Always Trying Something New

Completed fingerweaving project

When it comes to yarn, as I’ve said many times, I’ve fallen so far down the rabbit hole that there’s no coming back, even if I wanted to! I’m always discovering new-to-me crafts, and while not all of them have stuck, most of them have, and I take a lot of pleasure in learning about the less well known fiber arts.

When I say “less well known”, what I really mean to say, I guess, is that they are niche arts. When you walk up to people and say “weaving”, they instantly have a picture in their heads that, while maybe not completely accurate, indicates a general knowledge of the term. Same for knitting, crochet, etcetera. Even if they don’t take part in the craft themselves, they at least know enough to recognize what you mean. But if you walk up to John Q. Public and say “naalbinding”, or “fingerweaving” or “taaniko”, most likely you’re going to get a blank stare. If you follow it up with “fiber arts” and you’re talking to people like me, they’ll be compelled to go look it up. If they’re really like me, they’ll also be compelled to at least try it.

Thus my repeated attempts at fingerweaving, which finally paid off and were successful: I got through an entire band, with pretty decent selvedges, and I’m pretty proud of it. Will I continue with it? Most likely. It has the feel of one of those things that stick for me.

Practicing taaniko

Another thing that has that feel is taaniko. In my last post, I mentioned seeing a Maori artist who had posted a demonstration video of taaniko, or taniko, which is Maori weaving, and also resembles, as I discovered, the Chilkat weaving of the PNW nations.

I was so enthralled with this video–and the fact that no loom is actually necessary–that I hunted down a book on taaniko weaving to give it a shot and see if I liked it.

The book arrived a few days ago, and I finally got to it to make an attempt. The book was written in the 70s, and, for me, didn’t give me quite enough information. It went over setting up the warp, and the first two rows of actual weaving, then mentioned something about starting row five differently, then I turned the page, and the author was talking about finishing the piece.

Whoa, hold on!!!! There’s a whole heap of things that take place between row two and finishing! Where is all that information? What happened to rows three and four? Do I just repeat the same thing I did for rows one and two? Why is row five begun differently? And why are we talking about finishing the piece ten seconds after beginning it?

I tried, I truly did. I made two attempts in mercerized cotton that were absolutely disastrous. Then i decided to try what I should probably have tried in the first place: I hit my tutorial go-to website: YouTube. Some things just never click for me without a video.

I found a bunch of tutorials on taaniko, more than I honestly had expected. And the ones I chose to watch not only demystified the art, but also de-complicated the book. What I saw in the videos was far simpler than the book had been. Then I made an attempt in acrylic that went a little bit better. Then a fourth one in acrylic that went even better, and I began a fifth in unmercerized cotton that is only slightly better than the fourth, but the key is that I improved each time, and I’m proud of that.

The funny thing is that, watching the videos, it looks simple and easy, and in a way, it is. At its most basic, you’re twining two different colored wefts around your warp threads. That’s it. If you want color A to be visible, put color A overtop of your warp. If you want color B to be visible, twist the weft until B is on top.

It sounds simple. It looks simple.

It’s not simple at all, and yet it is.

I’m still working on my fourth and fifth attempts, and I’m just beginning to maybe-perhaps-possibly figure out how it works. I’ve given up on trying to follow even the easiest pattern yet, and just get the hang of getting the twining itself right, and the color changes. When you look at my photos, you can see there are mistakes…lots of mistakes. And I kept going because right now, it’s not about getting it perfect. It’s about figuring it out. Getting it right comes a little bit later.

It’s been a bit less frustrating than fingerweaving was. That, pardon my language, royally pissed. Me. Off. For years. I could not get it right. I couldn’t even get it going. I can now, but it has taken me nearly ten years to get to this point. Taaniko, thankfully, clicked a bit better! And yes, I do intend to continue with it, because it’s fun for me.

Monk’s belt patterns

I also tried out monk’s belt patterns on my new Windhaven Ukulele. And, by the way, I couldn’t be happier with both of the Windhaven looms, and I plan on getting at least one more, if not two.

But anyway: monk’s belt. It was a different kind of bandweaving for me. Dressing the loom was different than I’ve ever done before, and bandweaving has always been warp-faced before, but monk’s belt is weft-faced, which made it weird for me. With a monk’s belt chart, the only threads you actually manipulate are the pattern threads. The other threads just change sheds back and forth and don’t get manipulated at all, really. They’re really just there to help anchor your weft down; that’s the only way I can think to explain it. Weird, but pretty. Naturally, I’d had to try it because, new loom, and Celtic knotwork! Once I’d seen that, there was no way I wasn’t trying it!

Well, I think I’ve babbled enough on this post. I’d better get to bed!!!!

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Staying On Task

Tiny loom from Hard Maple Looms. It’s 7″ long by 4″ high and cute as a button!

The weavebrain is back to running amok. I currently have four looms under warp. Two are weaving the same design in different colors and yarn thicknesses. One is under a practice warp. And the last, a teeny little loom, is under an inkle warp. My last loom and my wooden heddles haven’t yet arrived, and I have no idea when they will. The Ukelele is coming from Windhaven, and they had a major flash flood, so the shop was under water. No telling when they’ll be able to resume work. That’s a horrible thing to have happen, especially now when there’s already so much going on in the world.

The heddles are coming from Latvia. They shipped on May 7th, but there’s no tracking number for them, so I have no idea where they are. Given the state of the world, they might have gone to Outer Mongolia, for all I know!

Staying on point is hard because I am seriously wanting to try my hand at Baltic pickup weaving, but I don’t have a loom free. At least, not one for that. Two of my three rigid heddles are free, but they don’t fit in my lap. I need to swing by WalMart and get a tv table of some sort. Maybe I’ll do that today. 

In other news, both kids will be moving on to their next grades. Aneira did well with homeschooling, and we’re looking into keeping her there until graduation. Bryony, not so much. And I am no teacher. Her passing had absolutely nothing to do with any help on my part. We spent more time fighting over her actually doing her work than cooperating to get it done, primarily because it is her contention that “help” means that a parent does all the reading and tells her which item to read to get the answer she needs. Naturally, that’s not happening!

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Windhaven Concertina

Windhaven Concertina

One of my three new inkle looms arrived the other day, and I’m very happy with it so far!

The Windhaven Concertina is a small loom that fits in my lap for weaving, which is very cool. Used as an inkle loom, it will do a 4 inch wide band that is about 3 feet long, and it can be expanded to a width of 8 inches. It can also be used as a rigid heddle loom, with the front and lower back rods used as take-up rods, or fabric beam and warp beam, which is also very cool, as you can then make much longer bands. If you remove the top rod altogether, you have enough space for tablet weaving, if you use small cards. All in all, a very versatile loom. It’s like a Gilmore Wave, without all the fancy pieces that make the Wave so much more expensive.

The downsides of this loom are very minor, but have to be mentioned to be thorough. If you want to do pickup weaving on this loom, it can be done, but be aware that the working area is very tight. If you like getting your hands in there to manipulate the warp, as I do, it’s difficult, although, as I said, it can be done. A small weaving sword might be a better idea, but that’s something else to get used to. I used to do pickup with a sword, but then stopped in favor of my hands. I may have to go back to the sword with this loom, but I’ve been using my hands as usual. Like I said, the downside is minor.

I did worry about the warping path a little bit…on my other inkle looms, the warp threads didn’t come in contact with other levels of the path, where they do with this loom, but that concern turned out to be unfounded: the warp advances very smoothly. The only thing I have to watch out for is that the tensioner isn’t quite as wide as the other rods, because it has to be able to move back and forth in its track, and that means that on a warp as wide as the rods, you need to make sure that warp threads don’t slide off the sides. It did happen to me once at the beginning, and it was a pain to get them back where they belonged, but once I realized what had happened and why, I learned to just advance carefully, and it hasn’t happened since then.

Because it’s a small loom, the working area is tiny, and you will be advancing a lot more often than with a standard sized inkle. That doesn’t bother me much; one of the biggest pluses for me was the fact that it fits in my lap! Another is the fact that I can toss it into a tote bag and take it anywhere to weave. Gonna be waiting at the doctor’s office for an appointment for an hour or more? You can take your loom and weave, or sit in the car on your break at work and weave. That is beyond awesome to me.

The company is made up of a homesteading mom and her two daughters, one of whom, the master woodworker, is a high-functioning autistic teenager. And while yes, I did like the idea of supporting her work, if she wasn’t good at it, I wouldn’t have ordered more than one loom. This one, I bought used from another weaver, but I already had one loom, the Ukelele, on order, and when they are back to work, I fully intend to order the bigger Accordion as well! The craftsmanship is fantastic, and the looms are among the least expensive I’ve seen as well, making it much easier for aspiring weavers with a limited budget to get started. Windhaven’s ladies are also very accessible, with a group on Facebook that is very active.

So, that’s my review of the Windhaven Concertina. As long as you don’t have unrealistic aims for the loom, you can’t go wrong with buying a Windhaven loom.

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A Myriad of Mistakes

Forever to get started, but going well now!

I warped my inkle with 10/2 cotton on Friday night. This stuff is very, very fine. I’d had no idea. I had forgotten that, like wire gauge in chain maille, the larger the number, the thinner the yarn, and this is the thinnest yarn I’ve ever woven with. As in, one short step above sewing thread. As in, I was worried about whether or not the pattern I had chosen would even manage to fit on the loom, and I need not have worried. Fully warped, only a little over half the peg space was taken up, and it’s by far the largest warp I’ve put on the loom, with 56 warp ends. Had the yarn been thicker, there is no way the loom could have done it. As it is, I didn’t include borders because I thought for sure the warp was too big.

I have always been a fan of smaller over larger when it comes to some art mediums. Smaller usually means more detail. For instance, in beadwork, one can do it with size 6/0 beads, but if you use the (much) smaller 11/0 beads, details are clearer and sharper. Or, for the IT-savvy folks, it’s like smaller pixels.

I had not, however, planned on moving to thread this small so soon. When I placed the orders, the only thing I was thinking about was that it would be thinner than 5/2 cotton. I guess it’s fairer to say that I knew it would be thinner, but not how much so. For whatever reason, it didn’t click in my head that 10, being the double of 5, meant that one thread is at least half the size of the other.

The colors, though, are so vibrant and pretty, that I shoved all my misgivings down the garbage disposal, hit the on switch, and ignored their screaming as they spun down the drain. I had plans.

I kept coming back to this Celtic knotwork pattern that I really, really wanted to try. The pattern chart was different from the charts I’ve been using up till now, so clarification of the new method and number of threads was my first email for help. That done, I sat down to warp the loom. It took me two hours, because I was trying something else too: multiple colors of background warp threads. I wanted a gradient from dark to light in the center, and back to dark. My pattern threads would be another color.

I hmanaged to get that done, and headed out to the living room.

One of the things that drives me bonkers about our house is its darkness. It’s an older, Colonial style home, and they don’t run to a lot of windows. During the day, depending on where I’m sitting, I still need a lamp on. At night, obviously, lights are on, but they aren’t close enough to the sofa to shed good light. My answer was to buy a rechargeable clip on light. It gets the job done. So I curl up on the sofa with my loom and phone with the PDF pattern and prepare to get started.

This is a much more complicated pattern than I have tried before. My previous practice bands, at their most complicated, were made up of small motifs and only 32 warp ends, plus borders. This one, without borders, is a huge jump up in complicated, then you add in the size of the thread –or lack, thereof — and what you end up with is me, cursing myself up one side and down the other, but still determined that dammit, I am going to beat this. And so I did, but it took two solid days, much screaming at the sky, and numerous emails and messages for help. I am so glad that Laverne is so accessible! There is no better help than being able to call on the person who published the pattern in question!

I wove four rows. It didn’t look right at all. I wove several rows more of plain weave, intending to start over further down the warp. Then I messaged Laverne the first time. She told me I started out ok, then went off track by one column and continued in that vein.

I decided not to leave the errors in place, went back and unwove everything back to the beginning — why waste the warp space? And I started again. Wove four rows. Unwove four rows. Wove them again, and unwove them again. And again. And again. And…

Every time I did these four rows, there were threads at regular intervals that were never being pulled into the weaving, and I couldn’t figure out why. I tried weaving them in different ways and only ended up with different threads that weren’t getting caught.

By this point, I was several messages into asking for help, which finally clicked this morning. Holy Toledo, Batman! But I finally have progress moving forward, and am well past those first four rows now, with the pattern forming beautifully…except for one thing.

I wanted the pattern to be subtle again, as in the previous copper and gold practice band, and I made my color choices with that in mind. However, I think I went a little too subtle, with the darker pattern strings being a bit too close in color. In the center of the band, the pattern is easily visible. Toward the outer edges, well, you have to work a little bit harder to see it. Still, all in all, I’m pretty pleased with how it’s going.

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Ants in the Pants

White Wolf yarn delivery, along with a long-awaited book from Amazon.

This is a phrase my mother used to describe me fairly often as a child when I couldn’t sit still, and it usually meant that I was excited about something (or I’d just been spanked for some infraction, and the derriere was too sore to sit still).

This is also a phrase that accurately describes my mindset right now. The yarn order from White Wolf and the Phoenix arrived today, when it wasn’t supposed to appear until Friday. Forty-five ounces of cotton, and two of silk, all slated for an inkle loom. I can hardly wait to use them, but I have two looms currently under warp with works in progress, so I’m trying to curb the impatience that has me wanting to cut those projects off, thus the antsy feeling.

Of course, even without those projects, I’m not ready to start a new one yet anyway. There is a process that must be followed when new yarn enters the studio. A protocol, if you will, especially when that yarn is a brand you’ve never used before, and it takes up a bit of time.

First, a large enough area for all of the yarn must be cleared on the desk. Then the yarn must be spread out on the surface to be admired and daydreamed over. Note must be taken of the color, the sheen, the texture of it all. Colors are then arranged by gradient to make them easier to find (they never stay that way), and then, finally, colors can be chosen according to what is in your mind’s eye to make.

What is in your imagination might even still be pretty nebulous. I’ve never woven a band with a purpose already in mind. Generally, I weave the band, finish it, roll it up neatly, stick a head pin in it to keep it rolled up, and put it away until a purpose presents itself, or one of my children sees it and lays claim to it. That last happens more than you’d believe. Bryony even claims work that has gone horribly wrong in my mind, that I’m about to throw out. She sees beauty in them anyway, because Mama made them. Somewhere in her room, there must be a box or something filled with scraps of tatting or weaving that I gave up on for one reason or another. The only way I can ever get rid of those scraps is to throw them out when she’s nowhere around.

So, I’m antsy without an outlet right now. Well, there’s one: it’s nearly dinnertime, and I need to get started on it. Hubby is off tonight, and he and Aneira have been wrapped up in American Horror Story on Netflix, which i categorically refuse to watch. Aneira loves horror. I hate it. With luck, they’ll sit down to watch that, and I’ll be able to escape to the studio!

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Variegated Weaving

Variegated thread vs. unmitigated black.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been bouncing from project to project because quarantine is playing merry hell with my ability to focus on any one thing for very long. So the other day, I decided to see how a variegated thread would look against a dark one in weaving on my inkle loom.

As I also mentioned previously, I’ve been working through Laverne Waddington‘s band weaving books. I’m still bouncing a bit, but it’s within the same medium, so it doesn’t really count, right? In working through the books, I’ve been doing one repeat of each of the motifs that catch my eye. See? Bouncing within the same medium, but with a purpose. I’m learning something.

I love variegated yarn. Pretty sure that’s yet another thing I’ve mentioned before. I am absolutely powerless against variegated yarn. I can’t quite visualize what I’m going to do with it when I see it, but I do look at it and think, “Ooooooo, pretty!!!” And like a magpie or a crow with shiny things, I have to have it, usually in an amount of at least five skeins, so I can do at least a throw with it. But that’s knitting yarn, and you can find dozens of colorways in variegated knitting yarn. I also have some unmercerized variegated cotton that I can weave with, but haven’t yet figured out how I want to use it, or how I can. (Or even if I want to. I’ve discovered I’m not a huge fan of unmercerized cotton.) With certain patterns, many of them in fact, I don’t feel as though a variegated yarn would work, unless it’s as background to the pattern itself. On the larger looms, I’m still working on the basics, never mind something like overshot or ikat. I’m not there yet. The inkle is a little more forgiving, especially since you’re working on a much smaller scale. Ruining an inkle warp is far from as painful as ruining a floor loom warp.

In this experiment, I picked up some #3 Lizbeth variegated tatting thread, putting it together with what I thought was the same size crochet cotton in black, with unmercerized weaving cotton in blue, for borders, in the same size.

Well, once I was warping the inkle, I quickly realized that what appears to be the same size thread looks very different under tension. The Lizbeth thread is a hair heavier than the other two threads, which are the same size. But since this was an experiment, I decided to continue it. And I love it. Even better yet, Laverne loved it when I posted it in Facebook’s inkle group. How cool is that??!!! It doesn’t get any better than the creator of the pattern you’re working with enjoying something you did with her pattern. That is a happy moment!

The inkle group has turned out to be quite dangerous as well, as nearly any fiber arts forum is, because we are nothing if not great enablers. Many people post their work, and you see a number of bands woven from these vibrant, popping yarns, and if you don’t ask, guaranteed, someone else does: “What yarn are you using?”

And nine times out of ten, if it’s an excessively vibrant yarn, the answer is going to be Lunatic Fringe Yarns Tubular Spectrum. Naturally, this meant I had to go look at the website and, having looked, had to place a small order. And believe you me, keeping myself down to ten mini-cones was hard. I haven’t got them yet, but, buddy, do I ever have plans for them!

Then came the deal from White Wolf and the Phoenix: order so many balls of yarn, get so much off the order. Well, had to do that too. Both these orders are slated for inkle weaving; I didn’t make any purchases big enough for the floor loom or even the big rigid heddle. And I’m giving some serious thought to trying my wools and acrylics on the inkle, too, as well as silk.

I’m keeping myself busy, for sure…I wish I could say I was dedicating a full day to housecleaning, but my soul is not that pure. I haven’t. The best I can say is that with four dogs all blowing their coat at the same time, I’ve been trying to keep the fur level down. And I spend time in the kitchen making meals. I supervise Bryony’s homeschooling journey from a distance, lest we kill each other. I did manage to get rid of three more moving boxes, and I cleaned out the truck, finally. Ye gods, did it need to be cleaned out. It wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, but it was worse than it should have been. It still needs to be vacuumed, but all garbage is gone. So I haven’t been utterly lazy, but I really do need to take a day away from what I want to do in order to accomplish what I should do. Fortunately, now that the girls are older, the worst of the household messes and clutter is confined to their bedrooms, which are their responsibilities, not mine!

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More Practice

What a warp for pebble weave should look like…

I started a new band today, meaning I started on the actual weaving part today. I’ve been working on the warping part for two days already.

Let me explain.

I wanted to try a patterned band with two close colors, in this case gold and a reddish-brown. I’ve seen fabrics done that way before. You can see the pattern that’s been woven in, but rather than popping out at you, it’s understated. If you’re standing thirty feet away, you might not notice the pattern, but as you get closer, it first starts to look like texture, then, closer still, and it resolves into a pattern that you can see. It strikes me as elegant that way; I don’t know why. But I wanted to try it.

The problem I had was that I didn’t want to do it on my inkle loom. I’ve been working my way up to wider and wider pebble weave bands…I had forgotten how much I love pickup weaving, and I’ve learned so much more about it since picking up the books I mentioned in the last post. So the width I was going to try was a good bit wider than what I had been doing before, and I knew the inkle pegs weren’t really long enough for it. It would take the warp, sure, but the threads would be running close to the edges of the pegs, and the second I had to advance the warp, I would have to contend with threads falling off, which I did not want to do. And Moya still has a warp on her, so that wasn’t an option either.

Work finally in progress

But my Big Wave didn’t have a warp on, and was more than capable of what I was planning, so I got started creating the warp. As I’ve been working in the living room, not the studio, in order to spend time with the family, I didn’t want to deal with the warping board. Not even the smaller one. My solution was to use the dragon inkle to create the warp. On the surface, great idea. In execution, not so much. For one thing, I warped it as an inkle, which means I didn’t have the warp cross, so when I took the warp off to put on the Wave, what I wound up with was a mess. I was still optimistic though. It wasn’t a huge warp, only 48 ends. I could fix this, right?

Uh…no. I could not.

After several hours of rather inventive cursing on my part, I called it quits. I was just going to have to use the smaller warping board and start over from scratch.

Having to throw out perfectly good yarn without ever even having used it makes me angry with myself. And maybe “perfectly good” is really the wrong way to think of it, because by the time I gave up on it, it was a snarled up mess. I cut it off the loom, very gently placed the loom on the hearth in front of the fireplace, very gently placed the inkle in the studio, very pointedly did not swear or hurl anything against the wall, and walked away till morning.

In the morning, I pulled out the small warping board and proceeded to create the warp properly, and then moved it to the Wave. Here’s where things became more adventurous: I had never warped the Wave for inkle weaving before, only for tablet weaving, wherein the heddles are the tablets, and where the warp doesn’t go straight from the front beam to the back, at least I don’t do it that way. For me, tablet weaving on the Wave involves the warp going from the back beam, over the castle, and down to the front beam. For inkle weaving, though, actual heddles are required, and they’re present on the loom, which carries two harnesses. Well, I also didn’t want to use both harnesses, since this wasn’t going to be a plain weave project. Most of pebble weave seems to involve a high amount of pickup weaving, or warp manipulation. Before each pick, I spend a minute using my hands to sort through the warp strings. This one comes up from the bottom shed, that one drops down, that one gets skipped…It’s a challenge!

I decided one harness was enough. 24 strings went through heddles, the rest went between the heddles. Hooray! Tied on and ready to go. I started weaving a couple of plain weave rows, and then realized I had done something wrong.

In pebble weave, with certain sheds, the shuttle should enter from the left, and with the second shed, you should be entering from the right. Somehow, I had it reversed, which might have actually worked for a left-handed weaver. And while I am left-handed, one thing you come to grips with as a lefty early on in life is that almost nothing is created with left hand instructions. As it happens, Laverne’s books do give an explanation for lefties, but I’ve gotten so used to following directions for right-handed people that sometimes, it’s easier for me to wrap my head around doing things that way than trying to do it in mine.

This was one of those times. For lefties, the pattern is read from right to left. For everyone else, left to right. And after years of reading left to right, for me, it’s impossible to read text normally, switch to reading right to left, and back again for more text. I could not do it. In the end, I adjusted my warp with popsicle sticks and finally got it right. This morning, I was finally able to get started!!

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Andean Pebble Weave

Working through different motifs in the book

As I mentioned last time, trying this new technique has helped my brain to focus more than it has been since the quarantine started. I haven’t been bouncing off the walls, mentally, nearly as much. So when I’m not crocheting or playing Animal Crossing, I’m working my way through Laverne Waddington’s book Andean Pebble Weave.

Laverne does her pebble weave on a backstrap loom, which makes it really portable. My house, currently, is not fit for backstrap, because I’d be sitting on the floor, and all four of my Arctic dogs are well into a summer coat blow. There is no escaping the fur, but sitting on the floor is just asking for trouble. Especially since the younger dogs take that as an invitation to jump all over me, which is not very conducive to weaving. So, I’m using my inkle loom. I have no idea if the way I have it set up is proper for pebble weave, but it seems to be working. As my dad always said, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I had started with the first project in the book using a very thin weaving cotton I’d bought several years ago. Long enough ago that I no longer have the tags that told me what brand or size it is, so it could be as long as nine years ago. Who knows? But though it was going well, I quickly cut the strap off. It was so tiny that I was having trouble with the weaving of it. I warped the loom again, with DMC satin floss, which you might remember from previous posts being used for tablet weaving. I doubled each warp thread and got to work. And though it can work, satin floss is very fiddly. It’s slippery, for obvious reasons. It might have worked better had I used some other material for the weft, like I did with the tablet weaving experiment, but my weft this time was also satin floss.

What is woven on the front, is woven on the back in the contrasting color

That warp went away too.

I went back to the original weaving cotton, and decided that to make it easier for me to see, I would simply double the warp threads again. Then I realized, the inkle loom I was using wasn’t wide enough to carry the warp comfortably. Every time I had to advance the warp, I’d have strings slipping off the sides.

I brought out the big guns: Moya, my beautiful first inkle loom from Northwest Looms. She’s nine years old now, and still as beautiful as ever, and more than capable of carrying this warp. What I didn’t count on was the fact that for the first time, I would have to remove her right side in order to put a warp on her. I’d always used those tiny skeins of embroidery floss on her before, so warping with both sides on made sense. It couldn’t be done that way with large cakes of yarn. Off came the side, and I got a warp on her while video chatting with an old friend.

Once I started weaving, I realized that, though it works almost perfectly, I’d forgotten one thing to make it perfect: I didn’t double up on the weft thread.

Oops.

With the weft thread being half the size of the warps, there’s less separation between picks, which means that the little dots, the “pebbles”, are all but impossible to see. Since they’re such a huge part of the pattern — it is called pebble weave, after all — it won’t be right until I double up that weft. For now, the warp remains, and I returned, once again, to the smaller inkle loom, which I proceeded to warp for a wider band. Although I didn’t double up warp threads this time, for some reason I seem to be managing better, even though the yarn is so thin.

The big guns: Moya. You can see that she’s bigger than the piano stool!

This is the slowest type of weaving for me, because almost every bit of it is warp manipulation. I am not fast with that, in part because the yarn is so thin and the lighting in my living room isn’t fantastic. It reminds me a lot of fingerweaving (yes, I do that, too), because you basically hold the warp in both hands and transfer the needed strings from one hand to the other, keeping some and dropping others. I’m sure other weavers are a good deal faster than I am. I don’t mind being slow with this. I kind of just…enjoy the journey, and watch the pattern appear. It’s fun. And I certainly have time right now!

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The Saga Continues, or: Quarantine Blues

Silk roving hanging off Anansi.

I did get that warp on the loom, finally, and made five placemats with it. They aren’t as perfect as I’d like, particularly as I forgot to count the picks, so was going by measuring only, but they’re not horrible. I also didn’t leave enough room between mats, which is another thing I’ll remember to do next time I have a large warp. So, I’m not going to put the photos up.

I’m now giving thought to what I want to do next. I want to get two warps going, one on my Flip, and one on the Mighty Wolf, and I also want to try out overshot weaving. So I’m doing some thinking about it. I’ve gotten the warp onto the Flip, but haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with the Mighty Wolf. In the meantime, I dragged out my book on crocheting socks. I’d wanted to try that out for a long time, so I decided to do it while in between weaving projects. I made two pairs, and was actually very happy with both of them. The second pair was yoga socks, so they have neither heel nor toe, and that actually made them a bit difficult to crochet, because one side of the heel begins with a long chain, and getting the chain to be loose enough is the problem. Mine are both a bit tight, though the second one is looser than the first. If I opt to make them again, I’ll need to make them looser still. But they were fun to make.

First pair of crocheted socks

I have silk spinning on Anansi. That’s what I’m doing as I try to figure out what to weave next. When I started this entry, coronavirus was not quite as prevalent as it is right now. Or maybe I should say, it wasn’t known in the US to be the threat we now know it to be. Now, all of the schools in North Carolina are closed for the next two weeks, and the children will be home, which means finding something to do is now a necessity!!!

I guess it’s a good thing I have so much yarn…I have a feeling I’m going to be using quite a bit of it!

Crocheted yoga socks

While the children are thrilled to be out of school, they’re also bored being confined to the house. Hubby has to work, which isn’t making things any easier. Because of my medical history, I’m immunocompromised, so I’m extremely reluctant to have company or be company nowadays. Social distancing is the new watchword. So Facebook sees a lot of me when I feel the need to be social now!

Besides spinning, I’ve been entertaining the kids by making slime, and of course there are the normal chores that need to be done every day. I was surprised at how much fun I had making slime. I’d never done it before, and the word “slime” does not exactly imply fun to me, but it was. We actually made two batches of normal slime, and one of fluffy. Two batches, we used a few drops of essential oils to scent them. My fluffy slime smells like cloves, which has good memories for me, but the kids don’t like the scent. C’est la vie!

When I began this post, I hadn’t finished spinning the silk, but it is now done and skeined. It isn’t my best effort, although, for not having used my wheel in three years, I think it’s pretty good. But the consistency is, in reality, pretty bad. In some places, it’s the thickness I wanted, but in most others it’s either too thick, or too thin, and when plying it, it broke a couple of times. All in all, while it could be worse, it could also be much better. In hindsight, I really shouldn’t have started with silk, although it’s one of my favorite fibers to spin. I have a tote absolutely full of different types of silk waiting to be spun. I also have a lot of much less expensive merino that I probably should have spun first. From a financial standpoint, it’s much more forgiving!

Spun, plied, and skeined silk

After skeining the silk on my niddy-noddy this evening, I went on a hunt through my totes to see what I could use for practice, and came across a bag that I’d forgotten about: a bunch of roving purchased from a well-known, foreign, online website. This bag was purchased roughly three years ago, and is full of tiny bags of roving. It is also the crappiest roving I’ve ever had the dubious pleasure of touching. Aneira is not a spinner, but she touched this stuff and one of the merino rovings I purchased from an LYS here, and she could feel the difference in quality. This stuff feels horrible in the hand. As in, you wouldn’t want anything you made from it close to your skin. But it is good for one thing: practice!!!

Sif investigating the really cheap roving!

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…And Trying to Get Back On

As you may have guessed, I am having a bit of trouble in that department. I did start a new warp. The sett on the thread I used this time was 12 ends per inch, which drastically reduced the number of ends I needed to create. This is awesome, as far as I am concerned. We’ve gone from 432 ends to 216. I am very happy with this. So it’s still five bouts, four of 50 strands, one of 16. Wonderful! …except I made two mistakes that I didn’t see till after the fact.

The first one was that I had gotten so used to following one path on the warping mill, I forgot I had moved the guide thread over by one peg, and wound one bout short. I, of course, did not see it until the bout was done. One of the 50 thread ones, of course. Life would have been so much easier had it been the 16 thread bout.

The second mistake came when I put the five bouts on the loom. Once again, a 50 thread bout…I lost the cross. The bout is a mess.

At this point, I rage quit. Temporarily. As in, I will return to this when I calm down. Probably once the children are back in school, and I have a bit more time.

We’ve celebrated our first Yule and Christmas here in North Carolina. We had a family over for Yule that is as pagan as I am, and for  Christmas it was just the four of us. And I’ve decided I’m going to stop with these huge dinners that I’ve hung onto all my life. We’re only four people. Aneira eats less than a sparrow does, the hubby eats only a tiny bit more as he doesn’t really care for either turkey or pernil, I don’t eat a lot as I’ve been in the kitchen all day and am sick of looking at food, and Bryony will pick over what’s on her plate and complain about nearly all of it except cranberry sauce. For Yule, we had gone simple: a huge vat of chili, to feed eight people.  It was perfect.

Why didn’t I do the same thing for Christmas? Well, based on my own self-psychoanalysis, I can only come to the conclusion that it’s my mother.

My entire life, right up until I had Aneira, my mother did Christmas, and she did it up big. A turkey and/or ham, a zillion sides, dessert, dining room table decorated with a nice centerpiece, and special dishes and silverware that were only seen during the holidays. Some of my best childhood and teenage memories are tied into those holiday meals, and I think they kind of act as my last link to my mom. But Mom has been gone for 13 years now, and I think it’s time that I realized that the holiday meals she cooked also included our extended family, where mine do not. I am hundreds of miles from my closest relative, and hubby has none left on his side. As much as I love seeing those meals hit the table for the memories they evoke, they’re largely a waste of food in the end, because the four of us are never going to finish that much food. So I’ve decided I’m not doing it anymore. Instead of a turkey, it’ll be a chicken with a couple of sides. Maybe I can find a small version of pernil, who knows?

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