Sleyed!

In a recent thread on Ravelry people were discussing how they sley their reeds off the loom.  I had never considered this before, and had found that sleying was the most physically uncomfortable part of warping--oh, the backaches from stooping over the loom!  I was not looking forward to sleying all the ends for the double-width wool blankets that are next project on my list.  I set the reed on the edge of my desk and sleyed it while watching movies on Netflix.  Wow,  What a great experience!  After getting the reed sleyed, I popped it back on the loom and voila!

I had originally wanted to gradually blend the colors from light to dark, but because the yarns are such different sizes, I decided to go with stripes so I wouldn't have to think so hard about coordinating the epi and getting it work right with the double width.  The light gray is sleyed at 25 epi and the dark gray is at 30 epi on a 10-dent reed.  I hope it's right (or at least close enough)!


Tonight I'll start threading....

Scorched!

The 8/2 tencel scarves that have been in the works for the last couple of weeks are finished.  Here are three of them:

I use a Singer steam press on almost all my handwovens and have pressed dozens of scarves on it.  I've always used the cotton setting for tencel and I've never experienced any problems before. 

But alas.....when pressing the lavendar scarf, it scorched!  A huge 18" patch of scorched tencel!

Washing didn't take it out. How devastating!  Then I remembered that there was some dye recently purchased for a special project coming up.  Overdye!  After dying it in a bucket, it came out streaked and uneven.  It couldn't be dyed in the front-load washer. Then I remembered my Wonder Washer! 

I've used this for felting, but have never used it for anything else.  Set the wash cycle to "gentle" and the timer to the maximum 15 minutes and went out to weed the garden.  After about an hour, I gave it a good rinse, dried it for 10-15 minutes in the dryer with some towels and gave it a press with my hand iron.  I wasn't going to trust my steam press!  It came out just gorgeous!

I love it!  It's going to be my "jeans" scarf.

The Learning Curve is Leveling Out

The AVL's been getting easier and easier to use.  It's amazing all the little things that work together to make this loom such a joy to use.  What a great loom.


That last week or so, I've been weaving another series of tencel scarves, this time with a white warp. This tencel was a different brand, and very luscious, super soft and smooth. Every time I get to the end of a scarf I've been hemstitching and then leaving about 12 inches of warp unwoven to twist into fringe.  I set the automatic cloth advance to about 4 beats to the inch and then beat to get to the 12 inches I need.  When the woven portion of the previous scarf left the front beam, the cloth would no longer advance because the tencel's too smooth.  The first time, I didn't realize what was happening and I ended up with tons and tons of tencel dust on my lap!


So on the next scarf I wove a few strands of heavy wool at about 2" intervals and the warp advanced with no problems.

The scarf above has a light blue weft. The one below has a lilac weft. I really like this pattern.

As soon as these scarves are done (I think I'm going to finish tonight!), I'm going to start warping the double width 2/9 wool blankets.  I'm a little daunted by the thought of warping 1000 ends on 16 shafts, but the sooner it's started the sooner it will be done.

P2P2: Lots of Thoughts

I'm having so much fun with this project and I haven't even done anything yet.  Well, I shouldn't say that I haven't done anything.  I've done quite a lot of thinking.  It's so much fun just thinking about this while I'm doing yard work or other weaving.  So far, two different ideas are starting to gel, which will be summed up here:

These are just buds of thought for two different possible projects.  We'll see what happens.

The Best Laid Plans

I purchased 6 1-kg cones of wool about 6 or 7 years ago with the intention of making blankets out of it. The labels on the cones look like this:

I had two cones of pearl and one of gray that I am using for the warp. Since the wool was labeled 2/9, I used my math skills to determine that the wool should be about 2400 yds/pound (JaggerSpun's 2/8 is 2240 yards/pound) and I was going to warp the loom for double weave at 32 epi.

HOWEVER--when I started winding my warp this weekend, I found that the pearl was actually about 2000 yards/pound. No problem, I can warp the loom at 24-26 epi, right? Well, when I went to wind the gray, I found that it was much thinner than the pearl--about 3000 yards/lb--even though it was labeled 2/9 as well! 

And that wouldn't be that big of a problem except that I was planning on creating a gradient from pearl at one end of the blanket to gray at the other. So I'm going to have to really hone those math skills for an ever changing epi across the width of the reed.

I don't think it will matter which reed I use!

P2P2: The Pix Have Arrived!

I have received my pictures!  I haven't had much time to contemplate them yet, but I've got a couple of ideas floating through my head.  I know that Shirley has already posted the pictures on her site, but here they are on mine:



They are pictures of Australia, the first four from the Outback.  I'm very excited to work on this project.  I have a couple of other projects I need to get woven before I start on this one, so I'll have a few weeks to think about this before I get started.

Tying One On

After finishing the black-warped tencel scarves, I tied on an 8/2 white warp.  I'm going to use pastels for the weft.  I really liked the black/green scarf, so I used the same pattern for the first scarf.  I'm now trolling handweaving.net to see if I'm inspired by some patterns for the other scarves.

This view is from the cloth beam.  I do love this loom.

Visitors Outside

We had some visitors in the backyard yesterday.  We normally have just two families of geese that stay on our pond, but we've got a few more passing through.

Not weaving-related, but I could see them from my loom room!

AVL FOs

I just finished my first FOs from the new AVL. They are 8/2 tencel scarves with a black warp, then I used different colors for the weft.  I also changed the design each time, keeping the same 16-shaft point twill threading.

I really like the green and the gray ones, but the eggplant looks like an ugly piece of upholstery fabric.  The design was quite prominent on the loom, but once it was wet finished, the design disappeared. 

Off to the box of ugly FOs!  I've collected quite a few of them over the years and I just can't bring myself to throw them away.  What do you do with them?

Next in Line

I've had 6 kg of 2/9 wool in my closet for about six years.  I've been planning on making blankets, but have been putting it off because of the 1024 ends it will require. But my mom called me a couple months ago and asked if I would make her a blue throw for her new couch, so it's now the next project in line.


I've never done a project with that many ends before.  I had ordered a couple hundred extra heddles for my Glimakra last year in preparation for them, but didn't get to it.  Now I have a 16-shaft AVL with 1600 heddles already on it!  I'm going to use double weave plain weave, so it will require only 4 shafts, but I'm going to spread the ends over all 16 shafts so hopefully it will reduce the stickiness of the warp.  The blankets will be approximately 64" square (on the loom) with 6 inches of fringe on each end.  If I make a 15-yard warp, I should be able to get 7 blankets out of it. Or at least 6 blankets and a nice warm shawl.

I'm going to use the natural and gray for the warp and the blue, red and purple for the weft.

I'm also going to do something else I've never done before and I'm going to sley this OFF the loom.  I'm going to Hobby Lobby tonight to see if I can find something that will work as a reed holder.  It's going to be sleyed at 32 epi, so an 8-dent reed is also going to be ordered.  It will be easier to thread the heddles (being an avid F2Ber) on 16 shafts if the ends are always in groups of four. I'm thinking about pegging my dobby to raise 4 shafts at a time to make threading go smoothly with less chance of a mistake.

P2P2: Making Contact

I just received an email from Julie Bowyer, letting me know that she has received her packet of pix.  Now that she has them, I'll go ahead and post them here.  I have a good friend, Derrald Farnsworth-Livingston, who is a photographer here in the American Midwest. He took these pictures in the area around which I live and gave me permission to use them for this project.


I live in the Loess Hills of Iowa.  Supposedly, during the last ice age clay soil had been ground very finely into tiny particles by the receding glaciers, which were then blown by winds to form these hills.  Just a few miles from my home is an oxbow of the Missouri River which is now a state recreational area called "DeSoto Bend". Most of these pictures were taken there.

I hope Julie finds inspiration from these pictures. I tried to find pictures with a variety of textures and colors.

Where will it go?

I have something hiding in the garage.  A month ago I won an ebay auction for 3 looms, of which one was my AVL.  The other two are an 8-shaft Mountain table loom....

...and a mystery loom.  It's a homemade 8-shaft, 10-treadle countermarche loom and has been finished so beautifully it could be a piece of furniture.  The problem is, it's in the garage in front of my husband's workbench and he's getting very impatient with me. 

I'm very excited about putting it back together and seeing how it works...but I have no place to put it!

Neglect

I'm almost feeling sorry for my Glimakra.  She's been sitting patiently with a tartan now for a month, waiting for me to return. 

I've been spending way too much time with the new AVL (which I love, love, love). The Glimakra isn't the only one being neglected.  The twins haven't seen any action for months, either.  

So much to do!  And my house needs cleaned and there's tons of yard work to do.  The days are longer, but I have so much less time!

Will I or Won't I?

My AVL came with a fly shuttle system which increased the width of the 40" loom by over 2 feet.  I had approximately 8 inches to squeeze myself between the loom and the treadmill on one side and 6 inches to squeeze myself between the loom and wet bar on the other.  So...I took it off.  Right now I don't see myself using it, because I have my trusty Glimakra for rugs and blankets, but who knows what the future will bring.  I'll just try to store all the pieces in one place and hope I remember where I store it.

When All Else Fails....

read the instructions.  After deciding to forge on with my weaving and NOT unweaving seven inches of pretty ugly stuff, it was still bothering me that I didn't know something as basic as how to back up my warp. So I got out the manual, and on the VERY last paragraph of the VERY last page, I read this:

OK, so where in the heck is the "plastic spacer that is on the outside of the gear housing"?  Flipping back a few pages, I found this diagram:

All right, that where it is on the diagram, but where is it on the loom? Looking around a bit, I discovered this on the left side of the front of the loom, where the cloth advance system attaches to the front beam:

You can see a little plastic piece that goes about 3/4 of the way around "the outside of the gear housing". So now I know the first step in backing up the warp.  I'm afraid to experiment with it now that I have the ppi right. I'm going to wait until I really mess up again.  It won't be long.

AVL Problems

I was so excited to get home from work last night.  I had warped my AVL with 8/2 black tencel set at 30 epi over the weekend and I was going to start on a set of 3 scarves in various point twill patterns. There was plenty of time to get 2 or 3 feet done on my first scarf. After starting, I noticed that the warp was not advancing. I played around with the adjustments on the arm of the automatic cloth advancement system, but then I figured out that that was working just fine, and front roller was spinning along just as it should be.  So....the only other possible problem must be the brake system in the back.  After spending a while trying to loosen it, I discovered I had put the springs on backward.  Once that was switched around it appeared to be working, but I had already spent a couple hours on it and had had enough!  So I went to bed.


When I got up this morning I looked at what I had woven last night. It's a disaster, as you can see here:

It's all smooshed together in some parts, and then stretched out in other parts.  I don't know whether to start over, or hope that it all comes out in the wash (literally).  I know tencel really expands when it gets wet, so maybe it will push itself into the right places, but I've never tried that with anything that's so distorted before.  It might be a good experiment!  I measured the length of the woven part, and it averages out to the right ppi, so it might be worth the risk.

Which brings me to the question of the day:  Is there an easy way to roll back the warp on an AVL advancing cloth system?  I will have to do some research.

New AVL

Here is my new-to-me 16 harness AVL I got on ebay.  My husband and I took a road trip a few weeks ago to pick it up and then I spent the next couple of weeks getting mechanical issues figured out.  I had problems with harnesses not raising properly.  But I contacted avlusa.com and the president of the company responded to my questions himself!  All it took was a couple washers on the arm of the dobby to adjust it and it works perfectly!  


I am a die-hard F2B warper, and with this folding loom I can easily reach the heddles from the back once I release the back beam.  My first warp was a simple 16-shaft point twill, so I pegged the warping order and by pulling the lever on the back of the dobby box to advance the dobby bars, I had the loom warped in no time!

You can also see my first pattern I tried out with some 3/2 perle cotton.  This is what it finally looked like after I worked out the mechanical problems.  I tried several different patterns and soon realized I will need additional dobby bars.  I'm going to have to start saving my pennies so that I can afford a compu-dobby!