There was a yarn fair just down the road in Perth today and I bought half a kilo of a 2/16 blend of merino (75%) and angora (25%). I plan to dye some warps, and it will be interesting to see how this turns out given the mix of fibres. On the other hand, there’s plenty there to accommodate more white-on-white Theo Moorman…

However, that lovely plan I had for a boring couple of months has rather come off the rails and there is much to-ing and fro-ing to be done in the next little while. So this yarn is a cone of intention rather than immediate action.

“the cone of intention” was posted by Cally on 12 May 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk

We — my mother, Stuart and I — went to visit some of the Open Studios in North Fife last weekend, and this time we went with our research hats on in order to glean ideas for our own open studio later on. We concentrated on textile artists, though we took in some other media as we went round, and they were a very diverse bunch. It got me thinking that I need to present my own approach to weaving very clearly, which suggests that I might need to think about it clearly too… I was formulating a plan for this, when Aviva beat me to it with this excellent Pecha Kucha presentation of her approach to “slow making”. Just in case you haven’t come across Pecha Kucha before, there’s an explanation here, but the basic idea is a concise and fairly fast-paced presentation — which in this case is rather a contrast to the craft being explored! When it comes to presentations, I am all in favour of succinct, so perhaps that’s a format I should be considering for the clarification process?

Another train of thought, also related to the open studio event, is the need to make “small things”. Like this covered button. I was surprised how well the button structure worked with quite thick handwoven fabric: it would be safe to place an order on eBay, I think.

“philosophies” was posted by Cally on 10 May 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk

Thanks to all of you who said complimentary things about the pink and gold shawl after my last post. Fingers crossed it will turn out well! I have been making slow but regular progress, with a bit of loom time every day, which is a very gratifying state of affairs after the chaos of the last few months. At last my university teaching for the year has all been done and dusted; this makes for a much more balanced schedule, albeit one that doesn’t pay me anything. In fact our teaching hours are calculated in such a way that only about half of them are remunerated — or they are all paid at half the rate, if you prefer — so I’m mightily glad to be shot of them.

I’ve done one end of the inlaid gold and am now weaving the plain middly bit. You can’t see the pattern from above, so here’s a squinting-over-the-breast-beam glimpse.

With all the extra time I’ve gained, I’ve also been complicating-in-order-to-simplify my computer life. A bit like spring cleaning a cupboard, where it has to get worse in order to get better… What I call (through gritted teeth, since it is only four years old) my “old laptop” has finally been retired: it was touch and go whether retirement would be achieved before defenestration or the other way around.

I had to buy my “new laptop” a year ago as the old one had slowed to such a crawl that I couldn’t do my essential PhD sums on it. This was also a good reason to keep the old one in commission, though, as I didn’t want to clutter up the new before my thesis was finished. The thesis is not yet finished, I hasten to add, but the sums are pretty much done so I decided it was time to give my sanity a break from grappling with the old machine every time I needed to send an email. I’ve split up my gubbins so that all my own “weaving stuff” is on the new laptop, along with recent photos and a few other bits and bobs, while everything else, including my photo archive, is on our massively underused desktop PC. I had thought about retiring some of the archive to a separate hard drive, but then discovered the terabytes of empty space we had on the PC — and wished I had noticed it twelve months ago!

Anyway, after a painstaking week of file transfers and program installations, I am now hoping to get things done more quickly — especially those things I have moved to the PC, like documents and correspondence! The trouble with a laptop is that you can always do a bit more work while you’re sitting on the sofa and I find it hard to stop and switch off when the emails are piling in. I will simply have to be disciplined, however, as I need to use any fleeting moments of sofa-time to practice my braiding before I head for Braids in August. Much more important than silly old email.

“treadling on” was posted by Cally on 7 May 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk

I was so glad to get home on Monday, and even more glad that I don’t have to go away again for several weeks. There has been too much coming and going, not to mention fluing, so a couple of months of plain vanilla routine will suit me perfectly — and that routine is going to include some serious loom time.

Before I forget, though, here are some pictures for Meg of the Stuff at the Back of the Loom. All these should biggify-on-mouse-click.

The main warp (the pinky-beigey wool) follows an S-shaped path over the back beam and around the warp beam, thus:

I’m using a roll of corrugated card as warp separator and I would usually use the second warp beam to hold the excess, so that it gradually winds on to the second beam as it rolls off the main beam. However, in this case I have tied it up in a makeshift sling — i.e. one loop of yarn at either end — so that it is held in front of the second warp beam and just clear of the back of the treadles.

The second back beam is attached to two U-shaped brackets which slot over the main back beam: it sits just above and behind the main beam in a way I find ridiculously pleasing.

The tie-down warp follows a C-shaped path (well, it would be a C if I could squeeze in a photo from the other end of the loom!) so that it winds onto the second warp beam from the back rather than the front. This keeps it completely clear of the main warp and its corrugated companion.

The second roll of corrugated card is supported by my handy studio floor. Leaning back into the corner as far as I can, I can almost get the whole ensemble in the picture…

…so that down in the bottom left hand corner of the photo, the handle at the end of the beam is just about visible. I have one handle for the two beams: the metal slot halfway up the side is where it fits into the end of the main warp beam. The main beam can be advanced using the brake treadle at the front of the loom, so once the warp is beamed I never need to use the handle. However, the second warp beam has a simple ratchet and pawl which need to be managed by hand. I thought this would be much more annoying than it is. Yes, I do have to jump up and run around to the side of the loom to advance the tie-down warp, but weaving Theo Moorman is so slow that this is not really a problem! On this project I am only planning to use inlay at the ends of the shawl, so it may be a bit of a pain during the long middly bit — but I reckon my natural weaver’s fortitude will be sufficient to endure any distress caused.

The actual weaving has so far been of the slow kind, especially in the first inlaid section where I found myself using 13 separate bobbins. What idiot thought that was a good idea? At least they were for distinct non-interlocking, non-overlapping inlaid squares. Yes, everything is still a square. I feel I could push this technique quite a long way without ever abandoning the right angle.

Here are the 13 bobbins…

…and here is the progress to date:

The basic idea is that it should look like a little shower of gold squares coming to rest at the ends of the shawl. I won’t tell you how many hours I spent thinking about algorithms for placing the squares and scribbling possible patterns. We’ll just wait and see how it turns out.

There is a pattern in the ground cloth too, although it is not really visible here. The threading consists of groups of advancing points on 6 shafts, the tie-up is 2/1/1/2 with an extended advancing treadling (straight, no points — there are limits, you know). I’m doing the two-treadle thing again with the tie-down warp on shafts 7 and 8. By doing 4 repeats of three lifts before advancing with four lifts, I can keep an even number of lifts in each little section which is enormously helpful for knowing where I am! With all the stop-start associated with the inlay, it is extremely easy to lose my place so I’ve also got notebooks and coloured buttons as aids in case of interruptions mid-section. It’s a shame that I totally missed the opportunity to enter this for the exhibition as I’d say it is pretty Complex.

“back at (and of) the loom” was posted by Cally on 28 April 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk

I’m currently in the middle of a conference for PhD students in OR, but I skived off this afternoon to go and see an exhibition at Nottingham Castle. There are actually three separate exhibitions happening together and all are about silk.

The main focus is Living in Silk, an exhibition — or part of an exhibition — from China. The original exhibition was put together for the Beijing Olympics and some of the items have come to the UK to mark the London Olympics. Definitely the best Olympic-related event I’ve come across so far! There are fragments of silk which are 1,800 years old, contemporary digital designs and many examples from the years in between. I particularly liked the Tang dynasty silks, which were in extraordinarily good shape for such old textiles, but the contemporary designs were also very striking. (I have been rummaging around online trying to see whether there are any photos from the exhibition I can link to, but the best I have come up with is the facebook page of the gallery — scroll down the timeline to March and there are some links to pictures posted on twitter, but they aren’t all that great.)

The exhibition also includes a loom and several scale models of looms. Fabulous! The miniature drawloom is a treat. The full-size loom was an interesting design, with the warp beam higher than the back beam and an ingenious brake. I’ve tried to sketch it and to photograph my sketch — I’m not absolutely convinced it will come out the right way up, but I’ll take a chance. The weaver just has to reach up and pull the handle of the brake towards her/him to release the spoke on the warp beam: very neat. (There is a lot more wooden superstructure than I have shown here. But you knew that.)

One of the linked exhibitions is based on Chinese textiles from the museum’s own collection — mostly from the 19th century — and there were some interesting comments on the lower quality of the garments made at that time for export to the west. This section also had some nice interactive bits: you are never too old for interactive displays, I say.

And the final part was a project by fashion students at Nottingham Trent: they had designed collections inspired by the theme of the Silk Road and ideas of nationality and identity. Only a couple of the garments were on display, but there were some wonderful, large photographs (so WHY no online gallery??). My favourite collection was The Silk Connection by Dinah Azoyine: silk couture dresses, with colours and patterns as if they had been made from Kente cloth, modelled by a Chinese girl.

All in all, I reckon it was a good use of my afternoon. And I promise to go to some more seminars tomorrow…

“skiving in silk” was posted by Cally on 21 April 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk