Latest Spinning Projects and Wonderwool Wales 2015

Apologies for the lack of posts lately but here is an update...... better late than never!

 

Wonderwool was busy as always and it was lovely to catch up with old friends. We were very busy on the My Fine Weaving Yarn stand as Helen had some new yarn ranges from Brassards of Canada which sold like the proverbial "hot cakes". I shall have to be quicker next time to try and bag some for myself.

 

My Fine Weaving Yarn

 

 

Phillippa and Jan Joad of Wheeldale Woolcrafts

 

 

Beautiful felted sheep portraits by Taylored-Felt

 

 

 

A very busy Saori weaving stand. I did manage to chat with the two ladies briefly and bought a couple of ready made warps but they were so busy I didn't want to keep them too long. There is definitely an increased interest in weaving this year. So many people visiting our stand started the conversation off with the words " I'm new to weaving" or "I'm only a beginner". It is really great to see that people are moving into weaving eventually. The next show is Woolfest!

I've been quite busy at home with a couple of dyeing/spinning projects, trying to work my way through the huge pile of fleeces in the hopes that this years crop will not overwhelm me! The first spinning project is to make a jumper for Graham and I dyed a Clun Forest fleece in Landscape Dyes Night which is a dark blue. I blended it with some Llanwenog which I dyed last year in a variety of lighter blues, mauve and a turquoise. This stopped the darker blue from looking too flat and gives a lovely heathered look to the yarn. Both fleeces have the same qualities and went together well.

 

 

 

The actual colour is a bit deeper - like a nice blue ink colour - the sun was a bit bright when I took the photo. My next project is to weave some fabric to make this....

 

 

.... a pinafore dress from a pattern by Get Weaving. I met Sarah and Elisabeth at Wonderwool and got some brilliant advice on what to do with some fabric I had made. They had an example of this outfit there and I just have to try and make one myself. So I have dyed a stack of Kerry Hill fleece in a range of autumn colours and I shall blend them roughly together so that I get areas of solid colour and some where it is a mixture.

 

 

So far I'm pleased with how it looks.

 

 





And Now For Something A Bit More Cheerful

17th April 2015

Despite the sadness of the previous post I have been able to get some weaving done and also to welcome a new loom to the collection. Yes my new Saori WX60 loom has arrived!!!

 

What a beauty! Such a simple 2 shaft loom yet it can help you weave such amazing cloth. I was weaving on it within half an hour of sliding it out of it's box as it only needed the warp to be attached to the back of the loom and to tie it on to the cloth beam. The built-in bobbin winder is fantastic, no need to get up from your seat when you need a new bobbin. I'm smitten.... it's the old drop spindle thing all over again I'm afraid. Can you hear me eating my words? I have already woven off the warp that came with the loom ( already threaded and in the reed I might add) and at the moment I have a navy blue cotton warp which I did myself from yarn in the stash. Waiting in the wings are 3 more ready made warps purchased from Kim at The Saori Shed. This is what my first Saori loom woven warp looks like. The ends haven't been trimmed yet and I think I shall sew it into a summery top to wear with my linen trousers.

 

 

It was a black cotton warp and I wove mostly with cotton and some cotton mixes with a few additions of novelty yarns. I'm really pleased with the way the fabric drapes so I must get cracking and sew it up before the weather breaks! The next thing to show you is the first bit of Saori-style weaving I did on my Louet Spring loom. The warp is black lambswool and the weft mostly wool with a bit of mohair including quite a bit of hand spun. I was originally going to make a skirt out of the cloth (to wear with long boots) but after draping it across the dressform I recently bought I'm thinking of wearing it as a shawl.

 

 

It has a Scottish look about it.... you can almost hear the skirl of the pipes! And finally I wove a long length of fabric, again on the Spring, to make into a tunic-type top. The warp is a mixture of lambswool and a few ends of Jaggerspun Zephyr left over from scarf projects.

 

 

A lot of the weft yarn is my hand spun taken straight from the spinning bobbin and used as a singles yarn. It seems to have worked alright and I really liked the mottled effect of the merino/silk mix top that I spun. I have started another warp on the Spring, which I'm hoping to get finished soon, in greens and yellows and I'm only using hand spun yarn for the weft this time.

 

 

The green-blue yarn is some that I dyed a long while ago and chain plyed it to knit a jumper but never got around to it. The yarn making the warp floats is some that I corespun from a mixture of merino tops, alpaca and glittery bits mentioned in a previous post. It's going along quite nicely and I would like to get it off the loom soon as I want to wear it to Wonderwool in a weeks time. Yes. It's showtime again!! Yippeeeee!

Toby

16th April 2015

 

 

Toby

19th December 1999 - 15th April 2015

 

After breaking a back leg it was discovered that Toby was seriously ill with bone cancer in his spine and therefore we had to have him put to sleep yesterday. He was always a cheerful little dog even at the end with a broken leg! But he was a bit of a rascal in his younger days......  I once had to chase him around the garden to try and retrieve a bobbin of hand spun alpaca from his clenched teeth! We all miss him already.

What's Been Keeping Me Busy Lately?

I thought that it was about time I did a post about what I have been up to in the weeks since my last epistle. The weather here at Deerfold has, on the whole, been wet and gloomy so the spring tidy up in the garden has been very sporadic to say the least. Most of the old dry growth from last season has been cleared away ready to burn and the snowdrops could eventually be seen in all their glory. This has given me extra time in my loom room before the gardening really needs to be done. Here is a glimpse of the creative chaos at the moment!

 

With my recent discovery of Saori weaving I have at last found a use for spinning some of the novelty yarns - I won't call my efforts "art yarns"- and so I spent a few happy hours playing with bits of fibre hence the messy room. With a vague idea of weaving some fabric in a cheerful spring colour way I made lots of batts from leftover merino tops, bits of silk, some white alpaca and of course some sparkles!

 

 

This is the start of the yellow pile and I also did pale greens and then did a few really dark blues for a change.

 

 

So far I have done quite a few bobbins of a really nice, soft core spun yarn which I'm hoping to use in weaving a shawl or wrap soon.

 

 

I have also been busy weaving. Last year I decided to make a tablecloth for our kitchen table but couldn't decide what design to do - dithering again. I did know that I wanted it to be in greens and blues to go with the blue Aga we have. After cutting my previous weaving project off the loom I started straight away making a warp from cotton, cottolin and other varieties of cotton and linen yarns mostly leftovers from projects or gleaned from Ebay all in greens and blues.

 

 

Here it is in progress.

 

And finished!

 

 

 

I'm quite pleased with the end result and I have already got an idea for another one but maybe this time I won't weave such wide panels. The fabric has a lovely drape to it and would make a nice tunic top to go with my blue linen trousers this summer. My next warp is already on the loom and yesterday I heard from Kim at The Saori Shed that my Saori loom has arrived and I'm hoping that it will be with me before too long!

Further Adventures in Saori Weaving

Since my last post I have been busy at my loom playing with yarn and what a jolly time I've had! It is amazing how many balls of yarn I have collected over the years, some my own hand spun and some left over from knitting or weaving projects. I decided to heap them in to piles of four main colour groups and use that as a starting point and go from there. I had set my loom up with a black 18/2 wool warp sett at 20 epi and threaded in a Rosepath twill using four shafts. I wasn't thinking of a finished project but just wanted to play with colours and textures and create a sampler for future ideas. I began with the largest heap which was blues/purples/pinks.

 

The yarns I used were a mixture of some hand dyed and hand spun yarns that I did over 20 years ago, some commercially spun mohair loop yarn, wool roving and fleece. I used the Rosepath Twill to help the thicker yarns show up and after washing it helped with the texture too. Then I moved on to the greens and yellows.

 

 

Then I moved on to reds/oranges/gingers.

 

 

And finally I tried natural greys and whites.

 

 

During the weaving of these samplers I played around with the many weaving techniques suggested in the Saori book such as clasped weft with 2 and 3 colours, inlay, looping the yarn with a knitting pin or just pulling it out as well as using locks of fleece or snippets of yarn to add texture. After a fairly rigorous hand wash I was pleased to see that the locks of fleece had felted enough to stay in the cloth but not so much that they lost the fleecey look. I must say that I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. Two more Saori books have arrived in the post and I am now weaving some Saori cloth to make a skirt with. Having been very sceptical about this form of weaving before I can know understand why people do it......it's fun and liberating! My big fault is that I dither. The number of times I have gone into my workroom with ideas for projects but came away feeling frustrated that I couldn't decide what to do first and felt like putting all my stuff in a huge pile and burning it! Choices of what yarn, what pattern, what colour, have I got enough yarn etc. etc. etc. But with this form of weaving I just played and I think that is sometimes difficult to do especially when you have been brought up as a child not to waste anything. Everything you make has to "be" something. Why have I got a humungous pile of "stuff" if I never do anything with it? I also think that the Saori idea will help with my more traditional style of weaving and that I will not get too indecisive in future. We will have to see!

 

New Year Catch Up....... new books, new techniques and a new feline friend.

Where does the time go? We are already well into the new year and it has been ages since I felt inclined to blog. Not that there has been much to share....the usual pre-Christmas stuff after a few weeks of getting all the outside jobs done before the weather closed in. So far the winter has been mild and wet with more than the usual gales. However, last week we did get a day of snow ( all of 2 inches!) but I did get out and about and take some photos.

 

 

By the next morning most of the snow near us had melted leaving only the distant hills covered in white.

I have recently started an online Tapestry Weaving class with Rebecca Mezoff . I have attempted tapestry weaving quite a few times over the years since I started spinning but I never got very far. I suspect this was due in part to the equipment as we were shown how using a simple wooden frame and basically string for warp! This is my sample so far.

 

 

I'm using a Mirrix tapestry loom borrowed from my friend Helen and I have eventually got the hang of it as it is quite fiddly to set up. I'm using 12/6 seine twine for warp as recommended by Rebecca and the weft yarn is from Weavers Bazaar although my aim ( if I like tapestry by the end of the course!) is to spin my own yarn and use that.

The other new-to-me technique is Saori weaving. Now, don't get me wrong, I still love "traditional" weaving, I'm a big fan of twills and overshot and one day I WILL weave that overshot coverlet! But last year at Wonderwool Wales I saw a stand demonstrating the Saori style or freestyle weaving. I have my doubts that a lot of this type of weaving will not stand any use and I dread to think what it will look like if it ever goes near a washing machine! But I'm very attracted to the use of colour and texture and after quite a bit of dithering I have eventually bought the book!

 

 

It does have some great ideas to make your own clothes and the instructions for setting the loom up are very comprehensive, so if you were a new weaver and followed this book you would be set on the right track. I also go along with the philosophy behind the Saori technique but I still think some of the weaving looks a bit slap-dash or shoddy. So I have set up my loom with a black lambswool warp sett at 20 epi and threaded in a Rosepath Twill  to play with yarns and colour and not to worry about patterns too much.

 

 

 I have pulled out lots of yarn from my HUGE stash and got stuck in! A lot of the yarn is some of my hand spun and I worked out that it must be nearly 20 years since I spun it up, so it's about time I used it!

I'm not thinking about what to make with the finished fabric as I just want to enjoy the weaving at the moment, but I would like to make some of my own clothes to wear to the fibre shows this year. To this end I purchased a couple of interesting books recently and it is my intention to use them as guides to sewing my own clothes from my hand woven fabric as I still break into a cold sweat at the idea of dressmaking after an unhappy time sewing at school. I only have to think of paper dress patterns and the vision of Mrs Hodby rises before my eyes!

 

The first book ( on the left) is "Weave, Knit, Wear" by Judith Shangold. It's packed with ideas for clothes that can be woven on a Rigid Heddle loom but can also by used by multi-shaft weavers too.

 

 

The second book is "Get Weaving" by Sarah Howard and Elisabeth Kendrick which is also aimed at the RH weaver but would also give a multi-shaft weaver some simple ideas for making clothes.

 

 

 

And finally meet Humphrey our new feline friend....

 

 

Humphrey has been staying with us since about September when he would sit with us in the garden. After a couple of days his owners (neighbours) called around to see if we had their cat. They took him back home three times during the week but Humphrey came back the next day. It appears that they had got a couple of new kittens and as one had got older he had taken a strong dislike to Humphrey causing him to leave home. He has settled in well with us as you can see, taking pride of place on the sofa, my side of the sofa where I sit at my spinning wheel I might add, and has even charmed the men of the house (and they are tough nuts to crack!) 

Bristol Wool Fair

Well I have just about recovered from another busy weekend helping my good friend Helen at the very first Bristol Wool Fair. What a great time we had too! The weather was sunny and quite warm with only one heavy shower of rain on Saturday morning, but that didn't spoil things one little bit. We met some of our fellow stallholders we see at the others shows we do and met lots of new friends as well.

 

Helen had an Ashford Sample It loom warped up and demonstrated weaving on it which attracted a lot of attention. The men (and one boy!) were fascinated by the mechanics of weaving whilst the ladies/girls liked the colours and sparkly bits! All we were keen to do was pass on the message to give weaving a try!

 

 

Of course I had to make a few purchases while I had the chance. Here are just a few choice items....

 

 

Pirkka-lanka yarn from Finland to knit a shawl with and some Lithuanian linen from Midwinter Yarns.

 

Some merino/silk fibre and some dyed carrier rods from Wheeldale Woolcrafts. I also bought some wool blanket bundles for rug making from Phillipa too.

 

 

And a selection of wool rovings from Adelaide Walker. As I said at the top of this post I had a great time and look forward to next years event. I'm off on my travels again this weekend as I'm heading north into Yorkshire for the Reeth Rug Retreat. This a new thing for me especially as we are staying in a Youth Hostel. I'm sure I'll have lots to say in my next post. Until then....Happy Crafting.