lights and baubles
Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope you have a lovely holiday.
“lights and baubles” was posted by Cally on 23 Dec 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk
dreaming of the new year
Having met the last of my pre-Christmas weaving commitments (yay!) I thought that this week I would add to the surplus scarf population chez Booker. Stuart actually asked me for another scarf, please, and could it be purplish to go with a particular shirt and tie? Since I like purple too, I had a soft-focus vision of lovely his-n-hers scarves from the same warp for Christmas… but then Phoebus got himself beaten up again and we have to take it in turns to stay home and keep an eye on him, so no studio time for me for a few days.
[Note to the alarmed cat-lover (non-lovers of cats might want to skip this part): the patient looks as though he is going to be fine. He has some nasty injuries to his nose and it wasn’t immediately clear whether his right eye might also be damaged — hence the careful supervision. But there have been no scary developments in that area, so he seems likely to see (and fight) another day. In the meantime he snorts blood and cat-snot all over his people as it pleases him, but can breathe and eat normally. The people, on the other hand, are hyperventilating at the prospect of more vet’s bills.]So, instead of weaving, I have been thinking about weaving. Of course I have. Some playtime is in order in the new year and there are so many things I want to do that I daren’t even make a list of them all — though they are known to include: following up the things Pat & I learned in our 4CDW lessons with Bonnie Inouye in September, doing my next CW double weave study group project, trying out the metallic Habu yarns I bought in Charlottesville and getting better acquainted with the fine merino/silks from Shirley Pinder. You’ll notice that there are a couple of double weave items there which might find themselves combined into one, and the yarn games could be thrown into the pot as well… BUT. It is all a bit messy, frankly.
To take a different approach to the muddle in my head, I thought that, rather than list all the random things I fancy doing, I would try and list the things I have done. What do I feel confident with? What have I dabbled in but would like to develop further? It turns out to be a fairly short list, especially the first part.
1 Things I feel very confident with: twills
Twills are my default setting. When I think about doing something and I wonder what would be a good weave to use, I realise that I am often actually wondering what would be a good twill to use. Straight, point, broken, fancy (but not too fancy, please), networked or in parallel, there seems to be a twill for every occasion. To a certain extent, I am happy with that: with so much wondrous variety in one basic structure, it is going to take more than my lifetime to explore it all. But I’m not so enamoured with twills that I don’t want to push myself to explore more widely.
2 Things I feel reasonably confident with: parallel threadings, networked drafts, double weave
Hey, look! These are all things you can do with twills! But not just twills. I have done some networked huck as well, which was fun, although it is more challenging on a mechanical dobby than the twill flavour. And who doesn’t like weaving double cloth with plain weave to get as many layers/blocks as you possibly can?
3 Things I do pretty regularly but haven’t explored in depth: summer and winter, huck, differential shrinkage
4 Things I have done recently or from time to time but have explored even less than the above: Theo Moorman, honeycombs and waffles, colour and weave
These are all structures/techniques I like. I appreciate both the process and the result (though in some cases I prefer the process and in others the result!) but have only nibbled at the edges of the possibilities.
5 Things I have done but am really not fussed about: overshot
Actually, I do like a bit of monk’s belt, and also what I think of as ‘fragmented overshot’, where you lay in only part of the pattern as if it were a surviving piece of a mosaic floor, but on the whole overshot is not something I lie awake wishing I could spend more time with.
There is much more I could put on this list. Most of what I’ve included here are structures — and there are plenty enough of those to think about — but once you start getting into design techniques (like the network drafting or colour and weave which I’ve mentioned) or finishing techniques (like differential shrinkage) then the universe expands very rapidly. However, it is quite useful to me to focus on the headline things and see how short the list is! And there is plenty to do around items 2, 3 and 4 to develop even this small repertoire, so that helps me to dream constructively about my new year play time…
This is looking alarmingly like a post without any pictures, so I’ll just put that straight. At the end of November I took some of my latest scarves on a road trip to the Red Cabin Studio in Fife so that photographer Jenni Gudgeon could take some glamour shots. These are a couple of her pictures. Aren’t they lovely?
“dreaming of the new year” was posted by Cally on 19 Dec 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk
Photographs are © Jenni Gudgeon, Red Cabin Studio (2012)
adjustments
So messenger bag mark two is finally complete and I am very happy with how the fabric turned out.
Amazingly, after much anxiety and wet finishing, it was exactly the width it needed to be. It is also much brighter and crisper than the original. This is only partly because the original has had more than a year of wear and tear. Another reason is that the hodge podge of yarns I used the first time included a hand-dyed red silk which ran when I washed it. The section I used for the bag was the part where the white cottolin was least pink… but overall it wasn’t as healthy an appearance as one would have wished for. This time round I restricted myself to safer yarns and the cloth definitely shows the benefit. I stuck with the original sequence in the violet-gold section, partly because there seemed to be a consensus that it would be fine (thanks! you were right!) and partly because I reckoned that re-threading offered too much of an opportunity for me to introduce errors in a pattern which is hard enough to thread correctly the first time around.
No, my problems this time were with the strap. When I made my own, I just measured how long I wanted the strap to be and stitched it directly to the bag. However, for a ‘proper’ bag the strap should be adjustable. I didn’t think this would be very difficult — you just need the right widgets. But the strap I had designed was 65 mm wide. Who knew that strap adjustment widgets don’t come wider than 50 mm? At least that is the widest widget I have been able to source in the UK. I had already wound the warp for the strap when I cottoned to this, but it wasn’t yet on the loom so I gradually shed sections and ends as I set it up. Fortunately, the warp was so densely set that there was very little change in the width after weaving and, to my great relief, I ended up with a 50 mm band…
…which is attached at each end by one of these…
…and adjusted by one of these:
Technically, this project stretches me on all my weak points. Sewing, for a start. Weaving to a required width, for another. And weaving warp-faced bands in general. But overall I am very pleased with the flavour of it. Plus I now have a stash of 50 mm widgets so I can practise.
“adjustments” was posted by Cally on 12 Dec 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk
messenger bag reprise
I mentioned not long ago that I have been commissioned to reproduce last year’s P2P2 messenger bag and that I was going to make a few changes. Most importantly, I wound a shorter, wider warp so that I wouldn’t have to spend hours painstakingly matching the pattern at the selvedges as I stitched two pieces together. I had also used a somewhat bizarre assortment of yarns the first time, some of which are now all used up. So, when I looked for substitutes, I tried to match the original colours but limit myself to a narrower range of fibres.
This morning I was looking at this,
and by 2 pm I had got to this.
I am having a bit of a dither about one section, however. Or two sections, since they are repeated… The violet and gold part (most clearly seen second from the left, right next to the black – which has been added as a border stripe, just for insurance purposes) is one of the substituted sections and it was more of a fuchsia and gold in the first bag. I’m not using the colour terminology in a very precise way, I’m afraid — I just mean that the pinky-purple shade was originally a bit brighter. So when I set up the alternation of the colours, I happily placed the fuchsia so that it appeared adjacent to the red in the next section. Thus.
But as I threaded it up today, I wondered whether the let’s-call-it-violet and the red are now too similar in value. Perhaps I should swap the section around so that the gold appears next to the red instead? This is the sort of thing I could think about for weeks without coming to a resolution — even if I had time to try both options, I might struggle to choose! Mocking it up in Fibreworks isn’t an enormous help, since all the colours come out a bit wild.
Tomorrow morning I will need to commit myself one way or the other — I just haven’t decided which, yet. Wrappings may be called for. Feel free to weigh in with your opinions! I will listen very nicely, then go out and do precisely… well, you know how it goes 🙂
“messenger bag reprise” was posted by Cally on 4 Dec 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk
quiet day
We don’t often get one of these, so I was briefly at a bit of a loss… but then all the chores asserted themselves. Laundry, grocery shopping, and other favourite tasks which can only be postponed for so long, i.e. not quite as long as I typically postpone them. I still maintain that meals are possible from porridge oats and carrots, though perhaps not any meals which have been willingly consumed outside of a Victorian orphanage.
The craft and design market yesterday went well, although it was rather uneven: extremely busy from 2 – 4 and then very quiet from 4 – 6. They were serving mulled wine in the foyer and the most tantalising smells kept wafting towards us! My space was a nice little niche between two jewellery stands, and it was nice to meet some of the folk from Vanilla Ink who are actually WASPS neighbours (albeit two floors down, which is why we haven’t been bumping into each other). The lighting was a bit tricky, though. There was plenty of it — spotlights in the ceiling, uplighters and moveable spotlights — but, with the ceiling being quite low, it was difficult to arrange things so that the scarf tree…
…was (a) illuminated and (b) not casting a shadow over everything else. Eventually we worked out a place for everything, but it was a bit jumbled.
The scarves on the tree ended up being rather too far back for people to feel relaxed about touching them — although, fortunately, not everyone was deterred and plenty of things went off to new homes. (Aside: I love to see people’s reaction when they touch things I’ve woven. They are often so visibly startled by the lightness and softness of a scarf, say, that I can’t help wondering what they were expecting!) Stuart made me the scarf tree a couple of years ago for using at table-top sales and it has done good service, but we need to think about some alternatives so that odd configurations don’t get the better of me.
Speaking of odd configurations…
…Polly wonders what’s going on up there.
“quiet day” was posted by Cally on 2 Dec 2012 at http://callybooker.co.uk
