2009 - 2010 Happy New Year

My last posting this year. I cannot believe it will be 2010 in a few hours time, it seems like yesterday that we were preparing for the new millennium and fearing what it might do to our computers.
In Holland the tradition is to eat oliebollen en appelflappen on New Year's Eve. Have a look at this site though I think the recipe is slightly adapted as I think there is no ginger in oliebollen but raisins, but you can see what they look like.I've never made them myself but rather buy them :-) to smelly to bake them is my excuse.
The appelflappen are my favourite, made very thinly. My father's wife used to make them really nice like that.

There is already lots of fireworks been fired, what a pest that is. Youngsters who like to thow them when you are just passing and you get a real fright. I do watch the fireworks at midnight but we have never bought any ourselves. I just heard that fireworks for 68 million euro have been sold this year, 2 million more than last year. What a waste and the cats always get very upset.

2010 is going to be a weaving year I have decided. It is now 4 years ago that I started with the 2 year HNC Handloom Textile Design Course at Bradford College but I had to stop after one year. When unexpected things happen around you I find it difficult to be creative. But it was good to meet up with so many talented weavers and keeping in touch with them like Doni and Cally.
So this seems to be the right time to put weaving on top of the agenda and push myself further. My next (new) course will be on January 9th about colour and weaving, also given by Marian Stubenitsky.
I started this blog a year ago on 1st of January to keep track of my weaving. I never envisaged to meeting so many other bloggers, very inspiring. Thank you for stopping by and leaving comments.
Tomorrow will be Woodyarn's first aniversary.

Have a Happy New Years Eve and wishing you all a wonderful creative 2010.

Deflected double weaving

Here is the threading for my deflected double weave warp. We had to make 3 different design threading's in the warp so that is what I did. My warp is 22,5cm wide making each designs 7,5cm.
I have a dark blue on shaft 1-4 and a lighter blue on shaft 5-8. (weaving is like the threading)

The liftplan is where the playing starts, I've started to draw different possibilities but there are so many, so this is not all that is possible. At the moment I'm weaving number 4.

It will become interesting after this as different things will start to happen. At the moment the whole width is the same, but when only part is lifted out of the way, starting at number 5 where shaft 1 and 2 are lifted out of the way when weaving shaft 4-8. This will be the result and you can see clearly that there are 3 different designs in the warp, left, centre and right:

So far, my weaving looks like this: (liftplan numbers 1-4).
Front number is like back number 2 (horizontal stripes), front number 2 is like back number 1 (vertical stripes). The same with 3 and 4 (one side is dark, the other light).
Photos as on the loom and close up's.

Pressing

I'm a happy girl today, my iron press arrived! :-)
Ever since Laura mentioned hard pressing I've been looking around to find one. In Holland you just do not see them so, this one comes from the UK.
I pressed one of the scarves and oh what a difference!
Here are all the "unpressed" scarves.

Below a photo of a "pressed' (right) and an "unpressed" (left) scarf but you cannot see much unfortunately. It is the feel that is so different.

I also pressed this cloth and that too is so much softer. It is now a proper cloth. Hopefully the threads will not pull so easily now.

And the bonus is that I can press other things, not just my weaving. May be dresses would be easier to use an iron but things like t-shirts and shirts are just fine to do (I tried already) and of course the bigger items like bedding and table cloths will be sooooo much easier to do now.

Starting deflected double weaving

I've finished the warping and the first cm is woven.

 In the end I did take the raddle of the Leclerc loom as I did not need it there any longer and I found some other lease sticks, so I could start with warping the Thumm loom. This is a 16 shaft table loom but I'm only using 8 shafts for this warp. For the deflected double weaving I need a closer sett so I have warped 16 threads/cm with a width of 22,5 cm. I feel this is a good sample width but I have made the warp long enough so that I can make a scarf in the end.

But there are so many possibilities with this that I might need all of the warp.
Here are some sample drawings with just 2 colours, same threading but different shaft lifting. These are just some possibilities, there are more!
I'm really looking forward to weaving this warp.

Generations

We had the family around on Boxing Day as the forecast was black ice for Christmas Day. In the end it was all a lot better than forecasted, but better safe than sorry, so we had changed our family gathering to Saturday.

I feel we were very fortunate again to have both our grandchildren and my father visiting us this Christmas, young and old together. The grandchildren are 4 and 2 years old and my father will be 99 in 16 days time. Our grandson has named my father opa-opa (Dutch for granddad, but doubled up) to make a difference with his granddad. How children can come up with simple solutions :-)

Here they are helping opa-opa with opening a present ;-)

My warp is made, now I have to find a way of getting it on my Thumm loom, as I have the raddle and lease sticks still in use on the Leclerc loom. Tomorrow is another day!

Nostalgia

I'm winding my next warp (using Venne 34/2 cotton yarn) at the moment for the deflected double weaving.

Whilst winding the warp I'm listening on the radio to this at http://top2009.radio2.nl/.  Mostly old but also recent music is coming by at the Top 2000, mostly English but also Dutch, French, German, Italian and more. You can read a bit of history here how it all started. It is one way of introducing youngsters to music their parents used to listen to ;-) and becoming addicted themselves as it is now the 11th year it is being played. This year's list can be seen here and the music played this hour can be seen here.
Not all the music is my own choice but overall it is really nice to hear so many oldies in such a short space of time. The Beatles top the chart with the most entries, closely followed by The Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson in third place. The oldest entry is from 1936 Billie Holiday with Summertime.

Merry Christmas

Wishing everyone who is stopping by

a Merry Christmas

Shuttles

I had some comments about weaving with 9 shuttles.
I seem to have gathered that amount (I have some others too) with looms that I have bought and at sales, so most have had a home before I had them :-)
I discovered that all these happen to be Glimakra shuttles.

The ones that I used in the corduroy weaving are these:

You can see how they all vary in size.

Looking from the side you can also see that they differ in height:

making some very light indeed and the lowest ones only take a small amount of yarn on a bobbin.

This shuttle is the highest and heaviest of the ones shown, is open and has rollers at the bottom:

I specially like weaving with this one when it is a wider cloth that I'm weaving.

More shuttles that I like using are these:

I have added the largest and smallest shuttle to give an idea of size. I have been using these double shuttles for some of the corduroy weaving. They also hold the smallest bobbin yarns from Venne,  mini reels. I find this very handy as there are many colours available.

I'm in the proces of winding a warp for deflected double weaving using Venne cotton yarn shown in the link above. With Christmas only a few days away I might not get it finished and warped as I had hoped doing.

Today the temperature is above zero so the snow is melting but there is enough of it (we had more than 20cm fall) so it will take a while for it all to go and temperatures are falling again later.
 Yesterday and today:

Not a good time to go out on the road, when to do my Christmas shopping?!?!?

Still Snowing

It has been snowing on and off all day. It looks really pretty out, as long as you do not need to go anywhere.I was ok going out yesterday to my weaving class. Very inspiring, the deflected double weave!

More corduroy

I've cut off the third sample and there is still lots of warp left to weave......I had re-threaded like this, double corduroy,and that makes interesting weaving. Here the loops overlap one and other. Many different options are possible. Again I have used odd yarns for weft. Also added some glitter, after all it is December!

A close-up of the first part of this sample:
It was woven like the shown threading above.

This is a close-up of the middle part of this sample:The yellow/blue and the top beige/brown in this bit of the sample are woven like this:The bit in-between was woven like this:giving horizontal stripes. You can see at the back of the sample how different it looks.

This is a close-up of the last part of the sample:
The bottom part (green/pink) is woven like the first part of the sample.
The turquoise/blue is double sided, meaning that you get loops on both sides. I have not cut the loops on the back part of this weaving.The top part of this sample had to be woven with 9 shuttles! I really had to think what to use next each time. Again I have not cut the loops on the back part of the sample.I quite like the last bit of this sample but with 9 shuttles it is slow weaving. I may re-thread the warp again.
There is whole chapter in Peter Collingwoods book "The Techniques of Rug Weaving" about this type of weaving. This link will bring you to the part where the corduroy chapter is written.

Tomorrow I start another course with Marian Stubenitsky this time on deflected double weaving. Last winter I did a double weaving course with her.
I hope the roads will be ok regarding wintry conditions as it is about an hours drive for me from where I live under normal conditions.
I had hoped to have finished this narrow warp for corduroy weaving before starting with this 3 day course (last course day in early April). I have also enrolled on a 5 day colour course for weaving with her starting in January (ending in May). I'm hoping to combine the colour course into the deflected double weaving.

Colour in December

Sue of Life Looms Large has been busy with her camera for a while now. Since October she has challenged others to also show photos. I missed October and I was to late with the November challenge but for December she is challenging us to find colour. Well, it is all white around us at the moment, but I did find some colour!The brambles that did not ripen. I left them on, thinking that the birds might want them. So far they have not touched them.
Earlier this month, when seeing flowers everywhere, I took this picture of our holly. I can hardly see the berries at the moment as the bush is all covered up with snowbut I have seen the birds in it, so by the time the snow has melted I'm sure the berries will all have gone. To late now to get a branch as decoration indoors........

I hope the birds will find this to eat:

Snow

We had snow overnight! I tried to find the snowdrops in the snow but they are totally covered.Eating in the garden will have to wait until the sun is back :-)Scruffy did go outside but was back indoors very quickly......

Corduroy

I'm slowly getting on with the corduroy weaving. For weft yarn I'm using odd bobbins and found some cones that I thought would be useless for weaving but hé for the loops they would be ok!
So far I have finished 2 samples.
After the first sample I cut it of the loom (you can see that I did not cut all the loops, it is nice to play with that) and re-threaded as I wanted to try something different like this:
The result is that there are less loops, not sure if it would work (has it become to predictable?) but I just wanted to try it out. It just depends what you are weaving for.
After this sample, I cut it of the loom again and re-threaded for the double corduroy like this:Here I'm using the yarns, all cotton, that I thought was no good. The green just breaks up very quickly but used in the loops it would be ok. I've combined them with a bit of glitter yarn.
Here you can see how I cut the double corduroy, the loops overlap one and other so you have to be very precise to find the right row for cutting. I've tried to show you in a sequence of photos how it works.

Yesterday was Sinterklaas in Holland. You can read more about it here. I had hoped to have gone to the grandchildren but I'm stuck down with a bad cold at the moment so had to stay home. But I did see them 2 weeks ago when we went together to see Sinterklaas who happened to visit their village hall that day! (They are both in the foreground in this picture)

Winter?

It is December and what a surprise to find the first snowdrop in the garden yesterday!But not just a snowdrop, the rose is still flowering, and the lavender too.Flowers in the rosemary with lots of new buds.The delphinium is also producing a new shoot!Is this Winter?