Category: Projects

Getting distracted

Today some new reeds arrived for my new 24” rigid heddle loom.  Have I mentioned my new loom? Here it is, being put together a few weeks ago:

loom

An additional reed for my 16” loom also arrived.  With two looms empty my mind turned to getting the next projects on them, so I fished out my boxes with my “weaving” yarn in (I don’t think I’ve got a good criteria for it being weaving yarn – just that I think it’s more likely I’ll weave with it than anything else).

I played around with some colours together (I’m thinking cushions for the lounge) but wasn’t feeling inspired.  Then I spotted some “knitting” yarn in another box and my tricot hooks/needles (are they needles or hooks? nooks?  heedles?), and before I knew what was happening I was running up a quick sample (and liking it).

So, that’s one scarf in tricot from chunky eco wool in various subtle colours in the queue.  The weaving’s still on the starting blocks.

I’m also liking this Sherlock Hat in the latest edition of Knitty.

A finished object

Now here’s a rarity on here.  A finished object.  Well, at the moment it’s an almost finished object as I need to trim the fringe, but close enough!

Last night I did the last few picks, hemstitched and removed from the loom a shawl made from bamboo sock yarn.  Today I tided up some ends and washed/finished it.  This is the first proper project I’ve made on my 16” rigid heddle loom.  And as a first project here are some things I’ve learnt:

  • Don’t be too ambitious.  A first project should be quite short, a scarf or a cushion cover perhaps.  As a first project it’s likely that the gauge of the weaving will change (on this shawl there’s a noticeable difference in the number of picks I was working at the start of the piece and the number at the end).  I, however, ignored this advice (it’s in all the books) and put a warp on for a long shawl.  When I removed the shawl from the loom, I was shocked just how long it is.
  • Despite the fact that weaving is fairly quick, I can still take well over a year to finish a piece.
  • I should place markers as I go, so I know how long the piece is and can make a sensible decision on when to start the end border design (if that’s what I’m doing).  In the end I sort of guessed at how much was still on the back roller (knowing the length of the paper wound onto the roller helped a bit here).
  • Placing paper into the front roller (as the finished weaving is wound on) really improves the tension and makes subsequent weaving easier.  However, once the weaving is finished (i.e. washed), there’s no noticeable difference – but it does look better on the loom.
  • Sampling is a good idea.  If I’d sampled the pattern I was planning, I may have chosen to work the leno in a different way (there are some very long threads in the leno section that are quite likely to catch).
  • A dessert spoon is just the right weight to use when repairing a broken warp end.  It’s also the perfect shape!
  • Make better notes.  In fact make much, much better notes and also take lots of photos, just in case.  Here are my notes, written in my weaving book (yes, that’s really all I wrote down):

shawl notes

  • Some things I should have written down:
    1. Length of warp
    2. How many ends of warp
    3. The DPI of the reed/heddle
    4. Notes on the yarns (including composition and washing instructions – keeping the ball band would do)
    5. Which yarn I’d used for the hemstitching (e.g. warp or weft)
    6. Both the number of picks and ends that the hemstitching is over (a photo would also be helpful here)
    7. How long the section of weaving was before the first leno section (at least I’d noted the number of picks)
    8. Kept a photo of the leno work (and printed it out for easy reference).

I’m sure there are other things I have learnt and more things I should have written down, I may add to the list later.

In the meantime I bet you’d like to see a picture of my shawl?  Well, as soon as I’ve finished the ends, found some sunshine (hmmm, it’s 4 days to the shortest day of the year…) and made a decision on whether to drape the shawl gracefully over a chair or model it myself (which will require finding a photographer) I’ll post up a photo…

Spindle spun Blue-Faced Leicester

Firstly a quick update.  In my last post I mentioned that my phone was languishing in a bag of rice.  I don’t know if it made a difference, but my phone survived. Hurray!  Here’s the stash:

stash

Now, onto the Blue-faced-Leicester.  I dyed the tops at the start of this year.  You can see me starting to spin it in January.  So, after months and months of spindle spinning (not constant spinning, only occasional spinning) I’ve plied together two spindles worth and have a lovely skein of yarn.

The singles:

singles

I made a box lazy-kate.  It’s “designed” to take the spindle or knitting needles (I slid the first spun cob onto a knitting needle).  The spindle occasionally fell out as the cob was unwound, but the knitting needle worked brilliantly.  I’m keeping my free lazy-kate for future plying projects.

kate

I plied over a couple of evenings on my Dryad wheel.  The second cob had a lot more yarn (by length, not necessarily by weight) so I finished off by Andean plying (I didn’t get into too much of a tangle and at one point discovered that the bed-knob at the bottom of the bed was a great holder for the resulting bracelets of yarn).

wheel

Sadly, it’s November.  It gets vaguely lighter at about 8am and is dark again by about 4pm.  The last few days have been ones where the lights have stayed on all day in the house.  Even at noon.  So in the end I bowed to the inevitable, and photographed the final skein in the warm glow of artificial light:

skein

I may be a little quiet for a week or two – as paid work will take priority. If I do post tell me to stop procrastinating and get on with my proper job Smile.  I’ll be back soon…

A new wheel

Today my new wheel arrived and was promptly whisked out to a craft group meet-up.  I took her to bits, gave her a polish, put her back together again and put on a new drive band. 

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I then wondered what to spin on her.

I fished out of my stash some white, grey and “black” Shetland tops took a length of each and thought about a marled yarn.  Then Secret Spinner walked past and said that she was planning a gradient yarn with her Shetland.  What could I do?  I decided on a quick spin of a small amount of gradient yarn.

I put the tops into groups working from white to black.  For the transitions between white and grey, then grey and black I held the two adjacent tops together and drafted them together.  This produced a marled rather than carefully blended single.  If I was going to do this on a larger project I would go to the effort of blending the transition colours together before spinning.

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This evening, once I’d got the wheel set up at home, I checked the assembly instructions (they can be found on Ravelry).  I discovered that there are two bobbins for spinning singles and one bobbin for plying!  I checked my bobbins and found that two have a whorl that is slightly larger than the remaining bobbin’s whorl, so assumed that the odd-one-out is the plying bobbin.

I’m planning on Navaho plying my blue BFL.  But I don’t want to learn on that project.  So this gradient spun Shetland was the ideal candidate for practicing on.  I got in a tangle a few times (I think leaving the singles to set for a day or two would make things much easier).  However, I ended up with a beautifully balanced skein:

skein

It’s now soaking to set the twist.  What shall I knit?  A winter hat, a beret, a small scarf or a Mobius cowl?  It’s not a huge skein, but I should be able to get something useful from it.

As for my new wheel?  She is a delight to spin on.  I’m about to upgrade the flyer on my Traditional to a lace flyer, so the Haldane Lewis will fill that gap and provide me with a lovely wheel for spinning 4-ply to DK thickness yarn.

Learning skills

I’m continuing to weave the bamboo sock-yarn stole.  I’m feeling like it’s taking forever at the moment, but I’ve just had a careful look at the back roller, and there are just two sheets of paper still on there, and I’ve taken three sheets out, so I’m more than half way there!  There’s little point in posting another picture of progress though – as it basically looks the same as the last one!

In the process of weaving over the last couple of days I’ve had to solve a couple of problems:

The first problem was a knot in my warp.  I hadn’t noticed it as I was warping up the loom, but as I worked this knot became visible.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  Should the knot be left in the work, should I attempt to fix it, or should I fix the end after completing the weaving?  In the end the weaving told me what to do: fix the end as it has now broken!

I fixed it using a temporary weighted warp end – as per the instructions in Anne Field’s book.  She suggested a table fork as a weight – I grabbed a dessert spoon and found that worked very well (and comes in a very convenient shape for tying to a length of yarn).

The second problem related to the winding on of the finished work onto the front beam.  I’ve found that the design of the loom (with plastic rods holding the front apron bar to the front beam) and the slight differences in the width of my weaving as I work; mean that I’m getting different tensions on the warp ends as I wind the work onto the front roller (with a noticeable difference in the ends at the salvage).  I’m not sure how much difference this really makes, but I found a simple solution.  I used the paper that had just come off the back roller and rolled it in with the work as I wound onto the front roller!  For my next project I’ll make sure I’ve got an extra sheet of paper to do this for the initial winding on.  At the moment it’s making the work look much neater so I’ll see what difference it makes as weaving progresses.

And all this problem solving?  It’s developing my weaving skills and moving me beyond being a beginner weaver!

Finishing yarn

Saturday was spent in good creative company, where I treadled and counted and plied up all of this:

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The orange is spindle spun and is noticeably finer than the pink and purple which was spun longdraw on my Ashford traditional.  These yarns were from Shetland tops dyed by me using food colour.

I love the transformation process from fibre to finished yarn.  My singles had been sitting for a long time before being plied, which meant that the twist had “set”.  This means that the singles were not too active (uncontrollably twisty) when plying.  However, if you want to test the freshly plied yarn is balanced, then it’ll kink back on itself even if it’s perfect!

The trick is to either make a sample at the time of spinning the singles, or take a length of the set singles, fold it back, tie a knot then soak the sample in water to reset the twist.  Usually, however, I’m afraid I just look at the plying and guess.  If I’ve guessed incorrectly, I can always put the yarn through the wheel again, either adding or subtracting twist as necessary.

After winding the yarn into skeins and adding ties, the skeins scrunched up into an uncontrollable mess!  Fear not.  A soak in cool water to thoroughly wet the yarn, remove from the water and squeeze out the excess, and there you have it – a beautifully balanced skein (or three)!

For my fellow crafters, who saw my innovative Lazy Kate from knitting needles, for the spindle cobs:  In future I will be adding a wrap of paper round the spindle before I start spinning.  This will aid the sliding of yarn from the spindle to the knitting needle and prevent the catching of yarn on the wrong side of the needle which does make unwinding the wraps near the centre more tricky!

Finishing Things

I currently have a quite large selection of unfinished projects (the ones I can recall are):

  • a woven shawl with overshot pattern.
  • a pair of brightly coloured socks – I’m knitting these simultaneously but they are still stalled half way through the feet.
  • a green jumper for my husband to my own design.
  • a pi are square shawl in very chunky yarn.

I realised, as I worked towards the finishing line on my daughter’s knitted dress, that I often stop working on projects when they are very close to completion.  The woven shawl, for example, is stopped half way through the second band of patterning (there is a wide band at each end of the shawl).  I probably only have another 6 inches to work and it’ll be off the loom.  So why have I stopped?

I realised that somewhere near the end of a project, I start to doubt that it’ll be as good as I imagined it at the start.  So, instead of facing disappointment, I simply stop working on that project and move onto the next one.  This is daft, because when I do finish things I’m usually delighted at the result.  If I’m not delighted then the item can usually be modified or embellished or given away (if it’s a poor fit for the original intended recipient).

Anyway, I was motivated to finish my daughter’s dress because:

  1. If I didn’t finish it quickly it would be too small.
  2. It’s a one ball project – so I wanted to use up as much of the yarn as possible.
  3. I wanted to see what the wavy pattern would look like once it had been blocked.

cropped_toocropped