Just a twirly sort of day yesterday. Winding bobbins, shuttles, warp chains and plying. Still have some tapestry bobbins and a stick shuttle to wind, then I’m ready to thread the loom and paint some more! Very colourful blanket coming up.
As I was finishing the muted yarn I finally, after two years of just looking at the fiber, figured out how I would have really liked to spin and ply it! Isn’t that just typical…. Where’s that Ctrl+Z when you need it?
Not really happy with any of these yarns, but now they’re done and that’s how it goes.
During breaks I get to play with this:
Big brown pony is recovering from a monster abscess in his left hind hoof. Very ouchy, swelly and gooey. I’ll spare you the sight.
I knew when I made the purple warp that it was too long for my swift, which only takes 2 meters. And I didn’t make a cross, so I had to wind it into a ball somehow!
Well, I have the long poles for warping. They have holes in them the same size as the rods I used for the swift, including the one in the middle! I have clamps, coffee, sleepy kittens, what could go wrong?
So anyway, enough of that, I’m still playing with paint these days, just had to try this out before calling on the help of a person with long arms.
I love it when things can be made from the “what’s in the woodshed” principle as well as having more than one purpose. I’ve previously shown you my blending hackle, here it is without fun fur on. I made the tines from welding rods and sharpened each one by hand, they’re very strong:
I also have a homemade swift. I tend to never get to the point where I polish and paint these contraptions, although I do love beautiful tools. I’m simply too busy using them, that’s all, and I know I’m not much of a carpenter anyway.
I use the pegs from the swift with these crude pieces of lumber to warp both directly and – eventually – indirectly. In summer I’m going to find a wall space outside to fix them vertically, as this will make running the yarn back and forth much easier on my back than leaning over the table.
direct warping a wide loom with multiple pegs
Measuring a 3 m. à skein for space dyeing a pooling warp (or so the plan goes). By moving the pegs AND the bars further apart, I can make virtually any length of warp I desire, there are 8 pegs total. One can hold the cone of yarn!
I can also use the pegs and bars to strap poles onto if I want to make a navajo style warp for my large tapestry loom.
I meant to include an image of my homemade tapestry loom, but we ran into a small problem and didn’t get it finished on Sunday. I’m going to have a look at it and see if I can come up with a new idea for the last bit. It’s functional as it is, but I want to include multiple leash rods I think they’re called. Homemade shedding device kinda thing.
I also made a few spindles before I got my wheel. I don’t use them very often now I have to admit, but they work very well, especially the 14 g which I used to make a lace shawl. I too dream of Goldings and Bosworths, but I’d rather have more fiber.
To get the motivational kick in the butt for this tapestry adventure, I’ve signed up for the Tapestry Diary weave-along on Ravelry. I don’t have a plan, but isn’t that the whole point of a diary? Some freeform flowing shapes are probably what’s going to happen after going through and discarding a number of calculations and ideas involving squares or cartoons and various shapes and choices of yarn.
And it did make me go and warp up ALL the looms actually, as I’ve hinted already here. Subsequently finding all the flaws on both homemade looms, so they are being fixed after a bit of brainstorming and a visit to the lumber yard + farm machinery / ironmonger (I just LOVE that kind of stores) for doodads.
a bag of doodads
Anyway, I haven’t really gotten seriously started, but the February portion ended up as a commentary on the winter weather and view. Dark ploughed fields and half dead grass. I managed to get some structure for the furrows, even making them smaller at the top for a bit of perspective, but of course you can hardly see it with a dark brown yarn (My handspun Shetland from the SAL sweater).
And then I thought I might use this cartoon I made from an old photo of big brown pony to put in the middle of it all, year of the horse and that. Proper diary. 😉 I may however stretch his nose a little forward, as I think this has a slightly restrained feel to it – and the “canvas” is landscape format anyway.
And I just realized, tapestry and weaving is where I’m going to suffer the most with my varied colour choices. Because you can always mix your paints differently, photographed object are what they are unless you run them by Photoshop, but every time I come up with a new fiber image theme I need to get more yarn!! Ouch on the budget. I need hope to get natural skeins by the kilo(s), so I can just dye to my heart’s content. Spinning for tapestry may happen eventually, but that also takes a toll on the time budget (and I don’t have a lot of longwools fiber stocked anyway). Especially if you want to do multi thread blending, meaning laceweight yarn or thinner, which takes forever to spin. Not logical if you’re trying to make the most of your playtime. Then spinning becomes tedious production and costs way more in hours than yarn to dye for. No, spinning is for the fun yarn.
I don’t know yet if I prefer the freeform invent as you go tapestry or the more traditional stringent method of designing first, I think perhaps the latter, because the diary has been giving me so much trouble, but maybe with experience it will change.
I’ve also spent an insane amount of time debating which project from my list to put on the rigid heddle loom first, redesigning some ideas endlessly (hello IC?), calculating yardage since I have only just enough or barely of some of the yarns. Discard, use other yarn, change design on FO? Especially the one project with insanely expensive linen yarn…
So I decided to just start with the ones that are definitely fixed to simply get more hands on experience, even if they’re not “timely”. I also realized, after dying the yarn and all for a specific project that needed the same warp and weft, THAT I HAD NOT TESTED IT FOR STRENGTH!! What an idjit. It’s 1 ply. It so drifts apart = broken warp threads all over for sure. And that was even for a mini-series of image-cloths! At least I remembered before getting started, so now I’m doing ONE test with a stronger warp in a similar colour, just to get it out of my hair (clasped weft), but I won’t get the multicolour warp I had planned, it has to be grey all over. I’m going to have to translate that idea to tapestry if I want to make it. Something with fog, trees and mountains in a very light, open cloth to then be embroidered. Well, later when I have other yarns, or in another medium. The dyed yarn will be used – somehow.
I have to keep saying to myself “This is a test, this is just the first”. Not so much the landscape in my head as simply an exercise in concave and convex, in using hands and paying attention to selvedges. It won’t be as open as all that either, this yarn is sticky.
Hopefully I’ll learn. Next week I may show you some of my homemade tools.
Technically it’s not tapestry, so what do we call it, pictorial weaving?
Did a real live yarn shopping trip to the village to see if they had a bargain I could use for felted cat beds. So I ended up with this lot too, for another of those sweater dresses I like to use around the house in winter. I was actually looking for something neutral, but there wasn’t any just right in the perfect fiber and thickness. I didn’t want anything with tiny needles to take me 4 years of knitting!
And in the 2 kr. ($0.37 / â¬0.27 / £ 0.22) button tray I found these, which I think could become tapestry bobbins when glued to a dowel.
Last, but not least, I bought this really silly yarn for some kind of trim or Saori weaving. Or whatever. You know, the colour thing. Texture.
