Only a weaver would know the difference between making cakes and baking cakes. I don’t bake, and I don’t eat cake (well maybe on very rare occasions…)
This is my cake maker. It is a ball winder (we now call them cakes, instead of balls, which they are not.) It was one of the first pieces of weaving equipment I bought somewhere in the mid 70’s, probably before I bought my first loom, which was 1977. It is still going strong, plastic is somewhat worn, but it has made many many cakes over the years and is very dependable.
Why am I making cakes? So it all started because I wanted to move the sewing room up to the weaving studio, get back to working in one space. I’ve mentioned this in previous blogs. To make this happen, I need help, from my daughter who helped me set all this up in the first place back in January of 2020, but she is really hard to pin down to help, as she sleeps days, and works 14-hour shifts at night. In complete frustration, I moved, an inch at a time, my two largest looms, by myself, across the rubber mats on the garage floor, to a new location, across the garage. That will ultimately leave room for my huge cutting table and sewing station to come up from the basement sewing room.
I can make room for the large “furniture” but it is all the small stuff, yarn, weaving/sewing supplies and small equipment, that will prove more challenging to incorporate. In addition, one of my guest rooms was completely filled with bags and bags of knitting yarn, procured from a going out of business donation to my weaving guild of bags and bags of knitting yarn. I moved it all down to the weaving studio, and sat in a pile of it and tried to make sense of it.
I actually enjoy organizing, moving things around, figuring out what I actually have to work with, and inspiration usually comes with those simple tasks. So I reorganized a shelf of random stuff, and was quite happy with the result. I started seeing things that could potentially work together, and laid them aside.
Since they are knitting yarns, and mostly in skein form, they need to be wound into cakes. Hence the cake making session. I love mathematical calculations, how much do I have of each and how much can I get out of what I have. After much figuring, and guessing, and translating grams to ounces, etc, I was able to figure out I could get 9 yards of warp, mixing four different warp yarns, roughly 34″ wide in the loom. I figured I’d just keep winding until I used up most of the warp. I ended up, with some creative additions of other stuff in my stash when something would run out, with 35″ width. Pretty good calculations!
And so, since I was repeating four different warp yarns, I grabbed my trusty warping paddle, this one made by a friend’s son years ago, in the early days of 3D printing. I liked how smooth the holes and slots were, and how large they are, good for bulkier knitting yarns.
And then of course, I spent the last couple days sleying, threading, and beaming, and then ultimately sampling.
The latest issue of Heddlecraft came in in the last couple weeks, and I always print them out. I loved this issue, all about what to do with novelty yarns. Which was at the time it came in, exactly what was all over my studio floor.
There is a section where Robyn says to just set up a straight draw on 8 shafts, that’s 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 for non-weavers, and that gives two blocks to play around with, but a twill is always a good starting point. I threaded in a straight draw, and started sampling.
I chose two yarns for the weft, alternating, so I’d have enough for about 8 plus yards of weaving. One is a variegated wool/poly, not happy about the poly part, but it is a pretty yarn and serves my purpose. It will create color banding or a wash, not sure yet how it is engineered, but time will tell. The warp is gorgeous, so I don’t want to really cover that, but these wefts are thicker, so I’m just guessing.
After sampling a bit, I decided that twills and variations covered too much of the warp, and plain weave gave a better warp/weft ratio, with more interlacements. the variegated effect in the weft was what I was going for.
Meanwhile, I’m still on a maniacal quest to clear looms. Some of these are my daughter’s warps, and since she no longer weaves, the looms that I actually own, I just figured out what she did and dove in. First up was this Glimakra band loom, which my daughter insisted on buying from a guild buddy at one of our stash sales. I was traveling at the time, this might have been when she was living up at Peters Valley as the textile assistant, back in summer of 2019. I let her use my business account to pay for it, since I was traveling somewhere in the world, so it is technically my loom. I told her she wouldn’t like it, because on this loom, one sits sideways to weave. She immediately set it up with a super long warp, and rigged a way to sit in the front and use a false treadle to depress the rear one. She is resourceful.
I cleared that in no time, and now, I’d like to find a home for it. It is a great loom, I just don’t need it. If you live near north Jersey and are interested, make me an offer.
Back in the very early 1980’s, when I started doing craft fairs, I only had one loom, a Tools of the Trade 45″ 8-shaft loom, with two warp beams and optional sectional beams. It was a lot of loom, and I still have it, though I gave it to my daughter when she moved out. And of course it moved back to my studio when she moved back home in 2019. But back in the 1980’s, I realized, as I was struggling to get into craft fairs, that checking that box that I could demonstrate, helped my chances of getting into them. I looked at many options for smaller portable looms, and realized that I wouldn’t be happy with anything but a replica of what I already owned, in a smaller profile. I bought a 25″ TOTT floor loom, 8-shaft, with two sectional warp beams. It was cumbersome to get in and out of a car, but it worked.
I didn’t realize until more recently, after acquiring a couple of used 25″ TOTT floor looms, that the one I bought was an early version and with subsequent versions, parts were made stronger, and better. Like the ratchet and pawl on the cloth beam. Or the cloth beam itself.
The latest version of this loom, probably somewhere around the 1990’s was a much more substantial block of wood, and one I bought for my mother in law, probably the late 1980’s, had an actual rachet and pawl, instead of a wood cross piece that you turned by hand.
I like a tight warp, and I’ve broken the smaller beams, and the wood cross piece on my oldest of the 25″ looms. So first up, was to clear the latest of the three, which was actually my daughter’s, set up probably 8 years ago, for rag rugs from her late father’s Hawaiian shirts. A noble effort, and something she needed to do at the time, the loom has sat idle, and the cat had made large holes in the cloth, ripping warp threads. I will admit, I coveted the beams and ratchet and pawl systems, and so I’d drop subtle hints over the last couple years, and finally, I just sat down and repaired the broken warps.
Then I took one of the balls of rags she had created and started weaving.
I showed her, and she looked startled, and then sat down on the floor and told me, with each of the rag balls, what she had originally intended. Rag rugs weave quickly, so I really didn’t understand why she didn’t just weave it all off herself, since she clearly knew what she wanted. That night, a rare night off, (she sleeps days and works nights) she went to the studio and actually wove off the piece. I found this in the morning.
I cut it off the loom, and it is a poignant piece, I remember each of the shirts my late husband wore. So that cleared the first of the three 25″ looms.
Meanwhile, I sat down, and just started to weave on the Periwinkle Sunset yardage I had put on my mother in law’s (she died in 2006) 4-shaft loom. I cleared that within a couple days.
The last of the three 25″ looms, was my beloved 8-shaft, the one I really want to keep, but steal the sturdier lumber from the later versions of the same loom. That had the Quigley sampler I’ve been talking about in previous blogs, I was nearing the end of this warp, and just weaving small motifs to use later in bags and items for my guild sale. And so I dove into that, determined to clear that as well.
Now that all 3 looms were clear, I lined them all up and started moving parts around. I ended up swapping out the entire back of two of the looms, a couple of trips to ACE hardware, and got everything put back together in a way I was moderately happy with.
My original loom with the sectional beams was drilled for a smaller L shaped hand crank, similar to what would be on a Structo, and I wanted a hex head bolt so I could actually use a removeable regular loom crank, but that would require drilling the loom and I wasn’t going to alter any of the existing lumber. And the Friction brake housing couldn’t accommodate the size bolt of the later looms. So I made compromises, and as I was doing the final assembly, the inevitable happened, dry rotted aprons.
So down to the sewing studio I went, found something suitable, created a new apron, and all is well. It was an entertaining couple of days.
And of course, now that it is August, most of the perennials are starting to die back and go to seed, and other things are blooming instead, but the gardens are looking a bit overwhelming. In another couple months, everything will have died back and I won’t have to touch any of it until late spring. Still, there is amazing insect activity, swallowtails, monarchs, monarch Beetles, bees the size of a car (just kidding), and I caught a glimpse of the hummingbird moth, picture is a bit blurry, but he is there in the center of the photo. The yard is still so alive.
And there are beautiful flower pictures to serve as inspiration.
My landscape designer added a Swamp Rose Mallow Hibiscus, a volunteer from her garden, to my landscape. I hoped it would take, and in the spring there were a few promising leaves. I looked out of my large window where I eat breakfast and to my great shock, there rising above the prolific Black-Eyed Susan, was a gorgeous hibiscus flower.
And today, I went out to feed the fish, and I caught a fleeting movement of a couple of tiny goldfish, there were babies! My late husband would have been so proud and excited.
And I’m just a couple rehearsals away from the Medieval Fest, August 29th in Montclair at the Art Museum, where I’ll be playing, in costume, with three music groups. If I’m not in the studio, or in the garden, I’m practicing. My life is sometimes a bit out of control! But I’m not complaining. I love the crazy things in my life, the communities they create, the brain challenges, and the fact that I’m never ever bored, and don’t even own a TV. And avoiding social media at all cost keeps me sane on the things I have some control over. Which isn’t much!
I know this was a long post, but I write this blog as a personal journal. I don’t really care if anyone reads it, though it is always a treat when someone comments. I like to write, and add pictures, and document my adventures, and hope some of those adventures will inspire someone else to “get to the studio and make stuff”. (Quote from a T-shirt from the late Fred Bobb)
Stay tuned…