2015 Christmas Towels half way

Progress on the Christmas towels has been great.  I decided to weave these in two batches to make the warp easier to wind.  Turned out well and today I cut the first 10 off BigMac.

The red and green I dyed this year was slightly different to last year.  Forest Green vice Kelly Green seems a lot more 'Christmasy'.  The design this year has solid stripes rather than the red/green mix I did last year which wove a lot faster.

Enough dyed yarn for warp and weft stripes.

The warp winding for 10 towels took a while and is close to the maximum for my warping board (about another 3 yards would see it full).  Anything more will need a warping mill or use the sectional beam on the loom as designed.  I do have a Leclerc Tension box that will work on BigMac but would need to build a bobbin rack.  Perhaps before next year.

Warp wound and tied off.

Dressing the loom also went smoothly.  I had assembled (but not glued and sanded) my new angel wings for BigMac and with Anne helping by supplying the necessary tension and de-snagging the wind on was simple. I may use slightly thinner dowel next time, this was all that I could get at the time.  It works fine, but thinner dowels would mean being able to see the 'next' warp thread from my normal position sitting directly in front of the heddles.  Threading the heddles went without error and only one snag on the reed where I forgot to skip a dent.  I un-did it back to the error and re-sleyed it!

Angel wings in operation.

Weaving turned out to be fairly fast.  45 - 50 minutes per towel.  The first day I did 1, then the next two days 2, then yesterday 5 to get them finished.  The repeating pattern for the huck lace design was simple to remember luckily, and I don't recall having to 'un-weave' even once.  I didn't have a temple large enough for these towels - I'll have to get one some time - but the thick cotton under tension seemed to hold the selvedge fairly well once it had drawn in a bit.

First few pattern repeats.

This morning I cut off the cloth and zig-zag stitched the ends then trimmed the odd end before throwing the whole lot in the wash.

Stack of 10 towels ready for end stitching.

The wet finishing has improved the feel immensely and closed up the structure nicely.  The pattern has pulled in the edges a little but nothing to really notice and I'm sure that will settle a bit more - it did a little after a quick press.  I now have to cut each one then fold and hem the ends - machine stitched for speed.

Then on to batch number 2.

Loom Room

Not quite a weaving studio yet, but over the last couple of days I have managed to make my loom room (spare bedroom #3 - but really fairly small for that purpose) a little more functional. 

Up until now I had so many bags of wool/locks/bats/etc along with boxes of miscellaneous weaving/spinning and odd stuff, that I could only generally use one loom at a time. By stacking the 'stuff' in behind 'Bernie' - the upright loom, I could use 'BagMac' - the Macomber.  Then swap everything around to do the opposite.  Little 'Dot' - the Leclerc Dorothy was mostly hidden under piles of paperwork on the bench so to weave with it I just took it out of the room.

No more!!

I have packed up all the spare wool/yarn etc and moved it up into the attic - where I can still get to it, but it isn't now in my way!  This has meant I actually have two looms dressed - BigMac and Bernie and the plans are underway to dress Dot as well (I have to dye some yarn first).  I even have a little bit of room on the table to work on planning - although it is crowed by some large cones of yarn that will have to move...

Looking almost like a studio (albeit fairly cramped!)

BigMac has a warp for 9 (of the 18) Christmas towels, and Bernie has warp for 3 rugs for an exhibit next year.  More info on both those projects to come.

Llama order

We finished the brown/black portion of the llama fleece a little while back  The final part was to give it a final wash to remove any remaining dust/dirt and set the yarn.  It turned out to be a little over a pound of yarn in 8 skeins.

Llama yarn after final wash

I'm awaiting word back from the owner before dropping off these skeins.  We still have the other 'half' - the white/cream part of the fleece which is a slightly larger amount, so I'm expecting 10 skeins.  Anne does a lot of the picking where we thoroughly remove all visible VM and guard hairs. We are left with a big box of fluffy wool which goes through the drum carder in 1 oz lots.  I have found that once through is enough with this wool then I use a diz and remove it directly from the large drum as roving.  I then pre-draft that roving to give me a perfect spinning diameter roving.

Llama roving ready to spin.

The 1 oz limit is a comfortable amount for the carder - it can hold 2 oz of fibre but at the 1 oz mark I can spin that roving onto one bobbin, spin another, and the result when plied is a 2 oz skein regardless of the thickness of the singles I spin.  This white batch I am spinning a little thicker. It is quicker and also will give the owner another type of wool to sell as up until now most has been spun at fingering or fine.

Loom modification

While working away at various pieces of the loom restoration I had noted that the top front bar on the castle showed marks most likely caused by Scotch tape - used to hold instructions/guides to the weaving.  I (on my Macomber) typically put the instruction for the treadling sequence there - but just folded so that it hooks over the wooden bar.  That solution works fine until I turn a fan on if it is too hot - it typically blows my notes away.  Options then include clipping it on, or balancing something heavy across the castle on top of it.  It has always been in the back of my mind to find a solution.

All the wood on the restoration loom is being sanded down and refinished so I wasn't worried about the marks, but decided to use that loom to try an idea.

Castle bar with Scotch tape marks

The first thing I did was drill holes from the back (using a stop) through to within 1/8" of the front surface.

3 holes drilled from back of bar.

The I glued a super strong neodymium magnet into each hole.  I had the magnets for other project work

Magnets in place

It's then a simple case of using decorative magnets (or simply more neodymium magnets) to afix notes/guidance/instruction to the front of the bar.

Finished modification

In the picture above only the cross bar has been sanded and finished - the difference between it and the rest of the castle can be seen and is much more obvious in brighter light.  This works really well so I will be modifying both the Macomber and the Leclerc next.

2015 Christmas Towels

Last Christmas we gave dish-towels to the siblings (one per family) and scarves to nieces and nephews.  It was done while I was working at Amazon, and on two looms with mostly 'stash' fibre.  This year will be different:

a) I'm starting early!!
b) everyone will get dish-towels, including sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, one per household again.
c) I've bought the cotton yarn which was an 'odd lot' from R&M yarns.

Based on the success of the huck lace towel design last year, I spent several hours this morning planning a new design for this year.  I'm using, once again, some red and green stripes and diamonds of huck lace in a grid pattern.  Even with software it took a few attempts to get something that would work with the amount of cotton I had.  Once designed I refined the initial calculations and was able work out how much cotton yarn to dye in the two colors for both warp and weft.

Then after a quick trip to the shop to get some non-iodized salt I began the dyeing. It's about an hour and a half per colour including clean up.  The green is into the final 30 minute soak after the addition of the soda ash fixer to the Fiber Reactive Dye (from Dharma Trading).  I'm using Fire Red and Forest Green this year which may not be exactly the same as last year, but I had these colours already.

The red is rinsed and as soon as the green is too I'll give them a wash with some Dharma Professional  Textile Detergent then rinse and hang to dry.  I should be able to begin warping in a couple of days.  Given the number of towels to weave I'll be doing it in two equal lots.