Category: weaving

And now for something completely different!

I had been reading about wool and about felting, and thought that I would like to see if I could make some nice-looking felt.

This experiment was just that – an experiment. I made a pattern with two colors, in the small. My goal was to see how the patterns came out when felted, to see how much shrinkage there was, and to get a feel for the whole thing.

I sort of have a plan to make a sturdy bag, but before I go that far I just want to see about shrinkage, predictability of pattern, etc.

I was careful to choose untreated 100% wool. In this case, a wool and alpaca blend, but it was right for felting. More expensive than my first few experiments due to all natural.

Here’s the yarn:

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The weaving, according to what I had read, needed to be very loose. I only used approximately every other dent in the heddle – you will see that the warp is widely spaced. And, I did not really beat the weft at all, just slid it to attempt to equal the warp spacing in the weft.

Here are a couple of pics of the piece before getting it wet:

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The long gaps were, I thought, to give a gap between 4 sample pieces.

I tried washing the piece in warm water in the sink, being gentle as the weft endings, not really being beat close, were prone to coming loose. In the future I need to do something about that. Washing that gentle way had no visible effect on the piece, so I bit the bullet and put the piece in the washing machine, on a regular cycle, with a few towels so it wouldn’t feel lonely. That did produce a result!

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Felt! But it was all scrunched up, and it took a lot of heavy fingering work to get it remotely smoothed out into something that could be cut. Then I simply used scissors and cut out the 4 squares that were my pattern attempts. What had started as 6″ by 6″ loose pieces turned into 4″ by 4″, maybe 3″ by 3″ pieces, that were not that well-formed. I had to work them into shape.

Anyway, the final result was 4 coasters, 100% wool/alpaca, and some interesting patterns:

I am not sure where I am going with this. It was interesting, it was an experiment, but for me, there seemed to be too many places where I was not in control of the process, and just hopeful. I would like to create things on my loom for which I have a strong prediction of how they are going to turn out.

It is likely that I have much more experimentation to do with felting if I want to become proficient in that craft. But I also have a yen for some other weaving forms. I think I am going to make a nice wool/alpaca scarf (Terry’s idea) with what’s left of the yarn, since it is really nice yarn. And of course warn whoever gets it that it is 100% wool, and so washing it should be done with extreme care.

This one was a piece that I made specifically for my mom. She saw the first scarf I made on my loom, and wanted it. I didn’t want to give her something I thought had too many defects in it, but ultimately I gave it to her.

She already had the original lavender semi-scarf that I made in class, with many flaws, and a size a bit too small to be truly useful.

In the meanwhile, I told her that we could go choose some yarn and I would make a scarf for her. So we went, and chose some yarn. At first she chose the exact same color as the lavender scarf. Odd. We compromised – something at least a little different, and with two colors.

Back home I set to work, copying the work I did for the blue scarf in “Weaving 002”, and trying to make better edges, etc. I basically repeated the patterns I used in the 002, but with only 2 colors this time.

There was nothing really new or unusual in this scarf, just a repeat, and a chance to get more experience and more feel for weaving. I think I did a bit better on this scarf than on 002, but I still have such a long way to go before anything feels natural.

Here are pics of the yarn, some progress, and some of the finished product.

Yarn:

Loom prep:

Drying:

A note: Since this was 100% acrylic, there was no noticeable shrinkage, and also much less forgiving behavior for the edges. The scarf, though, turned out fine, and felt very nice. Lighter than 002, so usable in less chilly situations.

Various attempts to capture the real color:

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All and all, a success. And now my mom has three scarves! Ha.

I have learned a little bit, and now I have some tips to use for color changes, edging, beginnings and endings, and other things. The next scarf will be better. I am not seeking a “next scarf” just yet, as I want to experiment with something else.

And, although I like to please my mom, I did not get as much pleasure out of producing an artifact that was at least partly somebody else’s choice. I realize that weaving something for somebody, especially if you do it well enough (or people are over-kind enough), can lead to more weaving of something for somebody. That’s not what I started weaving to do. Fine for my mom, a bit, but I am going to avoid the “make a gift” craft that this could become. I want to be more free than that.

I put together my new loom – very exciting! I actually botched a part of the assembly, and had to recover by using a power screwdriver and forcing a screw into its spot. My lesson: Haste, even haste due to enthusiasm, does not always result in speed of accomplishment. The loom, however, is none the worse for my error, and nobody except Terry knows about it.

On advice from various internet forums and from the folks at The Fiber Factory, I chose a Kromski Harp 24″ Rigid Heddle Loom. I also bought the stand for it – I don’t have a convenient stable table to use as a lean-to for the loom, and I like the idea of a self-supporting loom.

Here’s a not-great-lighting picture of the assembled loom in my “weaving room”:

I know that my Eames wire chair doesn’t go well with the loom, but both the loom and the chair are beautiful and functional in their own ways, and the chair is now a comfortable old friend. I hope that the loom becomes a comfortable old friend as well.

The loom comes with an 8-dent heddle, so my intent is to use that heddle for a while, and refrain from any loom embellishments until I get some experience and perhaps form a better opinion of what I really want to do. The 8-dent heddle, same as in the loom in the classroom, means that I already know the approximate style of yarn that I will work with for awhile.

My goal for a first project on this loom was simple: I wanted to reproduce the positive experience I had in class, on my own loom. I wanted to make a full-sized scarf, relatively simply, to see that I knew how to do all the activities necessary, and to see how it felt to work at home, mostly alone. And I wanted to do something with more than one color.

My artistic and tactful daughter Emma helped me pick some yarn for this project. The (I think good) results are a testament to her gently guiding me away from some odd choices, towards some cooperating colors.

Here is the yarn I chose: Blue for the bulk of the scarf, with a red stripe, and some yellow and light blue accents. Red and yellow cross-stripes to experiment with some patterns.

There is one yarn sticker missing from that photo – I forget which one.

I took some pictures along the way. I tried to do good clean work, and along the way learned a little bit on how to make the edges (selvedges?) better. So the beginning of this project, edge-wise, is not as good as the ending.

Here are some progress pics:

Warping and winding, preparing for weaving:

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The first set of cross-color weaving, thick areas:

When done, I washed it gently. It is 75% acrylic, 25% wool, so I expected some shrinkage and was hoping that the shrinkage would mask some of my early edging errors. Result? Some masking, and some still-visible errors. But I will learn to not call attention to the errors when showing a piece to somebody, unless that somebody is a weaving instructor. 🙂

Drying:

And a few pics of the finished product. I think it turned out well for my first project on my own loom. As you will read later, this scarf ended up in Florida, in my mom’s “collection”.

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Not the best pictures, but I hope you get the gist of it. It feels good to hold. That’s a bonus to me – I made something that I like to hold and to drape around my neck. Cool!

This was my first project. I started it, and completed most of it, in a class. My goal for this project was simple: To learn the basics about weaving, and to be successful in a minor weaving effort. I also wanted to see if weaving was interesting to me – if I felt, after this first exercise, like continuing.

I had read some books about weaving. I also had been to the Fiber Factory in Mesa, Arizona, and I talked with a very helpful woman there. I will mention her name in later posts, and thank her, once I remember to learn it. That’s a habit that I am not proud of.

She showed me several looms, and things that could be made on those looms. Since I was interested in starting small, I signed up for a class using a rigid heddle loom. Those looms are table-top, portable, and are less complicated than a shaft loom (either table-top or pedal-operated free standing variety).

I was excited and a little anxious. Although I know that weaving is not an activity limited to women, I was the only man in the shop. And, for anything truly new, I am a little bit nervous going in. I am not sure that’s true for everybody, but it sure is for me.

I started my weaving career (that sounds so momentous!) on May 31st, 2015, in a class at the Fiber Factory. Susan Clark was our instructor. She was very good. She was easy to get along with, very practical, very patient with us, and promoted our efforts. There were two of us in the class, a woman named Sherry as well as myself. Sherry had experience in other fabric pursuits, that was clear to me, but we were both new to weaving.

We had the class on a couple of tables in a back room at the shop. The room’s walls were cluttered with shelves of various projects in various stages, extra pieces for looms, scraps of all sorts of fabrics, and paper and cardboard abounding. I wondered why all the paper. I learned about that later. There were no windows. It was a pretty good environment for allowing concentration on the subject at hand.

I used a Schacht Cricket 10″ loom.

It is a good beginner’s loom. I had already read about it, and I was happy that I got to use it. I was considering buying this loom.

I had thought that it might be troublesome picking yarn, since I really didn’t have a specific plan or goal. But Susan was helpful. She pointed me towards a rack of yarn that would work well in the classroom loom. The Cricket had an 8 dent heddle.

So in 2 minutes I decided on a bunch of lavender yarn. I need to learn the names of these things – I am sure that “bunch” is a description that could stand to be improved. (Late-breaking learning: I think it is a skein.) I chose a single color, lavender, same for warp and weft, to make it as easy as possible for myself for the first project. I have no clue why I chose lavender in those 2 minutes. It ended up in my hand.

Here are the details of the yarn, as much for my historical benefit as anything else:

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I plan to record the weaving-lingo description of the yarn I use for projects, so that I can repeat the projects and also so that most readers can have a correct notion of what I used. This is a start – I hope to improve my technical descriptions over time.

The label says “knitting worsted weight” which means nothing to me at this point.

An exercise from the book “Learning to Weave” is to wind the yarn around a ruler for an inch. I wound 12 or 13 winds. Divide by 2, gives me 6.5. So I think that I did have correct-enough yarn for an 8 dent heddle.

The label says “100 grams = approx. 200 yards”. So if I do some conversions I calculate about 900 yards per pound. (454/100 x 200) As I read more, I see that this was a fairly “fat” choice for yarn.

It is 3-ply.

So I walked into the back room with a bunch (no! a “skein”!) of yarn in my hand.

We tied down one thread at the warp end, then used a peg a table’s length away (I don’t know the actual distance, probably something like 60″ or more) to both warp the yarn and to dress the loom at the same time. I am not sure those are the correct words.

We pulled the thread through the slots in the heddle, a double thread, wound it around the peg, then did that again until we had the width that we needed. Then we took one of the doubled threads in each slot, and moved it to the adjacent hole in the heddle. Of course we had to cut the yarn at the distant peg before doing this, but things were relatively orderly.

Now we had the heddle all set up properly, with the width of material what we wanted. In this case we were trying for 6″ more or less, but we weren’t particular.

Keeping fairly even tension on the warp, we wound the yarn onto the warp beam. This is where we used some paper, putting it in each layer of warp rounding the beam, so that the yarn on the warp beam, at each revolution, was fairly evenly tensioned. This activity is better with three or four hands, so Susan helped us with that.Then we used some clever knots to tie off, re-tension, and re-tie the yarn to the cloth beam (the place where finished cloth winds onto – the yarn “travels” from warp beam to cloth beam while weaving).

Then we started weaving.

We wound a shuttle and made a few initial passes (I forget the details of this), and started weaving. You leave a little on the side, just a little, and you leave the yarn a little loose, and then when you beat the weft that little loose-ness gets taken up because of the up-and-down movement of the weft onto the warp. Or something like that.

I started with close to a 6″ width but I can see that I pinched it a little during my weaving, and lost additional width in the first wash. I was fairly consistent with my pinching. Amazing that if you are consistent, even consistently in error, things tend to look okay. But you know that you were in error, ha ha. And, if you were counting on a certain size, you’ve messed up. But that wasn’t the case for me for this first piece.

I worked all day on it that Saturday in class, and a few hours on it on Sunday at home.

I cut and tied the ends on my own, then cut the fringes to make them equal length. I have a sense that there is probably a better way to do them, and better knots to tie them with, than those that I used. But I wanted to finish and get the loaned loom back to the store.

I washed it by hand in warm water in a sink, and laid it outside on a towel to dry.

I ended up with a scarf, 57″ long and 5″ wide, that looks like a first try but looks pretty good. You can be the judge.

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Although the pictures were taken with the same camera (smart phone), the colors look different because there was different light for some of them. The “true” color is lavender. I actually can’t say which picture is closest to the true color. Weird, that.

It feels good in the hands, soft yet substantial.

I was pleased with my result. Terry liked it as well.

I decided to buy a rigid heddle loom, and bought a Kromski Harp 24″ loom from the Fiber Factory. It will get to them in about a week. By then I hope I have a plan for “002”!

Here are some observations from my first weaving experience:

• You have to prepare. You must have a plan or you cannot start. You have to calculate how much yarn you need, and get it, especially if the yarn is rare. You have to measure the amount of warp you will use. You have to place the warp on the loom. That can be a pleasing job, or it can be a tedious task. It is up to you which attitude you choose. You have to mind the tension in the warp so that your project goes smoothly later.
• When weaving, you have to pay attention on each pick. Your goal is consistency, and consistency doesn’t happen if your attention is elsewhere. Your selvedges will expose your inattention. Some of that is experience, but much of it is attention.
• Weaving takes time before the product is complete. Is it a long time? It is the right amount of time. You have to stay with it, be patient and attentive and consistent.
• If you approach weaving with the right attitude, you can have a comfortable fun time all the way through, and in the end you’ll have produced something beautiful.

Hey, just while I was finishing this blog, I got news that my loom came in! Onward!

I am learning to weave.

My intent is to record my weaving efforts, along with anything else that comes to mind while weaving. This is a benign way for me to practice a form of public writing.

Why weaving?

a) It is something about which I know nothing. That’s perfect. I want to try things at which I suck. It keeps me humble, keeps me thinking and trying, and the ramp-up is rewarding. I enjoy demystifying some endeavors, and I enjoy learning how much lies beneath the surface of most worthy activities. I seek this kind of experience in some diverse areas – banjo, writing, weaving, golf. Each has a sense of beginner-ness, and each is a different type of activity. I already do some things with some sense of proficiency. (I hope my volleyball partners and students aren’t laughing out loud at this claim!)

b) It is patterns and math. For me, delicious.

c) I have a notion that I can make something beautiful.

d) It has a low entry cost. A useable loom is not expensive.

e) It has unlimited expansion capabilities. There are so many paths.

I hope you enjoy these entries, but I also hope you don’t mind if I tell you that I am not writing for you. I am writing for me, so I can remember what I did and how I felt when I did it. I will be the judge of my blogs. I am publishing them just in case they are interesting to some of you.

Also, I don’t predict my output. My interest can come and go. That’s one of the benefits, and also one of the drawbacks, to low entry cost – there is no “financial guilt” incentive to continue.