Finished weaving

This morning I finished the final placemat (#9) and as has become the tradition, was handed a glass of wine to celebrate :-)

Finished weaving...

I remembered from the last placemats that the linen warp became increasingly difficult to make a shed - with a combination of the lack of stretch in the linen and the small amount of warp left.  While I couldn't solve the latter problem the 'sagging' of certain warp threads was solved by progressively moving the shafts up one link in the chain that supports them.  I started about 1/2 way through the placemat by raising #8 then each time I wound on I raised the next inwards (7 then 6 was enough to solve the problem).
 
Tomorrow I'll be sewing the ends before cutting them apart and hand hemming them.  Then they go in the wash, then freezer, then a good hard iron.  Hopefully they will turn out as soft and shiny as the first ones.

Adding colour

The Colours of New Zealand Placemat borrow from the colours found in our paua shell (abalone here in the US).  The process starts by painting dye onto linen wrapped around a card.

Dyed warp

 The process (following the instructions with the Procion dyes from Dharma Trading Co.) is straight forward and after the rinse and a quick dry (with a hair dryer) it is ready to put onto bobbins.

Bobbins ready to go

 The mix on the bobbins starts to show what the eventual stripe will be like.

Stripe woven in

Back to weaving - placemat #8 underway.

Not 1 but 2

The weaving of the Colours of New Zealand Placemats is going well - up to number 7 at this stage, but then comes along the first broken warp thread.  The last placemats I did, I recall I had quite a few to contend with so had been thinking myself fairly lucky and wondering if the source and processing of this lot (half-bleached instead of fully bleached) might have made the difference.  I hadn't even made it half way through that thought and the next warp thread broke!!

Repairs were quickly set up (extra length on the warp thread and pinned into the weft down from the fell line).  Coincidentally the first break occured as I wound on a bit of tension ready to start the next placemat (in the photo below the blue thread is my 'cut' line between each placemat).

'Fixed' broken warp thread ready to weave in.

The second breakage was my floating selvedge - it must have worn on a weak spot.  I anchored it back in the same way, but will need to do some repairs to the edge of this placemat as without the tension of the selvedge the weft shots around the break have gone a bit wonky.

The other thing that has slowed me down a fraction (although I confess to only weaving in the the 'holiday mode' - two or three hours a day at most :-) was running out of dyed weft half way through the first stripe of placemat number 8.

Taking a pause on placemat #8

 I wound some more yarn onto the card and soaked it and Anne has now painted it.  Ready for a full day of weaving tomorrow to finish off the run and then try some experiments with what is left on the warp, which I'm not too sure of as I forgot (again) to allow for the fact that I don't measure these placemats exactly, but rather begin/end/place the stripes based on where the pattern (62 weft shots) is.

Other activity for the day was - more batts carded - the first bag is full (of 2 oz batts) and the flicked locks bag is hardly showing a dent!!  I was able to spin for an hour on some singles that will make 2-ply for the next Right Side of the Bed Rug.  The next spinning (actually concurrent) is more Clun Forest combed top to make up more skeins for either sale or the making of a cable jersey - I have a ways to go (and have to find a knitter).

Lots of Clun Forest batts

Off out tonight to another live band - I could get used to this holiday lifestyle...

Boxing Day

A great day for being indoors...  When I first got up it looked quite nice out - then about an hour later the snow/sleet/rain mix started and kept up for an hour or two.  It was nice to be indoors with no need to head outside at all.

 2 more placemats completed.

Yarn painted for the next lot of stripes

Anne painting yarn

The random-ish colours on the placemat are produced through a combination of the length of the 'painted' pattern - which is twice as wide as seen here (the back is a close copy of this side) - and the width of the placemat plus the design (a 'fancy' twill).  The last factor means that even if perfectly aligned for width the 'pattern' would vary from shot to shot as the ratio of weft/warp crosses changes across the 62 shots that make up the pattern.  Hence the choice of painting a random colour effect in the first place and letting the design randomise it further. The dyed yarn will be ready tomorrow morning to wash out the residue dye and I'll be setting up the drum carder for a long session producing batts.

Also Anne is about to embark on some drum carding after finally finishing the huge bag of washed Clun Forest locks. 

Flicked locks

Over quite a few months of flicking sessions there is now nearly 7lbs of flicked locks ready to run through the drum carder where they come out superbly, as the flicking removes almost all the left over VM, and sets up the locks perfectly so that they only need a couple of runs through the drum carder to produce ready to spin 2 oz batts. 

For a break we may go and see 'Lincoln' - one of the movies on our to see list. 

Hopefully the weather has picked up a bit tomorrow.

One down

Despite the late start today - Christmas Day (a sleep in, then presents, then breakfast) good progress on weaving the Colours of NZ placemats with the first (trial) one now finished.

Number 1 finished

For the next placemats I will be adding some more length before the stripe to allow for a hem and still keep the 16" length.  This one will be a half inch shorter.

With this much finished it is now time to go and stretch out on the couch and watch a movie and get back to the weaving tomorrow.

Christmas Eve weaving

Most of the day has been spent getting ready for the arrival of the Washington part of the family - we are hosting the gathering this year, our last here in Washington as it turns out.  However the cleaning and tidying went pretty quickly so I was able to put in a little bit of time on the weaving.

2/3 of the way through the 1st placemat

It is certainly going well and the slight difference in the yarn, the last placemats were bleached, these ones are half-bleached (the linen is from the Yarn Barn of Kansas) so the 'pattern' shows a little bit better, although that will only really be evident once they are finished and washed, ironed.

Tomorrow, Christmas Day here, will be a quiet day for us.  Great for some more serious weaving :-)

First stripe

The dyeing went smoothly - 3 main colours and then various shades and mixes to make up about 9 all told (blues, greens, purples, and pink/red).  I painted the wound yarn in fairly random stripes and blocks and wrapped it in glad wrap and left it for 6 hours. 

It washed out fairly easily - very little colour coming from the dyed yarn at all (just the full strength purple  which had quite a bit of red bleeding out.  I dried the yard with a hair dryer and was ready to weave the first stripe to see how the random colours would come out.

The woven stripe

Stripe with pattern visible.

The pattern emerged nicely as I went and getting back into the rhythm won't take long.

Dyeing Linen

After having woven enough of a placemat to check the loom dressing, I'm now moving on to preparing the coloured stripes.  This time I am trying to speed up the process a little, hopefully making it less tedious.  I've measured a weft shot from the test weaving to ensure I have pretty close to the actual length rather than just the width of the warp/drawn in weaving.  On the loom the drawn in width is 12 5/8 inches with the actual weft shot measuring 13 1/8.  I have cut some plastic dividers (the kind used in folders) to exactly half the 13 1/8 measurement and then glued them together to make a fairly rigid (but thin) waterproof frame to wind the linen yarn around.

The idea is to be able to make a whole lot more painted/dyed yarn than the groups of single stripes I made for the last placemats.  It will randomise the pattern a lot more over the whole series of placemats, but that should be fine with the colours and design I have planned.

This morning I mixed up the soda ash mix and the chemical water/thickener.  The former so that I can get the first lot of linen soaking while the latter is setting/thickening before I mix up the colours from the Fiber Reactive dyes I have.

Linen, wound on card, soaking in soda-ash solution

Ready to start mixing colours

The chemical water should be ready by tomorrow morning, so I should be able to paint on the dyes and then let that set for 24 hours - wash the yarn out and dry it ready to start weaving some test stripes by Monday.

CoNZ Placemat weaving

Another day and I have finished off the threading of the headles (after work on Wednesday) then managed to sley the reed and tie off the warp before calling it a day.  Today after work I was able to weave in some packing weft and weave the first inch or two of weft to check for any treadling/sleying errors.

None spotted, but I'll be checking a bit more, in daylight just to make sure.

2/3 of the heddles threaded, notice the twisting of the warp yarn.

This dressing of the loom went so much more smoothly that the last linen - paying way more attention to making sure nothing tangled and effectively taking it a little slower, worked and it was still a lot faster than with the extra day needed on the last warp when it flew into a huge tangle as I wound it on.

Heddles threaded and reed sleyed

As in the last placemats and using 20/2 linen again the sleying is a nice neat two per dent on the 12 dent reed.

First 1.75 inches woven

The next step is to prepare the dyes and mordant for the coloured stripe - a job for tomorrow/the weekend, with this time it being paua themed colours and I'll be trying a new and improved method for doing more linen at a time.  This placemat will be the testbed.

Colours of NZ Placemats

Finally started today with the placemats for my brother's Christmas present - yes I know it is a little late.  The linen took way longer than planned after multiple non-available messages before finally finding a source only to find out it was coming all the way from India!

These placemats will be similar to the Colours of Ireland, with a different coloured stripe (a paua theme) and a little wider at 13".

So this weekend we were able to warp and chain the necessary linen for the 8 placemats needed (plus a bit spare for trials, and a sample), then begin to dress the loom.  I remembered the difficulties encountered with winding on the warp last time, so was more carefull to defeat the natural tendancy of linen to a) grip when close together, and b) twist, which I suspect is a by-product of the way I put the warp onto my warping frame - that will need some trials to determine the best way to avoid this.  Bottom line - it all went well, the warp went onto the back beam without any real problems and I'm now starting to thread the heddles.

Warping frame with the correct length marked out.

One of three, tied up ready for chaining.

The chained warp ready to go (with calculations visible)

Yes - I still warp on the dining room table - certainly not the most erganomic choice.  I have once,  hung the frame on the wall in the entrance hall and warped horizontally which is certainly easier.  Something I will set up again once we are set up more permanently in TN.

The weight - ready to wind on.

 I chose to wind the warp on a small section at a time - to make sure I wouldn't encounter any of the problems of last time.  It meant untwisting the three chains and then combining them onto the weight (water in a milk containter) - I could then wind on the back beam about 3/4 of a revoltion.  While that may seem slow, it meant I could insert my custom cardboard (ex business cards) warp separators as I paused.

Warp wound on - noting the business cards at each segregation.

 Once wound on, it was fairly straight forward to pull the remaining warp through the cross and begin threading the heddles (according to the pattern top left in the picture).

Threading the heddles - with record keeping notebook handy.

This warp, for these placemats, is the same pattern as the last, with one extra 'repeat' in the middle.  The loom is tied up ready to go (from last time) so that will be one step not needed this time.  It should take a few more nights to finish off the dressing and then into the weaving - hopefully to finish during my Christmas time off.

Scarves finished

Spent some time this afternoon finishing the weaving and then the hemstitching and fulling.  The last scarf only had 10 or so inches to weave so didn't actually take too long and the hemstitching (same method I used for the CF blue striped scarves) was simple.  I've fulled them and they are now flat on the drying rack and should dry overnight. 

I've had interest in two and possibly the third - that would be great if they all sold straight off!

#3, 2 and 1

All three a slightly different (length, fringe length and with #3 the pattern).  I certainly learnt a few things during the process, but in general they were fairly straight forward to weave and the little Leclerc Dorothy loom performed perfectly throughout. 

I really like the way the herringbone throws up distinct lines (in the warp direction) along with the obvious colour changing stripes.

The other good news is that the Yarn Barn contacted me to say the 20/2 linen has finally arrived and was shipped a day ago - it should be here by the weekend so I will be able to move straight on to weaving placemats again, although I'll have to 'paint/dye' some weft yarn for the stripes before that starts.