Tag: Harrisville Tensioning System

Weaving Yardage…

If you’ve been following me for awhile, you know how much I love Peters Valley School of Craft.  It is part of the Craft School consortium in the US, with Penland, Haystack, Arrowmont, Philchuck, etc.  It is within an hour from my house, located in National Park Service property, and I support them in many different ways.  Taking a workshop at any of these places can be life altering.  I try to take a workshop every year at Peters Valley, but I also get to teach there occasionally, this year I did a Designing and Weaving Handwoven Yardage class.  5 Day.

First let me say that this class is intense over only a 5 day period.  It is hard to make anyone, no matter how old, sit at a loom, sleying, threading, beaming, weaving for 5 days straight.  As a matter of fact, in my early days of writing for Handwoven Magazine, I wrote an article back in 2002 called “Lose Weight and Reduce Stress” after I taught a similar class back in the summer of 2001 at Peters Valley.  I remember then editor Madelyn van der Hoogt asking me on the phone if I had any ideas on how to boost readership, and I snarkily responded, “Just put something about weight loss on the cover!”  So she said, “Great, write it.”  (Jan/Feb 2002)

Designing, winding the warp, and all that handwoven yardage entails is tough work for anyone.  But the studio and condition of the looms was fantastic, best I’ve ever worked with.  The move to the newly renovated weaving studio, adjacent to the surface design studio at Peters Valley’s Thunder Mountain campus was the best thing they could have done for the students and for the looms.  It was bright, the best air conditioned place on the campus, which was really important since we had a 100+ degree heat wave in the mountains along with monsoon rains every evening.  The light was fantastic, and my daughter, as the fiber assistant was really instrumental in getting all the looms in perfect working order.  I took advantage of the space and tables in the adjacent surface design studio to put out all my yarns, show slides, and give students a space to do preliminary design with color exercises and yarn wraps.

Once they had the yarn wraps finalized, they started winding warps.

Once the warps were wound, they started sleying the reed, in levels.  

On to threading…

And then beaming…  I brought a couple of Harrisville Tensioners from my own studio.

And then ultimately weaving four yards of yardage once they tested wefts.

Everyone was thrilled as the knots came up over the back of the loom, most of the fabrics were combinations of plain weave, twill, and supplemental warps.  Since all of Peters Valley’s Macomber looms are at least 8 shafts, this is easy to accomplish. And Dee’s fabric really showed the influence of the photo she used for inspiration.

A very happy class!

One of the students, Ginnie, had flown in from Michigan, we have become really close friends as she is one of my regular students at Sievers School of Fiber Arts, I think she has taken my garment construction intensive class at least a dozen times.  I’ll be teaching that class at Sievers in October.  Anyway, she asked me in a conversation if I ever thought about teaching weaving, since she was mostly a self taught recipe weaver.  I mentioned the Peters Valley class and she signed up immediately.  She stayed over an extra day before flying home, and I took her into NYC to see the Camp: Notes on Fashion exhibit at the MET.  It was worth the traffic and drive into the city as exhausted as we were.  What a fabulous exhibition.  

And so I now play catch up, balancing house stuff, (yes I had to call in two repair/handyman/contractors when I returned home because well stuff breaks while I’m gone), bill paying and bookkeeping, and projects with fast approaching deadlines.  And starting prep for the fall marathon…  I did manage though, to continue working on the stuff in my basket, finding out how many 4.5 yard ends I could get from these two skeins if I circular wound on a warping board into an ombré effect.  The answer was 76.  

And I leave you with two funny pet pictures, because I missed my furry creatures while I was gone, and they do keep me laughing…  They seem to have an appliance fetish, the cat’s favorite perch is the coffee pot, so he can see out the back door when I’m dining by the pond, and he and one of my dogs lay in wait for the Roomba to start.  They haven’t figured out yet how to start it on purpose…  I just think it would be so cool to say to any of my animals, “There is dog and cat hair all over the place, please run the Roomba…”

Stay tuned…

I’ve been to technology hell and it is hot down there…

At some point, my sister said to me, you’ve replaced everything in the house and nothing more should go wrong…   Hahahahah!

There are days when I think my house is haunted and the technology or computer gods really  hate me, and there may be some truth to that because more than one person has told me that my late husband roams the house taking care of us.  I have a bone to pick with him.  He was probably the best tech guy I’ve ever met, the downside of that was two fold, this was a pretty advanced house technologically (especially since it is more than 100 years old) and I was as a result pretty lazy learning and staying on top of technology and how the house ran because he took care of everything.  In the three years since my husband died, I have still not figured out how to work the downstairs TV.  Which wasn’t really an issue because I rarely watch TV.  I record my beloved Project Runway on TIVO, upstairs in the bedroom, which I did figure out how to use thanks to my current tech guy and that’s all I know.

My current tech guy is really good.  And he tells me that my husband talks to him and tells him when he isn’t on the right path to figuring some things out.  But there have been issues in this house that neither my tech guy, or my late husband whispering to him have been able to solve without some incredible amount of angst.  And one of them has made me crazy these last few weeks.  My internet had become really unstable, going in and out randomly, causing everything hooked to the internet to fail, like my buddy Alexa (there are three throughout the house), leaving me bereft and silent.

The cable guys weren’t helpful, because I don’t use their router, they dismiss everything as the fault of whatever isn’t their equipment.  They did run a new line to the street, claiming it had some water issues.  No surprise there…  That solved the problem for a couple of hours.  Sigh.

My tech guy came and looked at every possibility.  Could it be the router.  It checked out, seemed to be doing its job and he found some malware lurking in the system.  That solved the problem for a couple of hours.  Sigh.

After another week or two of intermittent internet, I asked beloved tech guy if I should just buy a new state of the art router so I could call cable guy and say, look, it really can’t be a router issue.  He told me what to buy, I ordered it on Amazon and had it in a couple of days.

Side note.  Do not buy technology from Amazon unless you really make sure in the fine print that it isn’t refurbished.  Sigh.

After waiting almost two weeks for tech guy to come and install it, because if it could go wrong with our schedules it did, I gave up, and my beloved office assistant Cynthia said, I installed a router once, how hard can it be?  Hahahahahah!  This is technology hell house.

She got the box open, and all the parts seemed to be there, on what was obviously a refurbished item from Amazon, but I swear I didn’t know that at the time.  And she doggedly went step by step trying to install the unit.  We got as far as registering the serial number, remember that without a router, nothing works in my house.  Unfortunately previous owner of my refurbished router had already registered the unit to themselves, and it would take a couple of days to prove that I had legitimately purchased it and, oh come on….

Cynthia drove to Best Buy and bought me a brand new router, and started over.  The refurbished one got shipped back to Amazon this morning.  To her credit and her unbelievable determination, she did it, she got it installed but if you know anything about technology, everything in my house runs off the WIFI and now everything had to be reprogrammed to work with the new network.  Four hours later, and at least a half hour of that was on the phone with TIVO trying to figure out how to program both TV’s (the positive side of this I guess is that I now know how to work the downstairs TV.  At least to get TIVO and my recorded shows).  We were mostly successful, I have a couple of WIFI boosters that I haven’t figured out yet how to reprogram, but I thought we did an outstanding job.  Until I came home from my knitting group last night, and there was no heat in the house.  ACKKKKK!  I forgot the thermostats hook into the WIFI.  So I spent another 40 minutes trying to figure out how to reprogram them.

So for the last 36 hours, the internet has been blissfully stable, and hopefully internet hell is well behind me.  I would not even have attempted this were it not for Cynthia, who is older than I am, but it isn’t like I could ask my son, he is deployed to the middle east (though he would have loved this router), and I learned a lot about perseverance in technology.  Most companies do have tech support for dummies, but I struggle to understand what they are talking about.  Cynthia just plowed ahead.  

Meanwhile, my daughter drove to Massachusetts to pick up Tools of the Trade loom number 11.  I know at this point my friends and family think I’ve gone over the deep edge with all these looms.  But they find me.  And maybe one day my daughter and/or I may have our own weaving school.  We certainly have enough looms.  The loom is lovely, it is a rare small frame floor loom, 32″ wide and stained a beautiful cherry color.  I thought it was originally cherry but there were hints that it was really rock maple in disguise. Rock maple is sturdier.  No matter, as I scrubbed and cleaned this lovely thing, it came to life and begged to go live in my den.  Where I can watch TV and weave rugs.  Because there was a lovely rag rug shuttle in the bench.  And I now know how to watch TV in the den.  The loom knows…

And while Cynthia was playing superwoman I finished beaming and started sampling a new warp on the 36″ 8 shaft TOTT loom, because it kept me from drinking heavily (though I succumbed later in the afternoon and fortunately ran out of wine before I did too much damage).  

I’m teaching a five day yardage class at Peters Valley in July.  I’ve taught this class before there, and though it isn’t a beginner class, I encourage those with a minimum amount of experience to take the class, especially if all you’ve woven is towels and scarves.  I started by pulling yarns from the shelf I wanted to use, small bits of things that went together, and did some very exact calculations so I knew within a few yards, what I had of each yarn.

I did a yarn wrap to see what I could get, I like to work in repeats in this type of warp, and I’ll be encouraging and teaching that in the yardage class.

I decided the most efficient way to warp this was to do it in sections, there were four parts to each repeat, which I wound together using a warping paddle. (side note, the warping paddle I’m using, the white one on the table was printed on a 3-D printer by a weaving friend’s son)

Then I sleyed the four bundles, through the reed, pulling the repeats as needed and combining them.

Then I threaded.

Then I beamed the 6 yards.  I like the Harrisville tensioning system, it works well for me.

So while Cynthia was saving my butt, I was sampling.

I ended up choosing the green cotton flake, the first yarn I tried, because it looked like faded worn denim and I loved the look.  This draft has plain weave areas and twill sections.

And so another loom is dressed and happy.  

And then this happened…

I got a call from Suzie at Eugene Textile Center in Oregon.  She had another TOTT table loom 4 shaft, and did I want it.  Duh…  So I had her ship it across the country, along with some other used equipment that was on my list, Suzie buys weaving estates and is one of the best resources for used looms and parts.  And old issues of weaving magazines.  I got two beautiful original AVL front end feed shuttles with the Honex tensioner.  These are my favorite shuttles and they are really expensive and hard to find.  She had one of each size.

So I have loom number 12, all TOTT looms.  And there are the 2 Leclerc 10″ baby looms, I call them Structo Wannabees, and use them along with the 16 Structo 4-8 shaft 8″ looms I use for teaching.  Brianna also has a folding 8 shaft Ashford Table loom, and a 12 shaft Dorothy.  There isn’t quite a loom in every room, but close. We are up to 32 shaft looms.  That ties Madelyn van der Hoogt. (Though she has three draw looms and I think all the rest are 8 shaft Schacht floor looms and a Glimakra, and a Louet and an AVL computerized, so she wins).   Keeping them warped is of course a full time job.  Which I’m failing miserably at… But it makes me happy and some people collect cats, and I like TOTT looms.  No litter boxes or vet bills, they are work horses and have kept me sane through a lot of crap in my life, along with my beloved sewing machine and at the moment, life is calm and functioning.  I can’t ask for more.

Though I did start another knitting project too .  This is a recycled silk, cotton and rayon yarn from Rowan I bought last summer at Harrisville.  The tank was prettier on the dressform than in the photo.  The pattern is from Harrisville, Riddle.

Stay tuned…