More sampling, Textile Festival and UK travel

I'm weaving another colour warp, this time with blues and a red.

(tabby sample, left side is unfinished, right side washed and pressed)
I had hoped to have finished the warp today but it will now have to wait until next week as I'm leaving for the UK tomorrow morning.
Today I went to Leiden where they have a Textile Festival. The website is only in Dutch unfortunately. There was so much to see, to much to take in. But it was an enjoyable day. The main festival was in the Pieterskerk (church) but at about 30 different locations were exhibitions. I only managed to go to 2 different extra locations. That was as much as I could manage. We went with our local Guild but we split up in small groups. It will be nice to exchange what we have seen today at our next meeting in April.

Cross twill samples

I have finished the warp and was able to weave 5 more sample + a very small one. Having cut the samples of this warp twice has left me with less warp to weave but it was a good lesson to see that the sett was correct for the twill. Had I gone on weaving after the plain weave at the same sett as the plain weave, the twill weaving would not have been as it has come out now.

I have woven one sample twice so that I can keep an unfinished and a finishes sample. You have to feel the difference! The unfinished one feels hard but the finished one is nice and soft.
So these are a good addition towards my sample archive.

Top is the finished sample, bottom the unfinished one. Left are the front and right are the back of the samples. This is a cross twill. Here part of the drawing:

Spring is on it's way, they are forecasting 15C this week, huray!!!

Sett for twill weaving

When I started weaving the twill samples I just felt that the sett was not quite right. So I made some small samples, cut them of and washed them to see what would happen. The first sample I started by weaving far to tight so after a few centimeters I changed the beat and it looked as if it was far to loose. The warp is threaded in the reed like this: 3-4-3-4 (4 openings per cm) and the bundles of the warp threads were so visible during weaving, I just thought it would not be ok. But having washed them they look allright.
The samples are woven 3/1 twill and the smallest one is a 3/1 cross twill

Left side is the front side and right the back. I used one warp colour in each sample as weft. I have not used the lightes warp colour yet. Not sure how much warp is left having cut twice, but I will keep on weaving now that I know that after washing it comes allright.

More on colour

I've now been to 2 of the 5 colour course days. It is such an eye opener to really look at colour. We are also painting our own colour wheel by mixing paint colours ourself. Next time we should finish this assignment, I find it not easy at all to get the right colours. We are using 2 reds, 2 blues and 2 yellows + black & white for the mixing.
We have also been playing with all the different colours that the Venne cotton yarn comes in. In 2 groups we had to make some kind of order in the colours. We found that there were some colours that did not fit in very easy. (like not fitting in with green or blue, yet they did look like green or blue)
It was a fun exercise to do together.

The home assignment is to work with 3 colours that we like and being close together + 1 colour that is an opposite. We had to make a yarn winding these colours for a warp idea.

I have gone for natural colours + a purple and I've just finished the plain weave samples, weaving the weft as the warp colour order. One I have washed (sample on the right side) and the other I will keep unwashed for my record keeping archive.

 The rest of the warp will be woven in a 3/1 twill + 3/1 cross twill, weaving with just one weft colour.

We have had some lovely sunny days these last few days and it gave a feeling of Spring arriving may be. But oh now, we have more snow forecasted for this weekend and freezing temperatures. A good excuse to stay indoors and do more weaving.....