A pinch of this, a teaspoon of that…

And you thought this post was going to be about cooking…

So I have this shelf in the studio.  It is of course overflowing.  I save bits of this, leftovers from that, small gifts of a skein of this, and some oddiments that find their way onto the shelf, until the whole thing comes crashing down at my feet because, well, there is too much of this and that on the shelf.  There is that small ball of yarn left from the dress I knitted from that skein I won.  There is a lovely skein of handspun gifted to me at my birthday in May.  There are leftover cones of mohair from my last mohair project. A couple more skeins left from other knitting projects.  Etc, etc, etc…

Surprisingly many of them go together.

Anyone who has ever listened to me lecture on handwoven yardage knows my first rule of thumb is to put all the design in the warp, and weave with one shuttle so the warp doesn’t sit on the loom for 10 years.  My record is 12, but I digress…

First off was to figure out what I had, and I spent an afternoon with my McMorran yarn balance and a calculator and figured out the exact yardage, as best I could figure in each of the little balls in front of me.

Then I did more nifty calculations to figure out what I could get with this group, and I thought, I’ve never really played with tartans, and wouldn’t it be fun to weave as drawn in?  Meaning almost every weft pick is different.

I’m guessing about five years from now I’m going to seriously regret this decision, but with a sett of 8 to the inch, how time consuming can this be?  I figure a repeat a day, and then eventually I’ll have my daughter screaming at me to clear the loom because she needs it, and I’ll hunker down and finally weave it all off.

So yesterday, fighting a cold, and feeling rather poorly, I started to wind the warp.  Seven yards.

I sat quietly drinking my hot tea with honey and lemon and a shot of whiskey (my son’s suggestion) and I sleyed the reed. Then I ate dinner.  Then I threaded (8epi goes really fast).  Then I set the loom up to beam and had most of it beamed before heading to bed.

I dreamed all night of setts and calculations.  I think I shouldn’t have done a 60/40 split of the yarns, maybe more like 55/45, warp/weft, so I may run out of weft halfway into the piece.  But I have other things I can toss in so I’m not really worried.  I did resley a bit, to tighten up on the sett before I even started to weave, and I think I’ll beat a little firmer to get more of a square block.  But this is coming out very cool.  And it is entertaining to weave.  There are seven yards of warp, and I have 13 different shuttles lined up across the table.  I expect to full this quite a bit when the fabric is off the loom, but that’s probably five years from now.

Meanwhile, I have one less naked loom…  Now about those two others…

Stay tuned.