Bits and Pieces…

Yippee Hooray for me!  This is blog post 700!  To my faithful readers, I thank you.  It has been quite the ride over the last 7 years…

There are tornado warnings outside.  This is not Missouri.  This is NJ.  Please…  At least there is wine in the cellar.  Note to self, if you hear the sirens, grab the dogs and a corkscrew…

My daughter Brianna has suddenly discovered that weaving an hour before bed makes her sleep amazingly well.  Sort of makes sense, it is good exercise, clears the mind and is soooo much better than video games right before bed.

So she is working like a fiend to always keep a warp on my large 8 shaft 45″ Tools of the Trade loom which I’ve sort of assigned to her permanently.  It is the “dad” loom in the room.  Right behind it, actually their back beams touch, is the “mom” loom, same configuration 8 shaft Tools of the Trade loom but the “mom” loom is only 36″ wide.  I actually prefer it for my old bones and joints.  And for what I actually weave.  Brianna, at 5′ 10″ tall weighing considerably more than I do, thinks the 45″ loom is built just for her.  Works for me.

So there is a bit of a rivalry going on, who can keep their loom warped at all times.  Brianna sits thinking about her next warp while weaving on the current one.  And she takes breaks to plan and wind the next warps so they can be immediately ready to go.  She is inspired by a couple of guild challenges from the guilds she belongs to, as well as the new Weaving Innovations from the Bateman Collection that just arrived from Amazon. She has two projects planned from that already.  She is plowing through my stash at lightening speed.

One of the pieces she decided to do on her loom was part of a guild challenge, which I won’t say anymore about because it is her project to show to the guild, but she needed a range of oranges to satisfy the challenge.  The original yarn she picked turned out to be too fragile for the warp, we tossed all of it.  So she went to plan B.  I can’t say I have a huge amount of orangy yarns on the shelf, but we started rooting through all my hand dyed skeins and ended up finding the perfect match.  She chose some structure from Dixon that had spaced warps.  It turned out pretty cool.  The warp yarn was raw silk I got from a weaver friend, small leftover cones that I dyed over the last couple of years.

I never thought to look at my stash of hand dyed skeins and pull out the like yarns.  I’ve always mixed the yarns, I like the variety of sheen and texture.  So I pulled out all the skeins of raw silk on the shelf and lined them up.  The colors were so much fun together and I had an empty loom, not to be outdone by my daughter of course, so what was I supposed to do?

I had this brilliant idea inspired by the towels I did in December of 2014.  I loved the warp, it was all Cotlin, but I could see a funky dress fabric or something along that line, and almost didn’t cut the fabric into dishtowels.  Here was the perfect group of yarns to make a similar kind of warp, inspired originally by a project from Linda Gettman in Handwoven Sept/Oct 2014.

I thought that when I originally wound my skeins they were all two yards, 72″.  So clever me, I counted the exact amount of yardage I had on each skein before winding them into balls.  I started winding the warps, and was shocked to find out that I was running out of yarn well before I needed to.  Brianna would glance over from her loom and say, “Mommy, wind faster”.  It didn’t help.  Turns out my skeins were only 62″ long, and I’m not sure why, either the AVL mill where I wind the skeins isn’t accurate, or they shrunk a lot when they were dyed and processed, or maybe a combination of both.

I dug through every stash of oddiments, bits and pieces I could find in the studio and found enough of the same yarn in similar colors with a little draft tweaking as I went, to finish the job.  I love my stash.  It never fails me.

I had dust left of the original yarns.

Warps were sleyed…

Warps were beamed…

And I trolled through my stash and found a 1 lb 4 oz cone of a gun metal bamboo from Silk City Yarns that is the perfect amount, perfect size yarn, that will soften up the stiff raw silk or at least that’s what should happen.

Take that tornado warnings…

Meanwhile, I was crawling around the floor of my closet retrieving some of the laundry that had fallen out of my basket.  I got the hem of a gown I made many years ago caught in the pile of laundry and remembered how much I loved the fabric print but how much I disliked the gown, and really never ever wore it.  Originally the print gown was a test for a length of handwoven fabric that I did make into a different much more successful gown.  I’m not a fan of Wilma dresses, one shoulder wonders.

So I ripped it off the hangar and cut it up.  Took off the bodice, whacked off the hem, let it out 2″ (let’s not go there…) and wore it today with one of my handknit sweaters and some boots.  Every time I looked down at my skirt I smiled.  Except when I spilled the whole container of Margarita’s all over it.  Let’s not go there either…

It has been a productive couple of days…

Stay tuned for blog post 701…