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.