Thursday, September 17, 2009

Wet finished cloth

The wet finished cloth feels lovely. It has shrunk length way but not very much, the width has almost stayed the same. So I now have a woven cloth of about 168x53cm. I made a compilation of the yarn, warp, weft and cloth:For the moment I'll just enjoy looking at this cloth before cutting into it!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Header fabric

Peg commented on the fabric in the header so I thought to show a bit more. It was a scarf that I made for my eldest daughter about 4 years ago.
The warp was cotton.The weft was silk. The woven pattern came from Fiberworks PCW called Tumbling Blocks on 16 shafts. I don't have a good picture of the scarf itself.

I like this tumbling blocks pattern and have used it for other scarves too but these were woolen scarves with weft yarn Noro Kuryeon. Here is one of them:

Finished silk warp

I've finished weaving the silk warp and it feels lovely!
I've still to wet finish the cloth. The weft yarn being a mix of wool/silk/cashmere I'm sure it will be even softer after washing. The warp yarn that I had to cut of was 30cm and being double at the end I now have 210x 60cm leftover yarn. I'm sure I can use this as weft yarn at some point.
The finished cloth is about 1,70cm x 50cm before washing.
Now I have to find a pattern to make my sleeveless jacket.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Weaving my silk yarn

I've started weaving my silk warp. It took me some time to get ready for weaving as I had opted for adding some extra yarn to the silk like this:This way I would have the least waste of the silk yarn. When I started to weave with different yarns I found that I had made threading mistakes in the heddles. I made some temporary heddles from cotton yarn:The weaving with different yarns was to look what yarns would work as weft yarn but also which colour would be good to use.In the end I have chosen as weft this yarn. And for weaving I have opted for this one.
The network drafting means a lot of different sequences of the treadles are used so I have made myself a small chart to keep up with what I'm doing.There are 8 shafts and 8 treadles for the network pattern. My loom has 10 treadles. So I named lifting 1 to 8 to treadles 2 to 9 as 1 and 10 were reserved for tabby. I use a clothes peg for keeping up with the sequence I'm weaving.
So this

now looks like this
I still find that the yarn has a lot of fluff but it seems to be ok with the weaving so far. I'm not sure if this is normal for silk yarn.
Finally, here a photo of the first bit of weaving:

Sunday, September 06, 2009

New warp from dyed yarn

I'm in the process of setting up my next warp on the loom.
It is the skein that I dyed the injection way.It has different colours red and blue in it.
I made the warp in 2 parts and found that the first part was more red and the next one more towards the blue. Now that it is on the loom this is visible.
I had problems with this yarn, it was sticking together very much but with patience I moved along ok with the yarn. It meant untangling the threads, one by one.On the left you can see that the yarn is snarling up, on the right you can see what that does with the yarn. I have now finished this process and also threaded through the heddles.
Not having used silk for a long time, it takes getting used to again after weaving with cotton or cottolin.

But I had to put the warping on hold as we had the family over today for DH's birthday tomorrow, so I made a cake last night. It is one of my favorites by Rachel Allen from her book Rachel's Food for Living: Chocolate Amaretti CakeThe cake is made with dark chocolate (70%), Amaretti biscuits, flaked slivered almonds, sugar, butter, eggs and zest of an orange.

I'm hoping that I'll get on with the warping quickly so that I can start weaving very shortly. I had a long think about what I wanted to weave. One skeins is about 950 meters long and I decided I want to weave some cloth to make a sleeveless vest from it. I've used a network drafting from Thrilling Twills, a new to me drafting but I think it will work just the way I want for this skein. I'm still contemplating between these 2 different ways:
The threading is the same but the weaving is different, so I still have some time to make up my mind which one I will choose in the end. :-)
Another thing is to sample with weft yarn but I do not want to loose to much warp yarn doing this. I'm thinking of using linen yarn for weft, I have just the right colour I think. But I will sample to find out what works best.
More when I have started my sampling.