Warping Day

I have been busy warping the Mirrix Looms with projects for some demonstrations.  First my new Mini Mirrix, won and in the Ott Light/ Mirrix Facebook contest and received yesterday.  I have done a no warp ends with beads project.

Next the Lani , with the third Affinity bracelet, 2 cut and crystal beads with hand painted silk warp.

Finally, a picture of the Little Guy.  I know only the header is woven but hopefully this will grow up to be tapestry bead trim for a multi-technique handbag I am designing.  Check out the easel box with drawer.  I think this will be really handy for doing demonstrations where the table height may not be just right because the easel opens down as well as up and will easily fit the Big Sister on down in size plus a bonus drawer for supplies.  I have seen these at Fine Fiber Press in their Tapestry supplies section but I just happen to have an easel or two already.

Now I just need to put the fleece sampler on the Big Sister and I will be completely warped!

Finished Tapestry, Riverside

The tapestry landscape is finished, well the weaving is done but I have some details in the finishing.  It measures 5 1/4 inches by 7 7/8 inches on the loom, set at 10 ends per inch with wefts of wool ,cotton, silk, linen, rayon and metallic threads. It was woven on the Little Guy Mirrix Loom and has a mixture of handspun and commercial yarns.  The cartoon was painted on the Brushes painting App for iPad.  There is an earlier post on Brushes if you missed it.

Extreme Warp Makeover

Tulsa Handweavers had a fabulous workshop presented by Robyn Spady this past weekend.  Nineteen participants were given the choice of three threadings based on Lace, Overshot or Rosepath Twill and then guided through a tremendous range of possibilities based on many different patterns and structures.  Here is a copy of the Handouts Robyn gave which will be a very helpful reference and her own samples based on the threading choices.

After Robyn's first presentation on Friday evening and a wonderful catered dinner we got right to work.

Saturday morning many happy weavers were back for a full day of weaving , excellent instruction from Robyn and wonderful food with breakfast items provided by the guild and lunch provided by the participants.

During a brief business meeting after lunch on Saturday the guild presented Robyn with an elegant silk shawl in Swedish Snowflake pattern woven by Ruth Morrisson. We seriously appreciate our workshop instructors!  Here she is modeling it for us.

Some weaving consultations  and concentrated work on our samplers followed in the afternoon .

Saturday evening we had a pizza party thrown by Ruth where there some socializing, impromptu singing and some of us even managed to get in a little more weaving.  Sunday morning we were back at our looms after Robyn's morning presentation and then after lunch she gave a wonderful bonus seminar on her creative fiber jewelry making ideas from the leftover bits and pieces of fibers and weaving samples.  A great time was had by all.

Here is Wimsey with my weaving in progress on Sunday afternoon.  I will have to follow up with my finished sampler as I still have a couple of variations to weave and some finishing to do.

Another successful workshop and a memorable experience for all of those involved!

Recent Weaving

This is a project full of interesting fibers, textures and techniques.  The idea was in an older book from our  Tulsa Handweavers Guild library, Weave a Weave by Malin Selander.  It is no longer in print but I do see it offered on Ebay from time to time and I was able to get a copy from a used book source.  It is full of interesting projects, and this one is based on a transparency with an inlay technique called "Ryss" weave.  I suppose what attracted me to it was the bold areas of color and the fact that it called for tapestry wool which I happen to have in abundance.  I have taken the pictures on the table as a runner but it would also work as a wall hanging.

The warp for these pieces has 4 different linen threads, unbleached linen 16/1 and 16/2, and unbleached tow linen 6/1 and 8/1 which gives the warp textural interest.  The sett is fairly open at 12 threads per inch which allows for the transparent feeling where the warp shows.  The wefts are one strand of tapestry wool (I used my handspun singles and plied) with one strand of 16/2 linen in a contrasting color.  There is also some metallic thread in the wefts and the 16/1 is used like a tabby between inlay picks to hold it all together.  I did the cool one first and also include a detail picture.

Next I wove a warm version of the same idea just laying in the areas of color as I went and improvising the layout.  I really enjoyed the visual effect of the combination of textures provided by the wool and linen combinations.

As a result of my newfound interest in transparencies my friend Lynn Tedder gifted me with a book from her library,  Sheer Delight- Handwoven Transparencies by Doramay Keasbey.  It is a lovely inspirational book and now it is my ambition to try a pictorial handwoven transparency. At this time I have only made a few sketches but I look forward to giving it a try.

Here is one last detail showing the yarns a little better and the metallic thread picks.

Fleece to Fiber Notes, Spinning for Tapestry Part 1

I have joined a fleece to fiber club through the Spinning Loft and the club is currently full but the idea is that we will receive 4 ounces each of two types of raw fleece each month starting in April.  With all the pots I have boiling at the moment I am not exactly sure why I thought this was a good idea but I suspect that is related to one of my favorite books of the past year, the Fleece and Fiber Sourcebook by Deborah Robson and Carol Ekarius.  I have been a spinner for about twenty-five or so years now and love to experiment with different kinds of fibers and it was a natural inclination when I started weaving tapestry to experiment with spinning my own tapestry yarns. Anything I write here though is a result of my own experiments and study and not meant to be complete or definitive in any way.

For this months samples we have received Wensleydale and Romney.  The raw fleece is lovely and even though I have had them since the first of the month I am just getting around to washing them today.  Here is a picture of the raw Romney.

In between 20 minute soaks I am writing this and taking pictures as I go.  Since I am up to my neck in tapestry weaving right now I decided to tie this club work in with my spinning for tapestry weft experiments because it seemed like the best way to get something done.  Both of these samples are from the Long Wool group and should make good tapestry yarn.  The basic idea is to try different fiber prep techniques and types of yarn,as well as different ways to use them like knitting, weaving  or embroidery- make samples and record them in a notebook.  It occurs to me that I could make a tapestry sampler that includes all of the yarn samples from the club as well as some of my own samples.  I know that not all the samples from the club will be optimal for tapestry yarn and some my not be suited at all but in the interest of experimentation and to end up with a complete reference tool I plan to sample all the fleeces from the club in this tapestry.  I will probably put this project on the Big Sister Mirrix loom even though I will have it tied up for many months in this way.  Can you ever have enough looms?  Here is the clean Romney.

Of the two samples this month I have worked with Romney quite a bit.  It is already a favorite of mine for tapestry weft.  I have not had much experience with the Wensleydale so I am hoping to find a new favorite here with some unique characteristics.  I decided to divide the Wensleydale into two different wash bags because there were two fairly distinct types of fiber in the sample.  One is shorter, finer and curlier and the other is longer, coarser and more wavy than curly.  A picture below with the two types separated .

I did two washing soaks of twenty minutes with Unicorn Power Scour and two rinsing soaks of twenty minutes and fifteen minutes.  Finally I did a five minute soak with some of the Unicorn Fiber Rinse added.  The water temperature for all was the hottest my tap would provide.  The Power Scour came with the club shipment and I have not used it before.  It did a good job.  The Fiber Rinse was a sample I had and this seemed like a good time to use it. Here is the Wensleydale after cleaning.

After the wash and rinse I spun them in a salad spinner to get out as much moisture as possible and then laid them out to dry on a screen drying rack.

Once the fleece is dry I plan to try a few different preps like flick carding, and combing and then try some worsted, semi worsted, and woolen spinning styles depending on the fleece.  I will make some plied samples but for the most part I spin a fingering to lace weight singles for tapestry wefts to make blending color and accommodating different sett formats easier.  I will write more about that later.  A list of my favorite fleeces for tapestry yarns at the present time follows, but who knows what I might discover this year.  If you have a favorite not on the list  I would love to hear about it in the comments.

Cotswald
Romney
Navaho Churro
Blue Faced Leicester.

Progress!

I am working on the  "Riverside" tapestry on my Little Guy Loom, 8 inches wide at 10 epi and I am just about to run aground!  It will have wool, cotton, silk, rayon, linen and lurex weft threads and hoping to have it finished soon.  I live close to the Arkansas river and I often walk my dog Laddie on the trails there so I have spent a lot of time observing and sketching the river.  It is as close to the ocean as I can get in Oklahoma and I have always been fascinated by the play of light on water.

Today is the day to finish the warp on Wimsey for the workshop which is coming up the first weekend in May.  I have been waiting on more 10/2 pearl cotton in color 48 Deep Turquoise.  I thought I was being thrifty by using one I already had but it ran out about an inch before the warp was done and for some reason that color was backordered at all of my normal sources.  I ended up getting it from Camilla Valley Farm.  I really like that color so no harm done and I have plenty now.

I have done a few sketches and barely started weaving on the LeClerc Gobelin Loom also known as Collette.  There is not enough weaving for a picture yet but I am sharing one of the rough sketches.  I want to weave this without a cartoon behind but a sketch or two seemed like a good idea to organize my thoughts.  Since I am starting in the middle of April I decided to just begin with some general spring weaving and then maybe I can catch up to the daily calendar idea by June.

Tapestry Bobbins

Several years ago when I began to get interested in tapestry weaving I started with using butterflies to organize my weft threads for carrying through the warp.  It is convenient and works pretty well and I was also influenced by the Nancy Harvey books and videos I was learning from.

There are some advantages to using bobbins though as I started to learn as I did more tapestry weaving.  They help keep the thread neatly organized  and this is particularly helpful in working with the handspun singles that I often use.  Also the slight weight of the bobbin can make moving them through the warp threads more fluid and efficient.

At the time I had entered a Long Distance Learning program through the American Tapestry Alliance with Janie Hoffman and even though I was unable to finish it do to some family emergencies at the time I am so grateful for the interest and advice she gave me.  You can see her art work here: www.artistsregister.com/artists/AZ104 .  One of the things she introduced me to was using plastic netting shuttles as tapestry bobbins.

There are many advantages to working with netting shuttles, they are cheap, light weight, come in many sizes from about five inches to thirteen inches long, it is also easy to wind threads on them and the threads stay put when you do. For the handspun they really help to tame those singles and keep them neat.  Their light weight is an advantage if, like me, you tend to have a large number of bobbins going at once and you like to take projects with you.  I have been very happy with them.  You can see them in many of the photos of work in progress on this blog.

One disadvantage is that you can not use them to pack the weft threads as you weave.  For that I usually hold an awl in my hand and use it to pack as I go, in fact I hardly ever put it down when I am working.  You can see the awls above with the netting shuttles that I use most often.  After every few passes I may also take a beater or comb and pack the wefts down again.  See some of the beaters I use pictured below.

After viewing the Archie Brennan and Susan Maffei set of DVDs I am becoming increasingly interested in the brass tipped wood tapestry bobbins that Archie is using in the tapes.  The big advantage with them is that you can hold one tool that will take the wefts through the warp as well as beat them down.  One tool. That sounds pretty good and in the tapes it looks seamless and fluent and I would like to try it. Of course that is due to the expertise of Archie Brennan I suspect.  I have found many sources for these bobbins online and have ordered a few.  I will have to follow up on how they work for me because I don't have them yet.  I did find a wonderful source, John and Joy Moss- wood turners, that make this type of bobbin in several different sizes.  This seems important to me because the size of the bobbin needs to relate to the spacing of the warp threads, the size format you are using and the grist of the weft threads being used.  You can have a look at these bobbins here:  www.johnandjoymosswoodturners.com/tapestrybobbins-wood-brass

I suspect that I will like them and start using them at least in part but I don't think I will want to give up my netting shuttles especially for work on the go and I will probably always just pull out a length of thread and start weaving for the tight spots and small pieces that I do.