I should have been prepping for the beginning weaving class I was suppose to teach on Saturday. I really should have been. I should have been filling out contracts for conferences, working on my 2015 books, writing proposals for conferences to come. But I looked longingly at my looms and said, nah… all that other stuff can wait. Which I gotta say is pretty unusual for me. I mean there was this class looming (pun intended) and I had to wind fourteen warps, print handouts, and generally pull a lot of materials and 14 looms together for what is now an annual learn to weave program I give for my local guild. The class filled by Thanksgiving, and it was suppose to happen Saturday.
Meanwhile, I just couldn’t. The thought of winding those warps, all the while staring at the tartan on my loom, and my cutting table which was filled with all the little thrums and a bazillion shuttles I was using to carry those thrums across the warp (I eventually ditched the shuttles and just passed the balls/bobbins through the warp, it was easier), well I just couldn’t. And forget the paperwork. I just couldn’t either.
So I sat down and decided to weave. A lot. And as knitters know, with some of the thrums getting down to seriously not having enough to finish, I started to weave faster, hoping to outrun the yarn. I did run out of a few yarns, and I would like to blame my miscalculations on the fact that I used what the label said for the yardage and of course it turned out not to be the case. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
I have a pretty vast expanse of yarns and small bits of things tucked in corners and bags in the studio. I found additional tiny quantities of a couple of the yarns in thrum bags, and substitutes for others. And I had a backup yarn that if push came to shove I could just use as a solid weft and weave off what was left of this seven yard warp.
In case you have no idea what all this is about, you should probably reread the blog post [1] from four days before Christmas. Go ahead, I’ll wait…
So I took all this yarn, small skeins of this, leftover skeins of that, gifted skeins of handspun, all things that related that I had no other use for and decided after considerable calculations, that I should turn it all into some sort of cloth. In that blog post I recall, I thought that this would be one of those warps that took five years to weave off.
[2]
Well I got into it. I can’t believe that I, queen of the one shuttle, used 12 different yarns, some of them only one shot across the weft, and made a tartan that ended up a full 6 yards before washing. And did it in exactly one month. And had fun doing it. Really. Before I knew it I saw this…
[3]
[4]
And the pile of yarns on the table was reduced to this. By the time I cut the yardage off the loom, I had a handful of thrums, and was pretty freakin’ proud of myself.
[5]
I took a quick shot of the yardage before I headed off to the washing machine.
[6]
Warm water, gentle cycle. My eyes nearly popped when I pulled it out of the washer. It was sooo soft and beautiful. So I tossed it into the dryer. About 10 minutes on medium. I pulled it out and put it back in for another 10 minutes on high. What I got was so cool.
[7]
[8]
It is soft and cozy and I can’t stop petting it.
I posted it on facebook and got the immediate responses of, “What’s it going to be?” Well I don’t actually know, because I never plan that far in advance. My handwoven cloth is like fine wine. It must age to fully appreciate it. I’ll find the right pattern down the road, maybe next winter. But for now, I just pet it when I walk by, and smile to myself that I did well. And I look surreptitiously at areas of my shelves, to see what yarns lurk where I might try this technique again. I do have a bag of sock yarn thrums…
Oh, and that class that was suppose to happen on Saturday? If you live anywhere on the east coast of the US, you most likely know why it didn’t happen. See we had this snow incident. More than 30″. It was a lot of snow. But really pretty. I won’t bore you with photos of that because I didn’t take any. Just scroll through facebook. There are more photos of snow than I really want to see right now. It was a lot of snow and I shoveled a lot of it for hours. I’m a little sore. But I did manage today to finish winding all those warps, and print all the handouts, so I’m ready for the class next weekend. My son came in and asked if I had heard about another storm potentially hitting next weekend. I just can’t right now… And there is all that paperwork…
Stay tuned…