kitten hiatus

i found a bag of kittens on my doorstep and my life is in total chaos. i will return to this blog when i can grab some shred of stability again. unraveling strings everywhere...

undulating twill

I have been working on an undulating twill pattern on my little 4 harness glimakra table loom. The warp is 20/2 pearl cotton in yellow and the weft is one 20/2 mercerized cotton in a dark almost black purple and one thread of 60/2 silk in a brighter, lighter purple. The tension is off one one side, or so it seems, so that the left selvedge shifts around as it goes over the front beam. It doesnt appear to have done that in the sampler but I only had about 4 inches in this same weft. My teacher told me to maybe put a cloth behind it as it goes over the beam, but I havent tried it yet. She said that is why she stays away from things like undulating twills, because they have to go over so many threads at once and they destabilize the cloth, especially by having many consecutive threads on the same shaft. It makes sense, and both yarns are slippery, but I want to make this work. It makes me get very nervous that it isn't perfect, and I almost want to stop, but the only way to get better is to just keep weaving. At least it will help me get my beat better. I'm honestly embarassed, this thread combination shows EVERY inconsistency. The upside is that it is very irridescent and the design features a psychedelic eye and star at different intervals, and those things together might coverup the imperfections in the final product.
The other upside is that this is the first piece I have made on my own where I tried a new threading, altered mathematically to suit my needs, wound a flawless warp of a finer than usual thread, made a bunch of new heddles and put them on this table loom, made a lengthy sampler of several different wefts and washed and dryed it before starting on the final product. Though it may not be the finest cloth in all the land, I learned a lot making it and...
listen to me,
this cloth is only 16 inches long so far. Why not finish it before I start referring to the experience of making it in the past tense!? I am a dramatic soul. It doesnt help to stare at undulating twills either. Im just figuring out how you can alter the way the round eye part of the pattern looks by changing which shaft you make your reverse at. Weaving makes me feel so good because I can follow a pattern really deep and then I start to see it opening up inside of me and I can see where it comes from and what its permutations are. Wheeeeeee.......Im looking forward to designing a draft of straight and undulating twills with a different warp color for each in the same cloth and treadling a straight twill with a weft color as the same as the straight twill warp. I think that will really make the undulating twill pop. Then you would get just some vertical stripes of the iridescent.
But first, Im going to do a plain weave. Nice, simple, good ol wool plain weave.

after the fact and pictures:
i only made samples with this and now re-looking at them i see where if i was being more consistent with my beat, and just an overall better weaver, I could still use this pattern and get something good. I made two small wall pieces, not even a foot each for my mom and a friend using a wool as a weft, which made the slipping much, much better.
Here are two pictures of the sample with purple mercerized cotton/purple silk weft.

You can see in the image on the right how the selvedges were slipping. It is a really cool design though!

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA HANDWEAVER'S CONFERENCE

I learned a lot this weekend at the annual nchc, held in santa clara. I didn't go to any workshops or classes (though I would have loved to), but I learned a lot about myself and the deep, dark pit of emptiness lurking inside me that needs to be satiated. Previously I had thought this void only could find temporary filling through drugs and sex, alcohol on a hard day and yoga on a good one, but now, I see, as my lungs get lined with microfibers, yarn will suffice.
Something happened to me at the conference that I have experienced before only in college, while at a precipice of shirking, or as an adult after a bender on the morning before work. I was standing alone, yet amidst many people, giggling in a high-pitch, nearly shrieking, while I considered spending every last penny of my savings, quitting my job and escaping to Mexico. I have always thought myself immune to over-spending. In my family it is a joke that although we are susceptible to nearly every other vice, we're not gamblers, and we're not shoppers. I have not bought clothes for myself in years. My mother has to drag me, a grown woman, to the clothing store once a year so I can be outfitted in more than rags and items I've found in the free box. I see my peers, young women in stylish threads - clothes that fit without ropes for belts, entire outfits without even one hole(!), "charming" dresses, shirts that their moms did not send them in a box after a sale at tj maxx (thanks mom!!! still got 'em all!) Those women buy their own clothes. They spend their money on them. They look nice. BUT I WILL HAVE YARN.

AND YARN I NOW HAVE. I'm not exactly sure what the repercussions of this spending vortex will be for me financially. My hope is that if I just keep working, a little wrinkle in time will open where it won't affect me in the long run. The repercussions in the world of my weaving are that I now have a stacked studio, with choices of bamboo, fine worsted wool, mercerized and unmercerized cotton, fat rug wool and the finest of fine silks and merino wool available to me for making 24/7. I have not really slept in days.

Perhaps because it scared me - the near out-of-control-ness I felt in that giant convention center room, dizzy from recycled air and lack of natural light, the din of all those women chit-chatting about warps and wefts. But maybe it was a weaver crone's parting shot as I made my final purchase, good goddess, nearing hundreds of dollars over what was supposed to be my final purchase..."IM SET NOW!", I exclaimed to her, as if I had to justify my purchases to the vendor selling them to me, "I AM TOTALLY STOCKED! I HAVE EVERYTHING I NEED!", my eyes rolling wildly, my smile stretching my jaw. "Ya hear that?", she said to a sister spinning nearby, "This new weaver said that she's set! She's got everything she needs!" And with that they both took to cackling loudly. "For now!", they both howled, as I quick grabbed another skein of 60/2 hand-dyed silk before she reached the final total.

All in all, the conference was a total success. Next year I'm going to enter some work into the juried competetion and sign up for one class. Highlights for me were the inspiring woven yardage in the gallery, especially the hand-dyed spot-lace silk "Sunset", the sweet dowey eyes of the alpacas (sweeter than any eye I have ever seen on any beast), getting to ride with my teacher, Maj-Britt Mobrand, who I relish spending time with, and of course, all the yarn.

brand new weavin blog

Oh Hello! I am so excited about this new blog that I think I will even use correct capitalization! I learned how to weave in 2003 and have been weaving off and on ever since, with intensity since 2007. I have woven on several types of looms and love it all. I'm not exactly sure what captures me most about this craft, but some of the words that come to mind are mathematical, womanliness and psychedelic. I enjoy repetition, ritual, symbols, color, and story-telling, and especially when they come together to make meaning, or as it's often called, art. I am so grateful to all of my teachers and weaving peers who have been inspiring and industrious women, each of them, and to the two exemplary men among them! Ive never met a weaver who didn't have some curious warp about them, and a sense of humor to match. I am excited to expand my circle of weavers as I enter the world of weaving online and with it, the world of insomnia. Though I have done several weaving projects, I am going to start at the present, and begin cataloging my work as it is now. I could spend the rest of my life rehashing the past and putting off my current projects, but I want to make this an active, up-to-date resource. My intention is to create a little space in which you might gleam a pick of inspiration, take a satisfying eye-bath in some color pools, commiserate with a fellow craftsperson, or, if you are my mother, read, "Hi Mom!" Thank you for reading. I hope that this space will grow as I do in my craft.