Hunkering down

This weekend I have been at a staff development conference for the OU, mixing with one of my tribes again. I must admit that being developed is usually fun, but more fun in June than in November! Yesterday’s sunrise was really spectacular but I’m confident it would have looked just as good from my bedroom window as it did from the motorway.

Anyway, the event marks the end of my formal commitments for 2016. From this point on, nobody needs me to be anywhere but here.

Having stocked up on essentials at last week’s Festival of Chocolate, I am quite ready to sit myself down in front of the fire and stay there until 2017. However, what the hibernation period really means is catching up on all the jobs I have pushed to the back of the queue for as long as I thought I could get away with it. The big one is, of course, the tax return. Or perhaps the big one is the file-and-shred routine that is needed to deal with the paperwork mountain. Or the invisible digital paperwork mountain – so much easier to ignore than the visible one.

But alongside the stick of admin, I have the carrot of designing and sampling. In fact, a whole crate of carrots was delivered to my studio a couple of weeks ago.

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That’s just the top layer 🙂

So after spending all of Tuesday going through my accounts, on Wednesday I treated myself to a short sample warp on one of the Ashford table looms.

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I’ve recently had the fun of trying out some turned drafts as I reviewed Barbara Walker’s excellent (oops, spoiler!) book Supplementary Warp Patterning for the spring 2017 issue of Journal of Weavers, Spinners & Dyers. That set me thinking about turning drafts more generally so as to shift more of the colour complexity from weft to warp, which is always my preferred way of working. I wanted to try turned Ms and Os, so I did.

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The result has fulled into a very pleasing cloth with the sort of scumbly look I was hoping for, but I still need to experiment with sett. That’ll be one of my carrots for next week.

I’ve also been emboldened by my success in tying on the dark chocolate warp, so I have tried it again with another silver grey warp. This one, however, is twice as long and I haven’t beamed it yet. Here’s hoping the first triumphant beaming wasn’t just beginner’s luck.

Hunkering down” was posted by Cally on 27 Nov 2016 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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2 Responses

  1. Amy Norris
    |

    Looks yummy! Curious as to where your box of wool (?) comes from and what it is.

    • Cally
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      Yes, it’s wool. Specifically the 2-ply version of this wool from Knoll. It is sometimes referred to as ‘Shetland style’, but whatever it’s called it fulls beautifully and is a great weight for throws, cushions etc.