I’ve been working on sewing patterns again, after not making any trousers from the muslins I developed last year – I wanted to be sure I didn’t grow again this winter and would be unable to wear them the coming summer! My handwoven fabric takes too long to make to be used just once, and I could just buy t-shirts, but then why would I weave? I don’t use scarves, tablecloths or many of the other things I could think of making. And G has declared that he does not want his sofa filled with hippie weirdo COLOURFUL cushions, blech! And for some reason, although fashion does nothing for me, I’m quite fascinated with fabrics and drape and keep collecting images of flowing, colourful clothes. In the end I had to make a Pinboard so that I can spot any personal trends after a while, in addition to the one I keep for clothes from panels. (We’ll get back to that eventually)
Category: Show-and-tell
Pattern testing
For the last couple of months I’ve spent a lot of time weaving on the computer. Making endless variations of patterns for all 12 shafts, exploring how to enlarge them (rather than just choose a thicker yarn), working from scratch or from downloaded files.
But I wanted to see what it looked like with yarn rather than pixels, so I made a narrow wool warp and planned to do maybe 50 cm of each draft to have a bit of fabric for a sample book and perhaps sew some pincusions or whatever. I should have doubled it in length however because of course I continued learning and developing after I had begun weaving, so after a while my samples became 30, then 25 cm long and as I got to the part where I needed to cut and rethread after each draft as well as running out of yarn, even shorter. Threading errors began to appear because I hurried through, etc. etc.
Waffle weave towels
5 shaft / 6 treadle pattern
60 x 90 cm on loom + hems
55 x 82 cm off loom
40 x 60 cm hot washed and tumbled
All the old stained hand towels are moving to the loft or garage, then I’ll see if I need to make more new ones.
I knew I was probably making a mistake on the hems, making them flare too much, but didn’t have enough treadles to make a sensible pattern and didn’t want to change the tie up between each towel.
As for my threading mistake, the result on the one woven with the mistake and the two others where I removed 4 threads getting a more open spacing in that spot was that the first one WITH the extra threads has the least visible error, so I should have kept it that way.
Waffles:
One of the things I’m working on right now, when I’m not elbowing my way through a month’s backlog of house and other cleaning. Mucking is exactly the appropriate word! I hope it won’t land me with another month long backache, because then it’ll just be a selfperpetuating nightmare, won’t it. 😉
Loom extension
I’ve long wanted a few more pattern options on my Lervad no. 9 – not as much since I got the Glimåkra, but still. 8 shafts would require a lot of remodelling (for instance I would have loved to extend all the lamms), so I settled for 6. That means I can work with supplemental warps in designs, at least 3 variations of waffle weave, turned 2/1 twill blocks just to mention a few of the ideas I’ve had over the years.