Weaving again

Over a month since I last wove. I want to weave but I seem to have "excuses" not to be weaving. So, to get back into weaving I have made a simple woollen warp and threaded a straight draw 1-8 on my Leclerc loom. I'm weaving scarves and should have enough warp for 2.
The weft yarn is a bourette silk yarn dyed at Summer School this Summer and a plain silk yarn that I had in my stash but colourwise goes with this dyed yarn. The dyeing method was a ball placed in a dish with one colour, fixing colour, turning ball over and dyed another colour on the other side, fixing again. I hope I have enough for one scarf with this weft yarn.
I have more but that is another colour, more towards blue. The balls shown here is not how they came out of the dye bath! I made skeins after dyeing and rewound them into balls after the skeins were dry. So, the more intense colour is in the middle of the balls now. I cannot wait to find out how it will weave up in the scarf.

Here a picture of the first few woven inches of the first scarf. If I find that my yarn is running out to quickly for the first scarf I will mingle in some of the other colour.



It is good to be weaving again after more than 4 weeks non-weaving!!

Colour in the garden

We have an Amelanchier in our garden and every season has it's charm with this tree. After the winter the white flowers are a joy to see in Spring, next come the berries. They are tasty but the birds think so too and they are soon eaten up by them. And now the leaves are turning into beautiful Autumn colours. Come Winter I always hang birdfeed in the tree.
The Holly on the left in the photo is full of berries this year, no doubt the birds will find them when the weather gets colder. The Rosemary in the front is full of flowers again, having flowered this Spring too.
Today is another sunny day, what a joy!

Spinning and more

I've been spinning on an irregular basis and I had lots of different skeins (wool, silk, wool/silk) in a bag with the thought that I will weave with them one day. I have now made balls from them (apart from 2 skeins that are still singles) and here is the collection. My own observation is that I tend to spin colours in a range of blue-purple-pink-yellow. Interesting observation. I thought that I had made an effort to get away from blue-purple-pink but I see no green or red.
I've not made up my mind if I will weave with the yarns or may be knit. The Online Guild is having a Domino/Patchwork workshop this month by Fiona Moir. It is very tempting to join in with these yarns.

It's also my birthday today
and in the post arrived this from Italy:

The scarf feels lovely and soft. The colour is not true in the photo, where it looks a bit purple but it is more towards red from the cochineal. What a lovely surprise!

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!

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.

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: