22 Jan 2011

the perfect weft

7

I have become completely addicted to this 30/2 Nm silk.

The colour is called “gunmetal” and it goes with everything. I used it in the previous crinkly scarf and then again in this — another — crinkly scarf. The first was mainly blue, the second mainly red, but both are enhanced by the gunmetal grey. I am sorely tempted to use it again in the current project which has a warp in grey and red; but I don’t want to become a one-weft weaver, so I sampled both the grey silk (at the bottom of the picture below) and a dark red wool (at the top).


The grey does give a very sharp finish and the customer — Stuart — likes it a lot. He also likes the red wool a lot. Finally, after much deliberation of samples fulled to different degrees, the weaver and the customer have agreed on the red wool. (I did offer him more choices, but he felt the two options were sufficiently taxing to his decision-making powers and he didn’t want to risk liking a third as well.)

I have been promising Stuart a new scarf since he bought a new winter coat last year. He is a bit of a scarf tree since he gets not only scarves intended for him, but also assorted items that didn’t quite work out as planned. His favourite is this block twill in blues and greys with a bit of red, but I’m told it goes too well with jeans to be worn with the more formal wool coat. Besides, it is getting rather elderly. I wove it in 2005, I think, and was experimenting — hence the two ends having different patterns. I’m afraid I just grabbed it off the peg for this photo so it is both grubby and crumpled.

For this pattern I decided to scale down the triangles in Mystery beyond the Mountains, which was a nice challenge and a good opportunity to re-deploy something that took me ages to work out. The original blocks were each about 3″ wide on the loom, which would give a rather dull scarf. The new ones are just under 1½” and it was surprisingly tricky to get them the right size and to scale the treadling as well. If it works out, I’m tempted to make another one, just because I can.

“the perfect weft” was posted by Cally on 22 Jan 2011 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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7 Jan 2011

nicely crinkly

15

Here is the merino-silk combination straight off the loom and looking rather stunned, as they often do.

I treated it the same way as the sample. First I washed it ever so gently in the sink, using Ecover’s “Delicate” as I usually do. Then I rinsed it and squeezed out the excess water. And then I flung it in the dryer with a towel for twenty minutes, ran away and hid (with my eyes shut and ears covered so I couldn’t hear any screaming). I might add that this is the same dryer which malfunctioned the other day: the timer apparently got stuck and it kept drying the same load for four hours… But for some reason, this seemed to me a gentler option than running it through the delicate wash cycle to shrink the wool, which is what I would do if the non-shrinking fibre were cotton.

Anyway, my post title is a giveaway: no disasters, just a nicely soft and crinkly scarf.

I did a bit of plain weave at each end for a hem, but the huck part — the whole body of the scarf — has shrunk from 91″ to 56″, so Quite a Lot.

For some reason, my camera is not at its best with blues and purples. The first picture is more accurate as to colour; the lower one seems a bit bleached. I took the poor thing all over the house to try and get a better picture, and then had the bright idea of plonking it on a red armchair in the hall. The camera likes red so I thought it might cheer it up a bit.

The hall is rather dark as it doesn’t get much natural light, and I wasn’t using a tripod so the long exposure means it is rather blurry… but, but, but… these are definitely more like the scarf colours and you get a better sense of the contrast between the light and dark areas.

I’ve got a few half-drafted posts about sensible things, so I hope to get those to you before long; but in the meantime perhaps you can help me fathom the mystery of why our letter tray is getting so lop-sided.

Any ideas?

“nicely crinkly” was posted by Cally on 7 Jan 2011 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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31 Dec 2010

last week of the year

3

I love this week. It’s my favourite of the year and Stuart’s as well. Even the people who love us the most have had more than enough of our company over Christmas so we can indulge our preference for doing nothing, going nowhere and seeing nobody. I should perhaps say — in case you are worried — that it’s not that we don’t like people, it’s just that we are both such introverts that more than four people in a room at any one time seems like a crowd and requires serious recovery.

So this is our hibernation week, when we do our in depth recovering. It usually includes lots of outdoor walks, but this year that hasn’t been possible. It also includes dealing with the paperwork mountain which has been piling up all year. That might sound dreadful, but after 51 weeks of superficial management the paperwork mountain has become such a source of stress that it is a huge relief to tackle it. (I am aware that this begs the question of why we don’t deal with paperwork more regularly — well, we do deal with what needs to be done on the spot, like paying bills and so forth — but the filing and the archiving and the shredding is a job or three too much for the working calendar. Besides, I now rather look forward to doing it all in one go.)

What I should have done is take “before” photos, but you’ll just have to trust me that things were Very Bad Indeed. Now they look like this.

There’s the big desk…

…and there’s the computer desk…

…and there are several boxes like this one:

Actually, we don’t usually leave all our shredding to the last week of the year, but the old shredder conked out a wee while ago and we’ve only just got around to buying a new one.

So now I’m ready for the new year — perhaps even ready to go out to a Hogmanay party and share a room with large numbers of people. Tomorrow I will get out of the study and back into the loom room, just in time for new year’s looms.

“last week of the year” was posted by Cally on 31 Dec 2010 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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26 Dec 2010

new toys!

2

Well, new books. Books are Serious so really shouldn’t be denoted toys no matter how many you have, right? I have just had the pleasure of adding these to my LibraryThing collection:

That’s volume 2 of Peggy Osterkamp’s New Guide to Weaving and Marg Coe’s new book Fit 2 Be Tied. I’m especially excited about the latter as I was disappointed that I couldn’t go to the Complex Weavers workshop which she taught at Handweaver’s Studio in early December (unlike Stacey who has blogged about it here). However, given my limited mobility in the context of All That Snow, it really wasn’t a good idea — I am still struggling just to get to the end of the road without falling over! Anyway, I have dived straight in to both books at once so no doubt there will be related posts to come.

In the meantime, what’s on the loom? In addition to the plain colours of silk which I used for the Serious Scarves, I bought a couple of variegated skeins: one in blue/violet and one in red/pink. I have matched the blue/violet one with some merino yarn from Chameleon Colorworks in a colour scheme called Midnight (yes, I admit it, another Convergence purchase). My plan is just to see whether I can make a soft crinkly scarf by shrinking stripes of merino between bands of huck lace in the silk.

My little sample piece looked like this.

There are two different shades of silk in the weft and two different options in the merino stripes. At the bottom I have woven huck in the merino as well as in the silk; at the top the merino is in plain weave.

I thought I should be gentle with the silk so I washed it by hand and had a go at fulling the stripes using a combination of bubble wrap and elbow grease. Hah. I ran out of elbow grease long before any shrinkage could be observed. There is nothing like impatience for increasing the presumed resilience of yarns. Silk, delicate? I threw it in the dryer with a towel. And lo:

As you can see, the plain weave areas didn’t shrink much at all, which was rather what I had suspected. However, in the huck areas, where there is more room for manoeuvre, the merino has shrunk just enough to give the silk a lively bubbliness. So I have proceeded accordingly and it is looking like this.

I made a complete muddle of winding the warp bouts and had to rearrange them on the loom to get a degree of symmetry in the colours, but I like the way it is working out.

For a seasonal finish, let me leave you with one of my favourite family photos from yesterday: Three Wise Men, making the most of those festive nibbles. On the far right, with the coffee, is my own Stuart, taking a well-earned day off from loom support.

“new toys!” was posted by Cally on 26 Dec 2010 at http://callybooker.co.uk

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