; I could use one, like the rigid heddle looms. (Experienced weavers will have just spotted an error. Don’t get ahead of my story.) I’d watched enough videos on how to warp rigid heddle looms, and despite the books I have that use different techniques, I reasoned that there wasn’t anything stopping me from warping my table loom like a rigid heddle loom. [ETA: Aha, this is called direct warping, and yes, one can do it on non-rigid heddle looms as well. As I proved today. Good job, me.]
I picked up some crochet cotton last week to practice with, thinking that it would be easier with something light and inexpensive. In some ways, the experience is a positive one; the cotton is very easy to handle and doesn’t fray or pill. On the other hand, it sticks to itself, which makes separating one strand from sixty others not so much fun. It will be interesting to try this with homespun, once I’m finished this test scarf.
And I started warping. I lifted the beater out of the loom, tied one end of the warp thread to the back apron rod, and began measuring it out, using one of the boy’s craft chairs as a warping peg, then looping the warp thread around the back apron rod before bringing it forward again. When I was done, I cut the thread off the ball and tied it off on the back apron rod.
Then I cut the loop made by the chair and tied it in a knot. I wound the warp threads on to the back roller carefully, keeping tension on it, and rolling pieces of paper between the layers of warp so they wouldn’t snarl with one another. (This all took about an hour.)
Then I did just as the rigid heddle videos told me to do: I threaded the dent in every heddle, leaving one thread loose in the slot between each heddle.
I almost tied the front ends of the warp on to the front apron rod before I remembered the beater! Right; I have to sley the reed in the beater. Wow, wouldn’t that have been frustrating if I’d forgotten to put the silly beater in? Chuckle, chuckle.
So I set the beater frame back in the loom, sleyed the reed in it, and tied the front warp to the front apron rod. (Time check: This took about an hour and a half.)
Very proud of myself, I tested the shed: I raised Shaft 1. Yes! A very definite shed!
And then I realised my error. To change the shed on this kind of loom, you need to raise another shaft that has the alternate warp threads threaded through its heddles. On a rigid heddle loom, you lift the heddle off the upper bracket and place it on a lower bracket, kind of dropping the shed below the neutral line of warp.
(Experienced weavers: Here is where the story catches up with you.)
So I untied the front warp ends, pulled them back through the reed, lifted the beater out again, pulled all the warp threads back through the shafts, and started again. This time, I alternated between threading a warp thread through a heddle on Shaft 1, then Shaft 3. And I got halfway across the shafts before realising that I wasn’t going to have enough heddles, since I’d started partway along each shaft. (I have since learned to push ALL the heddles to one side or another and start from the first heddle. You’d think that would be obvious, but I was following some vague sort of ‘balance it all by positioning it in the middle’ sort of thing.)
So I pulled it all back yet again and threaded the heddles for a third time. And this time it worked. It went much faster, too, no doubt thanks to all the practice I’d had. (Time check: This all took an hour and a half.)
And I put the beater back in and sleyed the reed, tied to warp ends to the front apron rod, and balanced the tension. I lifted Shaft 1, and yes, a shed! And when I lifted Shaft 3, a different shed appeared!
Yay, me! (Time check: This took about three quarters of an hour.)
Making my stick shuttle had taken about forty-five minutes before I started the whole project, what with the looking and sawing and sanding. I sat down and wound my weft thread onto it.
I put my waste weft along the bottom to help even out the warp, and then I got to actually weave my first few rows of a scarf. (Time check: This took five minutes.)
Mistakes I will learn from (apart from the ones already outlined above):
* My warp wasn’t centered through the reed, so it’s a bit cockeyed. I’m going to put marks on the frame to help line my warp up as it passes through the various harnesses and the reed.
* My jury-rigged front apron rod is going to have to be a real metal rod, not a bendy bamboo one. Also, the back rod is a bit rough; I may replace it with a smoother metal one.
* I need to get the rust off the harness frames. Perhaps white was not the best colour with which to warp it for the first time.
* Putting the loom on the coffee table was a good idea. Bending over to work on it was not. My back is in serious rebellion. After lunch I dragged the boy’s tiny chair over to the table and worked on warping the loom that way.
* A raddle on the back beam is a good idea to help centre the warp as it passes from the back roller over the beam to the heddles. I can make one and clamp it on.
But you know what? I warped a loom, and wove two inches of scarf. All by myself. It’s sloppy and loopy and crooked and I missed a slot in the reed (a classic rookie mistake, apparently), but I did it. (I keep telling myself that blocking will help a bit.) And I’ve been thinking about my maternal grandfather all day, because he was a weaver, too.
And now, if you don’t mind, I have a scarf to weave.
Dear Winter:
I feel it only fair to warn you that yesterday afternoon on the way home from school, the boy informed his father that he was done with winter. “Because,” he said, “I can’t really make snow angels any more, or play properly, because it’s too wet. So the snow can melt now.”
Winter, you’ve done your best (which, just between you and me, was a slightly below-average turn, but we’ll discuss that on your annual performance review). However, you’ve just been given your walking papers by the kid who plays with weather like it’s a Transformer.
See you next year.
