20 Nov 2017

Ladder obsession

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I have been slacking on the blog front again, but I can assure you that I have been anything but slacking in the studio. Not that I have woven anything much lately. Since Open Studios a new project has been sucking up my time: the project of moving my weaving life from one Meadow Mill studio to another. The move is part of a larger master plan, but is somewhat out of sequence – i.e. I wasn’t expecting it so soon! But studios at WASPS don’t lie around empty, and when something suitable comes up you have to grab it.

The new space is a long narrow one, so it is not very amenable to my phone camera. Standing at the window and looking back on the first day of my new tenancy, I could see this:

On the fourth floor, where I am currently, the ceilings are high. On the second floor, where I will be, the ceilings are really high. So WASPS have built storage platforms, which are incredibly useful additional space. They aren’t ‘floors’ due to certain building regs not being satisfied, which has implications for access: no staircases allowed, it must be a ladder. However, it is fine to fix a ladder to the platform in order to make it more accessible than this example, as long as you can unfix it again when you leave. I have had many, many ladder-focused discussions with fellow tenants! I ended up buying a loft ladder kit recommended by a neighbour down the hall, and thus most of the evenings of the last fortnight have been spent by Team Booker in the construction and painting of said ladder and a balustrade to go with it.

Now it looks like this:

I am so pleased with that ladder! In the process, we have also repainted the walls, platform and skirting, added a blind to the window…

…and had the heebie-jeebies over the state of the floor. We were expecting to paint it, so I scrubbed it, scrubbed it again and then scrubbed some more. But every layer of gunk I removed just revealed an even nastier layer below. In the end I gave up and ordered a roll of rubber floor covering, of the kind you get in gyms, and we covered the whole mess. What a relief. And it makes everything so stable: the warping mill has never spun so true! I was too cheap to buy the extra three metres I would have had to pay for to cover one extra metre of floor, so we have that one metre to paint (fortunately, it is a nice clean, even bit of concrete by the door), then we can pin the edges of the rubber and all will be lovely.

In the meantime, moving has begun. I have both tenancies until the end of November, so until then I will be shuttling yarn and books between floors in the Booker Yarn Transporter.

More to follow, if I still have the strength to blog…

“Ladder obsession” was posted by Cally on 20 Nov 2017 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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14 Oct 2017

Comparing selvedges

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As I posted while ago, the one thing I wasn’t happy with in my turned summer and winter experiments was the selvedges. I’m not brilliant at selvedges, which is one reason I like wool so much: it is a very forgiving yarn! But alpaca is not, and I do seem to be making a habit of weaving with alpaca… so before warping up with it again, I thought I would compare a couple of alternatives on the leftover bit of cotton warp I happen to have sitting on a loom.

In fact, my freeform samples on the cotton warp had rather ropey edges too: the process of changing the shed several times for a single pick means that the yarn has less freedom of movement when you are beating, and I think that is a contributing factor.

My immediate thought was to add double weave selvedges, like this:

(I have left out the patterned area to focus on the edges.)

But thinking about double woven selvedges reminded me of an article we published in the Journal for WS&D a number of years ago, in which Satu Hovi described how she wove a Viking-style cloak using an adaptation of their tubular selvedge method. Why not try that too?

Satu’s adaptation was for a twill cloth woven on a four-shaft loom, but I had four spare shafts to use so I set mine up like this:

Essentially you are weaving a plain weave cloth in one direction only, and on the return trip folding that cloth over to make a tube at the edge of the fabric.

Here are the three different edges after finishing. From the top: no special edge, double woven edge, Viking tubular edge.

The straightforward double weave is certainly the most regular, isn’t it?

The tubular edge wasn’t bad, but tended to be lumpy on the same side as my ordinary selvedge. It was slightly alarming to beat, as the weft wasn’t really happy until it had done its U-turn and headed back into the cloth. On the whole though, I think it is an improvement on the plain edge and I daresay I would get better with practice.

Another option would be to go for an extra-dense sett at the selvedge, but I must admit to not getting on very well with that approach… and with the fuzzy nature of the alpaca, I am already conjuring vivid images of future struggles.

However, this was cotton, so the alpaca remains to be experimented upon. I think double weave to start.

“Comparing selvedges” was posted by Cally on 14 Oct 2017 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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14 Oct 2017

Open Studios 2017

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It’s that time of year again… WASPS Artists at Meadow Mill will be opening our studios on Saturday 28th & Sunday 29th October from 12 – 5 pm each day.

I’m having a bit of a clear-out to make room for new work and fresh ideas, so there will be bargains!

13 Oct 2017

Weaving Space website

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I’ve made a new website! I wanted to give my teaching practice its own space and blog, so all my classes and a few other goodies can now be found at weavingspace.co.uk.

And the Warp Space blog is where I will be writing posts with a more practical focus aimed at fairly new weavers, starting with a series on reading and understanding drafts.

If that sounds like your kind of place, I hope to see you there! Meanwhile, loom-based blether will continue over here.

“Weaving Space website” was posted by Cally on 13 Oct 2017 at https://callybooker.co.uk

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25 Sep 2017

ETN: Crossover Borås – Impressions

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One of the things I appreciated most about the ETN conference was the opportunity to see so many exhibits. We were based in the Textile Fashion Center, a fairly new facility which includes the university’s textile faculty and a museum of textiles (among other things), so there was a great deal to look at without ever stepping out of doors. I really enjoyed Everyday Matters, a  juried exhibition by Nordic Textile Art, which considered questions of textile and value – a theme that came up several times throughout the event, but with more questions than answers. Wherever we went people were generous in allowing us to take photographs, which was great: if I didn’t have the images to remind me, I would have been too overwhelmed to hold on to any impressions at all!

Some of my favourite pieces from Everyday Matters (mouse-over for captions or click an image to enlarge; links to artists’ websites are at the end of the post)

The Finnish organisation TEXO has been celebrating its sixtieth anniversary with an exhibition called Narrative Thread which we saw at the Rydals Museum. In the rush of being herded back onto the bus I clean forgot my intention to buy a copy of the catalogue on the way out. However, I have tracked down an online version here.

Some of my favourite pieces from Narrative Thread

Other pieces I especially liked were Merja Keskinen’s Transparent Colors weavings (is it surprising I failed to photograph them effectively??) and Heijastus by Ulla-Maija Vikman (who had another piece of the same construction in Everyday Matters and I couldn’t catch either of them accurately). You’ll just have to look them up in the catalogue.

One of the highlights of the conference was the presentation of the Nordic Award in Textiles. This has been awarded annually for a few years, and the 2017 winner was Grethe Sørensen, a weaver from Denmark. We had the opportunity to see her astonishing solo exhibition at the Abecita Art Gallery. Below is my partial photo of ‘Rush Hour 5’ – visit Grethe’s website to see proper pictures. And you can read the jury’s statement about her work here.

The gallery used an adjoining room to show an accompanying exhibit of one piece by each of the previous winners, which was a great way of putting the award into context for those of us who didn’t know much about it.

Not an exhibition – but just as good! – was our visit to the studio of Kerstin Åsling-Sundberg when we were on a tour of Gothenburg’s Konstepidimin, an artists’ studio complex in a former fever hospital. The weavers in our little group all sighed with pleasure when we walked in and saw her loom surrounded by these lovely pieces. Kerstin has retired from teaching at the art college and this is her stash-busting project. There is a lovely profile of her here. It is in Swedish, but I found Google translate didn’t make too much of a mess of it.

Some artists’ links

Deepa Panchamia

Elisabeth Brenner Remberg

Elina Helenius

Grethe Sørensen

Helga Palina Brynjolfsdóttir

Janna Syvänoja

Kari Hjertholm

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