Embroidery

I went out to the Stitcher's Corner yesterday because both Spotlight and Lincraft are absolutely useless for embroidery supplies. They have almost no DMC threads, and the only 28 count even weave stuff they have is just called cloth, no composition whatsoever. Anyway, it's at least worthwhile going all the way out to Vic Park. The lady that owns it remembers me and got all excited when I came in, because she really liked my little pouch. She couldn't wait to see the pattern for this project. Anyway we had a good chat and $50 later I had all the things I need, including a new embroidery hoop. I bought a ridiculously small one for my pouch because it was a ridiculously small pouch. I started working on it last night and here's my progress:

Tada! It took me ages to choose colours, but so far I'm happy with my choices. I also decided to just go over each stitch once like I did for my pouch, because double stitch would just take too long and I got really sick of doing it on that other panel that I never finished. I used two strands for my pouch, but that was silk and seemed to have better coverage than this cotton. I started with two strands, but I wasn't happy with it so I pulled it out and started again with three strands. You can see the coverage isn't as good as my other ones, but it still looks ok. It looks better as I fill in more of the background, so I'm going to keep going like this.

The pattern is bigger than I expected, which is a good thing since that means not so many repeats and not so many chances to get sick of it. My pouch had a really small pattern, and I guess I expected this one to be the same. The gold is three inches from top to bottom. I think it will suit the bigger project a lot better than a smaller pattern.

Brilliant Plan!

I have a brilliant plan! It's not at all ambitious and stupid. I've been thinking about Pennsic and how my pilgrim bag is probably too small to carry around all the things I will need to carry around with me and all the things I'll be buying. It was too small even before it shrunk in the wash. I've been thinking how I really like my little pilgrim bag, and I don't wanna make a bigger one and put all my pilgrims on it because that will be like replacing my little one. But I can't have a pilgrim bag without pilgrims. So what if I make a different sort of bag? An awesome giant bag of awesome! I WANT TO MAKE THIS:

Yay a giant german brick stitch bag! I'm not gonna worry about a drawstring or anything, I'll just leave it open at the top, but I'll weave a strap for it. I'm sure I could try out a 3/1 broken twill and design a pattern that matches the bag. At the moment I'm thinking I'll just embroider the front of the bag and use some plain dyed linen or something for the back, because it's going to be giant and embroidering the whole thing is just stupid. I think I'll use cotton, because I'll need a lot of it and silk is expensive. Besides, The Stitchers' Corner only ever has a couple of packets of each colour, and I hate having to drive over there to get more of something. I'd rather only do it once. I'll have to go to get some evenweave linen, unless Spotlight happens to have some. I think I'll use 28 count because that worked for my little pouch and if I go any smaller I'll kill myself before I get very far with the embroidery.

But the most important thing to think about here is colours! What colours should I use? Mitchell Wymarc says red, purple, dark gold, gold and white. I'll leave the white how it is, and I like the purple bits around the white. I might change the dark gold to green around the other white bits. I like the red squigglies, but not sure about gold around them. I kind of like orange, but not sure if I like the idea of red next to orange. Maybe I could find a light orangey sort of gold. There's tons of DMC colours so it's not like I'll be stuck on options.

I was toying with the idea of tablet weaving the edges and having it extend out to the strap instead of splitting and going along the top, but I don't want a skinny strap digging into my shoulder, so the edges would be really chunky. Then I was thinking about having the flat band go along the edges so I'd have sort of a walled bag rather than a large pouch, which would mean more space! But then it would be even more open at the top which I'm not sure that I want. But I can think about all that once the embroidery is done. I think I might buy some embroidery floss after work on Monday, and hopefully Spotlight will also have linen evenweave. Then I can start working on it on Christmas night when I'm vegging in front of the TV.

Christmas

Tada!

I just finished the snowmen. I think I've had enough of Christmas bands now. I want to go back to period techniques and stuff. I'd like to try doubleface. I'd also like to try 3/1 twill. I'd like to make another belt with one of these techniques, so I have a belt to wear with my purple and green cote. I'm a little bit over my leaf and motto thing, but I have no idea what sort of pattern would be 14th century and fit with my garb. What I need is Peter Collingwood, and I think if I don't get it for Christmas I'll buy it myself.

I've also done absolutely no sewing from my fix-it basket. The red cote fits properly now, but one of the sleeves has started coming apart and needs repairs. My man cote needs taking in and new sleeves, my blue wool surcote needs a lot of work done, and my green brocade surcote also needs looking at. I'm just feeling very uninspired. It'll probably take until next winter to fix the wool stuff, and it'll be when there's an event coming up and it's gonna be cold, so I'll be all rushed. At the moment there's not much happening in the way of events. There's a couple of feasts happening early next year but they'll be inside in airconditioning, and anyway I have lots of light linen stuff for hot weather. I'd like to make a couple of new cotes for Pennsic, ones like my brown one that are comfy and I can just chuck on over a chemise, and hopefully I'll have the blue wool and green brocade done to throw on over the top if I get cold at night.

Maybe after Christmas I'll get motivated to do things.

Christmas

I finished my Santas on Thursday, and warped up my loom again for Christmas trees!

I like the colours of this one better. I should've used this blue for the Santas instead of the really pale grey/blue, but oh well. Hopefully I'll finish this band today and then I'll be up to Snowmen. I've decided to give the bands as gifts to some of the ladies at work. I mostly just work with two older ladies and my department manager, so that's three bands. Then there's another department manager who I think will really appreciate one, but I'm not sure that I'll have the time. We shall see.

My hands are looking awesome after all this weaving. The patterns are so simple that I've been moving really fast, so I have blisters in the creases of some of my fingers and some spots on my fingers where the skin is really dry and flaky. Wednesday was awful, my fingers were so sore, but since then I think the blisters have developed into callouses.

Time for more weaving!

I win!

I won!

On Friday night I was 10cm away from finishing, when my weft snapped three times in a row. It was very frustrating, I wanted to have finished it before dinner so I could warp up my loom for christmas bands. I decided that it was getting too close to the end up the loom, and shifted it forwards as far as I could. WELL it didn't like that, and I couldn't get the tension tight enough after about an hour of trying. I gave up when my fingers started bleeding and sulked off to bed. I was upset because I was so close to finishing and it just wasn't working. Then the stupid string sorted itself out overnight and when I picked it up on Saturday after work it was fine. UGH. Anyway, I finished it and cut it off the loom on Sunday morning, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. There's a line of bubbly bits on the back about a third of the way through the middle where I was having tension issues, but they're on the back so it's fine.

I spent all of last night warping up my loom for Christmas bands! I've hardly done any threaded-in patterns, so I still haven't gotten the hang of the whole S and Z thing. With the stuff I've been doing I've needed alternating S and Z, or blocks of S and Z, or threaded all the same but it hasn't been vital which one is which. Anyway, I stared at my thread and my cards for ages, figuring out which was which, and started threading. Then I got all confused and checked again, and realised they were all backwards. So I rethreaded some cards and kept going. Then I got all confused again and went and got out a picture of the different threadings, and realised all the cards I'd threaded were backwards. UGH. So I just flipped them over and kept going. This means that instead of my cards all facing the left, how I like them, they all face the right. I thought this would be ok, it just means that Santa's feet are on the left of the band instead of the right. John Mullarky threads his cards clockwise and doesn't specify which way they face. In the end it was ok, it just took a bit of fiddling to realise that the A corner has to start at the far top, which it usually does if my cards face the left, but not if they face the right. Anyway, it's working!

My Santas a quite a lot fatter than John Mullarky's, but that's ok, Santa is supposed to be fat. My tension is also working itself out and the third one is skinnier than the first. I think they're cute! Right now I have to go to work, but I have all day tomorrow to weave, so I should zoom through, seeing as it's such a simple pattern in good old #5 cotton.

This is just getting ridiculous

On Saturday I took my weaving to Nathan and Catherine's house, and tackled it for a couple of hours. First of all I wound a fresh shuttle from one of my other balls of leftover black cotton. Then I dug out the end of my snapped weft, and went to tie on my new shuttle. Because I'm very clever, I put the new shuttle on the floor right next to the old one and couldn't tell which was which. I clearly picked the wrong one because it snapped straight away. So I threw it far away so it wouldn't get confused, dug out the end again and tied on the new shuttle. I was doing ok for a while, until the weft snapped yet again. That's now two different balls of cotton that I've snapped, so I pouted for a bit. Then Catherine offered me some spools of various black threads that I might want to use instead, and I decided to give the poly top stitch thread a try. This is the same weft I was using for my belt, and the thickness is roughly the same as the #12 cotton. I tied it on and was going pretty well until my knots decided they didn't want to hold anymore, and went all slack again. UGH. That was my cue to give up for the day, before I sent the loom flying from frustration. I'd managed to weave a grand total of 20 picks, about 3.5cm.

Since then my string has been behaving remarkably well. My tension is perfect and I've woven a good 15cm, almost double what I'd done up to on Saturday. BUT THEN I snapped my weft again. I SNAPPED MY WEFT AGAIN. I snapped the poly top stitch thread. Now I'm thinking it's something I'm doing that's snapping the thread, rather than my choice of thread or a flaw. I've been so conscious not to pull too hard, but it's been getting harder to tighten the weft, it's just not sliding through the shed easily. Maybe this particular cotton is just rough or something, and the constant friction is weakening it.

I'm just over half way through this band, so I can't give up now, but I really wanted to finish it soon because THIS:

CHRISTMAS BANDS! I found them over at the Malarky Crafts blog, and I want to make one! They're just so cute! They're simple threaded in patterns with a 4F 4B turning sequence, so it'd be really quite quick and easy to make one. Mum said if I made one we'd hang it up somewhere as decoration, but I'd like to have a specific use for it. I'd have to make metres of it to wrap it around the tree, although if I make a short one and we wrap it around the top of the tree, then the cat won't be able to reach it. I suppose I'll go buy myself some milford satin and just figure out what we'll do with it later.

In other news, look at this:

It's the end of my belt. AND the end of my wefts. Poking out. Visible. WTF? I used this technique to finish the band, and it has never failed me before. This time it seems it has been slowly unravelling and now the end of my belt is a bit of a mess. I wore it to an event on Sunday and that's all it took for it to end up like this. I showed it to some people and I think my options are to unthread the wefts to the neat bit, then stick them on a needle and thread them back through the band. Then I can whipstitch the end to hold everything in place. OR I could divide the threads back into their cards and tie some knots. Either way the whole thing seems way too tedious for me to tackle right now.

It's getting a little bit ridiculous how much trouble I'm encountering with my weaving. At the moment I just have to laugh at my weft snapping all over the place and my belt coming undone, because it's like everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong, just because it can. I'm past being frustrated at it because of the ridiculousness of the situation. I should rename this blog THE DISASTER ZONE or something :P

Evil String

I've come to the conlusion that string is completely unpredictable and will just arbitrarily have bad days and good days. This has absolutely nothing to do with me, I have no control whatsoever. There was no reason for it to just start working on Monday, all I did was unweave it and tighten the knots that were already there to retension it, so really I should've gotten the same bubbles that I did the last time I tried. But I didn't, it just started to work.

It was working fine until Wednesday when I picked it up and two of my knots just refused to stay tight. Every single time I turned the cards, no matter what direction I turned them in, these two same knots just loosened. I was left with twelve cards worth of string hanging slack. So I would retie the knots, beat, then throw the wefts again. Then when I turned the cards those same knots just gave out again. I tried tying them in different ways, I tried holding the cards differently as I turned, but nothing helped. Eventually I gave up and put it away. When I picked it up later that evening, the knots just arbitrarily decided to hold and I had no problems whatsoever.

Tonight is a different story. Tonight I snapped my weft thread. Twice. The first time was a complete surprise, because I'd hardly put any pressure on it at all. Then I couldn't find it. I was pulling it through to the left side of the band, and it snapped right where it had last turned on the right side. I had to move the brocade weft out of the way completely and dig right into the shed to find it. It took ages. But I found it, tied it off and started again. It snapped again on the second pick, and this time there really was almost no pressure on it at all. I don't know if my thread is just flawed and I'm in the middle of a weak spot, but I can't snap it that easily when I want to. I can't snap sewing thread that easily, and that's pretty easy to snap.

I couldn't find the end this time, and I was starting to get cranky at it so it's been put away. I am not going to get anywhere with it tonight, so I may as well stop trying. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day and the string will cooperate. I'll need to decide whether to wind a fresh shuttle or not.

Better Things

I went to an archery event yesterday. I was called up in court and given something by the Kingdom A&S Minister:

It's the token for winning first prize in a Kingdom A&S competition. My belt won the competition, and my friends kept it secret for two weeks! I must say I was very surprised, I was not expecting it at all. Catalina also said there were two other entries and it was quite close between us, but she didn't know exactly what the entries were.

The rest of the day was really good too. I chatted to Mistress Rhianwen about weaving. She mostly does inkle weaving but the problems I've been having with tension are a universal weaving problem. She suggested I hold the warp as I beat it to stop pushing loose threads into bubbles. She said she'd bring something to the tourney next weekend and we'll sit down and have a good chat :)

In the afternoon I entered an IKAC and shot 122. I was quite pleased as I've been aiming to score 120. This score brings my average up to 125 for the season, so I'm quite happy with my shooting this year. I also did some more work on my red cote the other day and wore it to the event. You may remember the last thing I did to it was pull the top seams in by an inch on both sides. WELL of course this made the sleeve holes smaller, which I should've realised when I went to reattach the sleeves and had to gather them a little all the way around. Duh. So when I wore it at Championship I spent the day with it cutting into my armpits which was just great. Anyway, I took the sleeves off yet again, cut the sleeve holes bigger and then reattached the sleeves, and it is now a whole lot more comfortable. I tried to shoot in it, and while it was ok, I think it's just a little too restricting for archery. I think the mechanics of holding boobies up makes a dress unsuitable for shooting in, especially since it needs to work so hard to turn what little I have into cleavage. The dress is still not done though, my right sleeve is coming unstitched at the elbow, and at hem at my wrist as well.

Tonight I've been tackling my weaving again. It was really good to chat to Rhianwen and some other people about weaving and sewing and stuff yesterday, and I was feeling a bit more inspired again. I unwove what I'd already done, tightened my tension as much as I could, and started weaving again. I found that I needed two hands on the beater to beat tight enough, there's a significant difference between using one and two hands. But holding the weft with one hand and beating with the other seemed to work even when I then used two hands to tighten the one handed beating. The band started coming out a whole lot smoother. What I'm aiming for with the twist patterning is this:

Just really simple textured squares. This photo was posted in the historical tabletweaving facebook group. I'm not quite getting this level of awesome, but I'm getting the ridges where the turning direction changes and the band is relatively smooth. According to the facebook group, when you release the tension on the band there's more shadows that emphasise the squares more. So I'm hoping my band will look more like the picture once I take it off my loom. I also decided to change my threading yet again, so now I have five blocks of alternating threading instead of the three that I changed to from the original seven :P

It looks nowhere near as good as the picture of the white band, but it's definitely an improvement. Besides, the whole point of this band is to practice my brocading and try new techniques with that, so most of the ground weave will be covered anyway. I never expected that a simple twist patterned ground weave would prove to be so difficult. Anyway, I'm using some gold coloured embroidery floss as a brocade weft, and I'm turning it within the shed so you can't see it on the ede of the band. Basically the weft goes out the bottom of the band two card from the edge, then back up for the next pick. There ends up being a little running stitch along the back of the band, top and bottom. So far it's working. Here's my leaf:

It's looking a little wider than on my belt, I think that's because this band is a good 6-8mm narrower but there's still the same amount of length. Buuut at the moment this leaf is 3cm along the band, and it's under tension. My belt leaves range from 3cm-3.5cm, and that's not under tension, so this leaf will probably shrink a little once I take it off tension. I had lots of problems tying off the end of my gold thread on my belt, because I used the same method I use to start and finish bands, outlined here. It's really good for starting and finishing bands, but the poly gold stuff didn't agree with being threaded back through the band and it frayed and it was pretty awful. This was the main reason why I decided to continue weaving the brocade weft in with the normal shed between pattern bits, instead of stopping and starting like they actually did in period to save expensive thread. Besides, two layers of brocade weft thread plus structural weft bulked up the picks a lot. BUT then later after I'd finished the belt I mentioned this to Catherine and she told me you don't need to worry about threading the brocade weft back through, you just stick it out the bottom of the band and cut it off. Ugh. So I'm trying that this time.

And that's it from me tonight. Goodnight!

Issues

I'm having issues. Issues with tension. My fingers have been rubbed raw from pulling 200 individual threads tight, tying them off, then discovering that THEY'RE NOT ALL TIGHT. It's very frustrating. I end up with little bubbles on the surface of the band, above and below. Now, you'd think that by beating the weft and creating these bubbles I would be tensioning the remainder of the warp by pushing the slack into the bubbles, but apparently it doesn't work that way. There's just more bubbles. So I pull the threads tighter from the teeth end and tie them off again, only for bubbles to appear somewhere else.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to try a simple twist pattern. I threaded the two edge cards on either side in one direction, then I divided the middle cards into seven groups of alternating S and Z. The edge cards turn continuously forward, but the middle cards turn four forward, four backward. After unweaving and retensioning and weaving again, I ended up with this:

It just looks like messy weaving with threads all over the place. There's still random bubbly bits, but this is the smoothest I could get it. I don't want a random messy looking band, I want something neat, so I decided to unweave it and change the threading. I left the edge cards as they are, and divided the middle cards into three groups of alternating S and Z. The band is only two centimetres wide, so maybe my seven groups were getting lost in each other.

Can you tell the difference? Other than it looking a bit bubblier and messier, it looks the same. Ugh.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. I'm going to bed.

Experimenting

Last week I got all enthusiastic and decided I'd weave myself a tube cord and make it into a necklace with the leaf pendant dealies that Spoh sent me from Brisbane when she was there for Great Northern War. I decided to use four cards threaded with alternating colours of my leftover silk.

Here's a picture of my legs. I tied one end to my belt, and the other end to a little chair. I had to stabilise the chair with my feet.

I decided to turn four pickes forward, and four back, because I couldn't be bothered dealing with untwisting the warp. I ended up with a zigzaggy pattern. Here it's a bit uneven and spread out, but later I got into a rythm and it turned out quite nice and neat. It took a whole lot longer to finish the cord than I expected, and I ended up with quite a stiff cord. I think I'll go back to fingerloop braiding for cords, it's faster and I end up with a nicer feeling cord.

The other thing I finallly got around to doing was warping up my loom. I had my last exam yesterday, so now I'm completely free to start working on my projects. I've been pondering this band since I finished my belt, I want to brocade my leaf and words again, and experiment with twist-patterning. I also wanted to try continuous warping, which I did today. For a refresher on how continuous warping works, watch this video. I modified it a bit because I wanted to warp straight onto my loom rather than deal with transferring it to my loom. I got my loom out, and remembered this:

I've used sticky-backed felt in my clamp to hold the threads, but the glue isn't very good and it's been sliding off gradually. I can swap which way the top bit is facing, which is why it's all wibbly, but the bottom is just munted. I forgot I was going to buy more felt and replace this lot. OH WELL. I got some cups from the kitchen for my thread and set them up on the floor:

I'm using black #12 perle cotton because it's cheap and I want to experiment with a really fine warp. I put my loom on the table with a heavy bottle at each end, with the idea that I would go around the bottle at the clamp end (and around a straw which I would use to keep the threads organised once I removed the bottle), then I at the other end I'd zigzag through the teeth, but go around the bottle each time so I had extra to use for tensioning and tying. I decided to zigzag from on side of the loom to the other because REASONS. Actually, I forget why. At some point during my ponderings I decided starting in the middle and going around wouldn't work. Anyway, instead of the first card I dropped ending up in the middle of the pack, it ended up on the edge. So I got started and decided the lady in the video was LYING when she made the whole process look easy. I took me a while to get into a rythm and figure out how to hold my pack and stuff. Also this:

I was dropping cards and they were just hanging out wherever they felt like, instead of in a neat pack like the video. I guess this is because they weren't tensioned evenly, but it escapes me completely how you would tension as you go. Eventually I came up with a Brilliant Plan to solve this problem.

Ugh, blogger made my strings look weird. Anyway, this is my whole setup. I tied the cards together! I'd drop another four, then tie them in with the others, then drop another four etc. When I got to the end I slipped the sweet chilli sauce bottle out from the clamp end, leaving the strings around the straw, then rotated the straw 90 degrees and clamped the threads down. At the other end I slipped the mango cordial bottle out, and just held the loops in my hand before cutting them. I was left with what I usually have, individual cards threaded through the teeth, so all I had to do was tighten the tension and tie them up. Overall this method was a whole lot quicker, although I'm not sure that it was easier than threading each card individually. Also, when I went to flip cards and stuff to change the threading direction to how I want it, I found that the cards weren't all threaded in the same direction. Mostly they alternated S and Z, but there were also some randoms in there that didn't fit in any pattern. I guess some cards flipped while I was dropping them, but I honestly expected them all to be threaded in the same direction. Next time I'll pay attention to what happens to the deck as I loop it around the ends.

So my first attempt at continuous warp was a success! Now my loom is all warped up and ready for me to start weaving, and it only took about an hour from start to finish.

Procrastinating

I have an exam tomorrow. This morning I managed to convince myself that I've contracted some sort of horrible disease, so I had to have an afternoon nap to calm myself down. Google tells me scary things. Then I got caught up in my novel and had to read it to the end. I've been attempting study, I just read through my lecture notes but they're full of whining about how much I loathe ergative case and split alignment systems, and linguistics jokes like CLITICS ARE PROMISCUOUS HAR HAR HAR. Very useful.

Another thing I did today was add pages to this blog! With lots of fiddling and mucking around I managed to add a page of links to documentation for various projects that I've entered in competitions. Formatting was difficult because Blogger decides to randomly move things like pictures and we had an argument about captions, but I got there in the end!

I've also included the documentation for my belt. I sent it over to the event with Nathan and Catherine, and got it and my comments back last night! I'm still trying to decipher some of the words. Mistress Rowan was one of the judges and she makes a suggestion for a weft thread, but the only clear words are 'spun silk'. Before that there's a word that I think is 'Gutermann' then one or maybe two words that I have no idea of. Anyway, all three judges liked it, and I got a score of 39/50 which was higher than I expected. I'd like to know what entry won, but the kingdom A&S page is sadly lacking in competition results.

I'm currently thinking up another weaving project. I think I'll get some #12 black cotton from Spotlight and try this continuous warp thing, and weave a short band to practice with a really fine warp just to see how it turns out. I might use the yellow silk embroidery floss I bought to make my purchase up to $10 so I could use EFTPOS at the Stitchers' Corner as a brocade weft and weave my leaf and words again. This time I'll turn the brocade weft in the shed instead of on the edge so you can't see it.

I also have an itch to do some more embroidery. Not my German Brick Stitch but something different. Anyway I should get back to at least attempting to study. Also my jacket smells like stinky fighter and I'm not sure how it got that way.

Finished!

I finished my belt! The last 30cm were the most difficult, and took me an ENTIRE day which I was frustrating, considering most of it was just plain weave with no brocading, but I made it in the end! Yesterday I went out and bought a brass D-ring to use as a buckle, and I just finished sewing it on.

It's really difficult to take a photo of a skinny long thing. My camera doesn't have a panoramic setting, but apparently one of mum's does, so there was a huge kerfuffle while she argued with her technology trying to find the setting. The thing is, she happened across the setting while she was fiddling with the camera trying to take a picture of my sister's art assignment thing about half an hour before I wandered in asking about panoramic things. In the end we couldn't find it, so I just put my belt on the kitchen table and stood on the chairs to try and get the whole thing in. You get a general idea, but here's just the words:

I'm sorry, I'm not very good at picture taking. But yay words! I was pleased in the end with how they turned out.

Whoa my shirt came out all psycodelic, it doesn't look like that in my pictures folder on my computer. Stupid blogger has decided that this particular picture needs to be rotated forwards, so I had to save it rotated backwards so it would end up facing the right way. It also seems to have done weird things to it as well. Anyway, here's me wearing my belt. I was taking pictures of myself in the mirror, and surprise surprise my words are all backwards, so it doesn't matter that it's a bit blurry and weird, because you can't read them anyway! Anyway, here's what the belt looks like when I wear it. As expected, the words are all on my back, but that's ok. In case you didn't notice, I decided to weave extra leaves at intervals at the end of the belt. The whole thing ended up measuring 130cm, which is odd because I'm sure it measured 140 when it was on the loom :P Either it compressed a lot when it was taken off tension, or I just suck at measuring.

I mentioned I had a lot of trouble with the end. I think one reason was because the weaving wasn't in front of me at the front of the loom anymore, I had to reach for it. But what started happening was that the whole band got wider and wider. I noticed because the three middle stripes were getting really wide, but my outside stripes were skinny, but going all wibbly. I measured the width and it was 3.5cm, a whole centimetre wider than I started with. The majority of the weaving actually ended up being about 2.8cm, because it seemed to sit comfortably there once I added the brocade weft. I unwove a whole bunch and struggled to pull it in as I rewove it. I'm not sure why that is, whether it had something to do with being down the other end of the loom or not. The stripes were also quite wibbly, and it was obvious that the very outside cards were the ones being smushed together, while the inside cards seemed to stay the same distance apart. I could only tell this because of the stripes. But there are also bits where it looks like it suddenly gets smaller, but it's only an illusion because the stripes are wibbly. I guess it's just another thing to look into, how the warp behaves. I'm wondering if my other bands have done this and I've just not noticed because the ground weave is all the same colour. It's not just a matter of looking at the twists in each set of four threads, they all look straight, but it's groups of them together, like the ten card on the outside only take up 5mm, but the ten in the middle take up 8mm.

Anyway, I'm going to enter it in the competition, so I better get a move on with my documentation to get it finished in time. I think I might add some extra pages to this blog where I'll put documentation and maybe some photo albums of finished projects, so it's all in one place.

Tangents

I'm having a bit of a crisis. I've finished weaving my words now and I'm quite happy with how they've turned out, and glad I took the time to unweave so much and redo things so it looks right. It was well worth it. Anyway, I was just weaving along last night when I realised that I'm nearly at the end of the brocade, but nowhere near the end of the band. That got me thinking, where is the brocading actually going to be when I wear the belt? The length of the belt should end up being about 1.3 metres, and before I started I was measuring my picks and counting how many picks were in my pattern to try and work out how much ground weave I should make before adding the brocade weft, because duh, the brocade should be in the middle of the band.

But why the middle? Obviously my obsessive compulsiveness took over because THINGS NEED TO BE SYMMETRICAL. Anyway, with all my crises and switching ground weft threads and adjusting the pattern as I went along, there are a lot less picks in the pattern than I originally drafted. The way it is now, I've got 15cm of blank band, then my pattern goes for about 72cm. That adds up to 87cm, which coincidently, is the circumference of my hips, at the top where I will be wearing the belt. So the brocading will start on my left side, and go around my back, and finish where the band goes through the buckle. The whole of the tail will be plain. Hmmmmmm. I'm not sure if this is a good thing, or a bad thing. I could extend my pattern by adding in those other bits that I drafted and decided not to use, but then there won't be symmetry! Anything that extends the pattern will mean sacrificing symmetry, but then again the pattern isn't int he middle so it's not symmetrical anyway. I could add a couple more leaves at intervals down the band, or I could just leave it. Har har, leave, leaves.... I'm hilarious.

Anyway, while I was pondering this I was also wondering what everyone else does with their tablet woven brocaded belts, because I like to conform. I asked the internet, and ended up somewhere completely different. I found this:

Someone wove this as a double-faced pattern and OMG it's amazing. The article I found it in is here, it's about drafting double-faced patterns, which is very interesting, and totally relevent to my search for brocaded weaving :P

I was also reminded once again that I desperately need Peter Collingwood. I need it sooooo baaaaaad *grabby hands* The Book Depository doesn't even have it, I've only been able to find it on Amazon. And it's expensive. There are so many books I want, I have a wish list on the Book Depository but I can't figure out how to share the wish list with people in a vain hope that maybe someone will take pity on me and buy me them for Christmas. I need to be able to email it to my mum, then she can pass it on to my siblings.

Anyway, I want to try weaving a band in 3/1 twill. I also think I want to make a silk hairnet thing, I have a vague idea that I will make one (I have no idea how, some sort of crochet technique? Lacemaking?) with a tablet woven fillet thing around the edges. I think what I need is to go to Pennsic and go to every weaving class available and buy all the materials and things and learn useful things. But Pennsic is so far away and I wants it all now!

But back to the original brocading thing, before I got lost on the internet I looked at Guntram's belts again, and he's got brocading or twist patterning over the whole surface of all of his bands. So I'm still undecided. I'm really bad at decisions because I just don't know what I want. ALSO OMG I nearly forgot, what I should've done to hide the little bits of gold that you can see on the edges of my band, is use a border! So my brocade weft should have not ever gone past the outside couple of cards, it should have turned around inside the band. I will keep this in mind for future reference.

But first, I will clean my room, because I can't see the floor and the cat has made a nest in my floordrobe. Who knows what mischief he's getting up to in my clothes?

Progress... and more unweaving

Last night I finally managed to finish weaving my first word!

Yaaaaay! I ended up moving the o one pick forward, away from the f, to bring them into proportion with the rest of the gaps. Finally I'm happy with the spacing of the whole word.

Today I worked on the second word. Before I went to bed last night I spent some time untwisting my weft and shifting the whole thing down the loom, so I was expecting tensioning issues today. Luckily I didn't have much of a problem, but there are still a few little bubbles where I started up again. Anyway, after a few false starts on some of the letters where I realised I needed to move it forward or back to space it properly, I got this far:

Phone picture! I took this with my phone because there was no one home with me and I needed to see if the fourth letter was recognisable. I sent it to Mister Nathan, and he thought it was an 'n'. It's supposed to be a 't'! It's got a wanky taily bit which is a little confusing. Anyway, I had a look through Guntram's pattern for this alphabet to see if he had a tail-less 't', but instead I found a different one. The 't' in this alphabet for 48 cards only takes up 25 cards, but in the alphabet for 36 cards, the 't' takes up 28 cards and is a little more defined. So I unwove this one and used the other one instead.

Tada! What I've done is take out one pick in the middle hole bits of the 'o', 'u', 'm', 'a' and 'n' letters, and taken the very outside picks off the 'l', 'i', 'u', 'm' and 'n' letters. The only letters that stayed the same as the pattern were 'f'', 's' and 't'.

Also, I don't know that it's very noticeable in the picture, but my second word is slanting to the right. I'm not sure how this happened as I'm quite careful to beat evenly. The only other times I've seen this happen is when I've retensioned the warp and one side of it has pulled the pattern askew, but I haven't needed to retension since the start of the word when I untwisted my warp. The only thing I can think of is that I accidently beat one pick unevenly, then matched every following pick to that one. This is yet another unexpected thing that has happened, but hopefully once I take it off the loom and the whole thing relaxes it won't be so noticeable. At least it's slanting in the correct direction for writing, which probably isn't a period thing but won't look so odd to the modern eye :P I think my width is getting slightly better too. I've given up on measuring it all the time and I'm just going on what looks good to my eye.

More Unweaving

I thought once I'd gotten everything sorted and my leaf looked good, I'd just zoom through the rest of the brocading. I was wrong. Last night I wove most of my first word:

I had already spent some time working out the spacing and stuff, and the f and o came out pretty much perfect. Then I got to the straight up and down letters and I found that their taily bits were really spreading them out. Here I've already given up on having a blank pick in between each letter and just woven them right next to each other, but I want the spacing to be closer like the first two letters. So I put it away for the night.

Tonight I decided that I would unweave back to the o and get rid of the very edge of the taily bits on all the letters. I tried putting the blank pick back in between, but it was too much space so I left it out again.

I think this is worse. You can see f-o-l, then a whole lot of straight up and down bits that all look the same and run together. It should be i-u-m, and you may be able to tell once I've pointed it out, but I don't like it. I think tomorrow I'll unweave it all again back to the f, then take out one pick in the middle of each letter. The pattern is that every stem of each letter is three covered picks, and each space between stems is three picks. So the o has three long picks, three picks in the middle hole bit, then another three long picks. I think I'll change it to three long picks, two middle picks and then three long picks. This will shorten every letter except the l and the i, which are already pretty short anyway. The m really bothers me because of how much it's sprawled out across the band. It's a third of the word all by itself, but taking three picks out of it altogether will squish it together more.

I'm also a little frustrated with how difficult it is to keep the band the same width. I've never had this problem before, and even though I'm paying attention to it it's still going all wibbly. I'm getting better now, it's only going out by one or two millimetres, but it's still quite noticeable, especially in the above picture.

I'm in two minds about whether this is going to end up getting entered in the competition. I think I could get it done in time, but it would be a bit of a rush. I don't want to rush it, but even redoing as much as I have been to get it to look closer to what I want doesn't fix things like the width. The brocade weft is also really obvious on the edges of the band, I can't get it to tuck in like I have in the past with cotton. Anyway, the whole thing is becoming a lot like my pouch. Something not exactly wonderful but something close enough and I'm happy for it to be functional, just not a showcase piece I guess. The only practical thing that would come from entering it would be possibly useful feedback from the judges, although I get the feeling they'd just confirm what conclusions I've already come to, like they did when I entered my pouch.

Anyway, we'll see how I feel the more I get done. Once I get past this first damn word!

Compromises

After have done so much weaving over the weekend, but I have also done just as much unweaving. On Friday after I realised what I was doing was not going to work, I did some serious pondering. I decided to try a thinner thread for the structural weft to see if that would help my picks get smaller, but what could I use? I was thinking something along the lines of #10 or #12 perle cotton, but I'd planned this project to be made with period materials, and cotton just isn't period. I ended up going to Spotlight and buying a reel of Gutermann linen thread, and another reel of polyester top stitch thread. I tried the linen first, since this would keep my materials period, and it seemed to work. I got to six picks per centimetre, but when I added the gold the linen really didn't agree with it. I couldn't pull the linen tight enough so the band started getting wider, and I had to really force the gold thread past the linen. Then after four picks the linen snapped.

I gave up at that point, but I brought my loom over to show to Mistress Catherine on Sunday afternoon to see if she had any ideas. I ended up trying a super tough polyester thread as a weft, which I found quite rough and hard to pull through the shed, then I tried my poly top stitch thread, which was a lot softer and easier on my hands as well as being more cooperative with the silk. I also used one of Catherine's fancy jarrah beaters instead of my ruler, which is a lot harder with a finer edge. It seemed to work much better and I could beat the picks closer together.

This is what I ended up with. You can see all the random wefts poking out the top edge, because I was trialing I didn't weave them back through neatly. I was always going to unweave it anyway. The first four gold picks are with the linen and my ruler, then the rest are with the two poly threads and Catherine's beater. It's not very neat but there is definitely a significant improvement.

Yesterday I decided to unweave the entire thing and start again with my top stitch thread, Catherine's beater, and adding an extra 5mm to the width of the band to see if that helped. That's when my stripes started going all crooked. The extra width made the whole thing look a little weird, and the middle stripe was really wide while the outside ones were narrower. The very outside ones were going all wibbly as well. So I unwove all of that and started again, this time with my usual one inch width. I almost wove my whole leaf last night before I started making tired mistakes, but I wasn't happy with it. The gold thread really hasn't been surviving the constant weaving and unweaving, and the gold was flaking off in places, which didn't look good at all. Even though the gaps between floats were narrower, it still didn't look how I wanted it to.

Today I came to the conclusion that I need to pack the gold thread away and not use it until I've had a bit more practice with silk. I have woven excusively with cotton until now, and this is the first time I've ever had any major issues. Cotton just worked for me, both threaded in patterns and brocading, and I've always been able to produce decent bands. Having had no problems ever, I just assumed silk and gold would work for me and I'd be able to make gorgeous bands like Guntram does, but I guess this plan was a little ambitious. I think I'll keep playing with silk for a while and different wefts until I can weave something fine enough to add the gold thread to and have good coverage.

Anyway, I ended up going over to the Stitcher's Corner and buying myself some DMC metallic floss, and some yellow silk embroidery floss. I only bought both because they had an EFTPOS minimum of $10 and I had no cash. Once again I unwove the gold I'd woven last night, and tried with the metallic thread. It seemed to have really very good coverage, so I redrew my leaf since I was still having the problem of it stretching too much, and wove this:

It's a leaf! It actually looks like a leaf! I think we have a winner. I'm going to continue the band, and I may even finish it in time to enter it in the A&S competition. It will be nowhere near the standard that I had in my head when I dreamed up this project, but it will be at least a decent looking band. Maybe in another ten years or so I'll revisit this project, dig out my gold thread and weave it again, this time with appropriate materials and skills.

Things Going Wrong

I have had a crazy stressful week. I had two assignments due, one of which was epic and impossible, I had to move out of the house I was housesitting (and clean it all up to hide the fact that I'm a slob and didn't sweep or vacuum for the whole three months I was there), and I wanted to get my loom warped. I had a very tight schedule to get all these things done, which was completely blown out because I suddenly had no access to vital learning materials because my university's IT department sucks and keeps breaking things. So there was a bit of tears and hysterics this week. But I managed to get it all done!

I started warping my loom last Saturday. This is the first time I've had to deal with proper big skeins that aren't just DMC thread, so that was interesting. I'd been warned about skeins, so I was very careful.

I ended up putting it around my basket, which worked qute well for me. I just plopped the purple one on top of the green when I got up to it, and they didn't argue at all, which was nice. I'd arbitrarily decided before I started warping that I wanted my stripes to go green-purple-green-purple-green down the band. Then after I'd started with the green I started pondering whether purple-green-purple-green-purple would look better. It took me all week and lots of staring at the half-warped loom to finally decide on purple-green-purple-green-purple. So that meant shuffling the cards a little bit, but that was fine.

Yesterday after I'd handed my assignments in I started thinking about weaving. First I needed to decide what patterns I was going to brocade, so I went back to looking at my leaf. I ended up printing off an outline of it and tracing it onto the graph paper.

I've been home since Tuesday night, but I didn't remember to charge my camera battery until I wanted to take this photo. So we've still got phone pictures. Anyway, this leaf looks a whole lot better than my last attempt! I even put in the little veiny bits with the idea that they could work as tie-downs for the brocade weft. I also did my little arrow thingy, I had a vague idea that I'd have a small arrow thingy in the middle of the band, then a big leaf, then another small arrow thingy, then my words, then an arrow thingy, then the leaf, then the arrow thingy. I decided to give up on the cool looking swirly motif thing, since I didn't know what to put inside it.

Then I started weaving!

I'm quite pleased that I chose purple-green-purple-green-purple. I think it needed the darker colour on the edges. Anyway, here's where I realised that my little arrow thingy was only gonna cover the purple stripe in the middle and only a tiny bit of the green on either side. The band is only an inch wide, so it would've just gotten lost. I decided I'd just do a leaf on either side of my words.

Here's where my problems started. I added in the brocade weft and started my leaf pattern, but each thread was miles away from the next one. I decided almost straight away that it was gonna look crap, so I unpicked it and rewound my gold thread to double it over in an effort to make it cover more of the surface. It took me ages to figure out if I had enough gold thread. I decided to put everything closer together, and only do one leaf at the start instead of on either side of the words. Then I had to go to work, so I didn't get to see if it worked.

It didn't work. This morning I wove half of my leaf and it just looked awful.

This picture was actually taken with my camera, since my battery is all charged now. The purpose of my graph paper is to see what the pattern will look like when it's stretched a bit. The actual weaving stretched it double again. Also, if I put the weft over only one card, it gets swallowed up, but if I put it under one card, the warp looks really thick. Anyway, this is half of my leaf. Does is look like a leaf to you? Nope. The brocade threads are way too far apart. I think the problem is that my picks are too big. I get about four picks per centimetre of weaving, but Guntram with a 30/2 warp (just a little bit finer than my cord) and the same gold thread gets at least ten picks per centimetre. That's more than double what I'm doing. If I could half the size of my picks I'd be happy, because it would be like there was a thread in every one of those gaps in the picture above. The problem is I have no idea how to do it. I've been beating as had as I can, the whole loom creaks under the pressure.

Anyway, I'm a little upset because I was intending to get a lot of this done today, and unless I fix it right now I won't be sending it to November Crown to enter in the Kingdom A&S competition in two weeks. I've also spent a lot of money on good silk and gold thread, and I would hate to have to chuck it all. There's no way I'm going to keep going with how it looks now. I thought the tower brocading I did at the start of the year was gappy, but looking at it now it's really not. You can't fit a whole thread between the brocade threads that are there, and you can with space to spare on the one I'm doing now. It's odd because I used thicker threads for the whole tower belt, and the whole thing is done in the same size thread, and I still get four picks per centimetre. I would've thought that finer thread would mean finer weaving, but instead each pick is the same distance apart, but it looks further because the threads are finer.

If anyone has any ideas on how to make smaller picks, I'd be grateful for the advice. I don't know if maybe the tension on the warp makes any difference, or if I need to find something with a smaller edge than my old school ruler to beat each pick. Or if I just need completely different materials.

Continuous Warp

I have two assignments to do today, so instead I've been looking into the possibility of continuous warp to thread my cards for my belt. Amalie, who writes this blog, suggested it after my last post, and though I've heard of this mysterious continuous warping thing, and even had it explained to me, I never understood it until I watched this video:

OHMYGOODNESS ISN'T IT AMAZING!!!! It just looks so easy and simple and I can't believe I've been threading my cards one by one all this time. However, with further consideration, there are some problems with this technique.

Number One:
My band is not going to be one colour, it's going to have five strips alternating purple and green. This means that I will have to warp up only ten cards at a time, a total of five times. I can see it getting a little bit annoying when I'm dropping one card on the outside, then trying to slot one between the purple and the green.

Number Two:
My thread currently consists of two rather large skeins, one purple and one green. I would need to measure out four balls of the correct length of each colour before I even started. I can see that going very badly for me.

Number Three:
My cards are going to be alternating S and Z threaded. Continuous warp means threading cards all in the same direction, then flipping every second one. What's the problem you ask? The problem is my obsessive compulsiveness. My cards have labelled holes, and I couldn't possibly weave an entire belt if they're not all facing the same way with the same holes in the same positions. I would need to spend time working out what is going to happen to each card, and stack them so that when I flip them they all end up the same. Not sure that it's worth the effort :P

Number Four:
I don't have clamps. I need to find two sturdy objects of some sort that are the correct distance apart, or something I can move to make them the correct distance apart. At the moment I have no ideas. I want to have my loom warped up by the end of today, so I'll have to find something in this house. The other thing is that I want to weave on my loom. It's transportable. It's not suitable to use for continuous warping. This means moving the warp from whatever objects I find to my loom, and I can see that being incredibly tedious, and the string getting all tangled like evil string does, and cards falling out all over the place.

In conclusion, I think that continuous warping won't work for me on this occasion. The thought process alone is going to take me all day (in amongst the two assignments I'm going to do :P) and in the end I don't have anything to warp around. I think that today is going to consist of me doing my assignments, then taking a break to individually thread up a few cards, then taking a break from that to do my assignments, and so on. Hopefully by the end of the day I'll have at least one assignment finished, and my loom will be warped. Continuous warping still looks amazing though, I think I'll have to invest in some clamps and definitely try it for a later project. Thanks for the suggestion Amalie!

More Sidetracking

I've spent this last week working on my pouch. It was supposed to be a quick project, but after spending all day Friday on it I sort of lost my enthusiasm. Last time I posted I was practicing some new embroidery stitches. I did some more practice, then I printed out an outline of my leaf and punched holes in it to trace it onto my fabric

 My chalk pencil is really quite blunt, but I couldn't find a pencil sharpener anywhere in this house! I ended up punching the holes with a pen that had run out of ink, then pushing the chalk pencil through. Then it was time for the embroidery! I used some old yellow crochet cotton that I've had lying around for ages. I bought it for making lucet cords but found that it kept snapping from the friction against my lucet. Perle cotton seems to slide around my lucet a lot better so I've been using that instead. Anyway, it's a really good colour so I decided to use it for this. It's three plys, but I only used two for the veiny insidey bits of the leaf.

Once I'd finished the embroidery, I strung up some cards! I think I'd done about two cards before I nearly died from the tedious, so I dread to think what stringing up fifty cards is going to be like when I get around to finally starting my belt. Anyway, after asking the internet I decided to use eight cards, and I threaded them alternating S and Z. Then I just started weaving. I felt a little bit like I was going in totally blind, because there weren't many tips to be found on the internet about how to actually do this whole weaving edges thing. There was just a whole bunch of people saying they'd done it with finished pictures. So I made it up as I went along. My loom was too long for the length I was weaving, so I tied one end to the coffee table leg, and then had this brilliant idea to tie the other end to my belt, so I could easily climb in and out and stuff, and I wouldn't need to waste a whole bunch of weft by tying it around my waist. On Saturday morning I realised this wasn't such a brilliant plan, when I had to go to work without a belt because it was tied to my weaving. It's also a little bit hard to explain to people, that my pants are falling down because I tied my weaving to my belt. Anyway, here's a picture:

I was quite pleased with my embroidery, although the split stitch with only two plys worked a whole lot better, which actually makes complete sense. I don't know that I want to try it with a single strand, that just seems way too tedious for me. I got the look I was after, even if it does look a but chunky. I tacked the edges of the pouch together, just to hold everything together while I did the weaving. What you can't see from this picture is that I really did need a few more cards. My stitching is visible and it's not very neat at all and I don't like it. While I had it tensioned really well between the table and my belt it was quite consistent in that the weaving joined to the fabric on the back, and the stitching was only visible on the front. I thought it was doing it that way because of the direction I was throwing the weft through the shed, maybe I was consistently pulling in one direction. Then I hit the corner.

I untwisted my weft just before the corner, and got some bubbles. I'm too used to being able to separate my cards with the teeth on the end of my loom, but this time I had them all tied together so I couldn't indivivually tension my cards. I just guessed with the corner, I'm sure there's some sort of trick with weaving around corners, but I couldn't find any tips at all. This was the point where I realised that I could no longer control the tension with it all tied to my belt. You can see the fabric pulling already because I was still trying to hold the tension as if it was still straight. It was also around this point that I realised that the other pack was getting looser and looser the more I turned the first one. I decided to catch up with the other side, and from then on I alternated packs with each pick.

I also encountered a problem with my lining. The whole point of weaving the edges is to create a neat edge, so I didn't finish the edges of the fabric beforehand. It was fine along the sides, but when I got to the top the linen lining wasn't sandwiched between the wool anymore. That was when the stitching started just pulling the fibres of the linen apart and it all frayed. At one point there's a whole where the lining isn't even attached, but mostly there's just a messy looking fluff all the way along the top inside edge. The second corner worked out a lot better, and I think that's because it's easier to join two packs of cards together than it is to split them. By this time I'd given up on tensioning the weft with the belt, I basically held the pouch between my knees as I stitched and pulled the weft through the shed, then I held the corner to tension it as I beat it. My theory about the direction I was throwing the weft being related to which side the stitching was visible on fell apart as I wove down the last side. The weaving sort of travels all over the place along the seam

The end result is fine in that the pouch is still very much useable and it was always going to be a possibly dodgy project, but I don't know that I want to enter it into a competition. I feel like competition worthy projects should be of a high standard, and I think I'd be a little bit ashamed at entering something substandard. However, my documentation is 95% finished, because I did it alongside making the pouch. At the moment I'm leaning towards entering it anyway, with no expectations of coming anywhere close to winning, and a paragraph at the end of my documentation outlining what went wrong and how I will fix it for future attempts.

It still needs drawstrings and a hanging cord. I've made one drawstring and I dun wanna do anymore. I'm also pondering whether I want a multicoloured hanging cord. I'd going home tomorrow so I'll be able to pick up some purple thread then, but I might just go with green. All in all this has been a useful learning experience at least. I've wanted to do tablet woven edges for a long time, but next time I will definitely go for 12 cards and whip stitch the edges together before I start weaving. The wonky corners don't bother me so much, I think it's just the nature of trying to weave around corners.

Slighty Sidetracked

My gold thread arrived!

It arrived a few weeks ago, but it was before Championship and I was Very Busy. It's 20 metres, but it doesn't look like that much. I'm feeling a little bit anxious about having enough for my belt.

But I'll think about that later. Championship was two weeks ago and it was awesome! I decided to stay up on Thursday night until the buttonholes on my wool cote were done, because when I left work at 9pm it was bloody freezing and I knew it wasn't gonna be any different on the weekend. I still need to fix the hem and look at the back seam, but I made it wearable, and I did end up getting it out on the Saturday night. I think I got an average of five hours sleep every night, between going to bed after midnight because there were Exciting Things happening by the fire that I didn't want to miss out on, and getting up at 6:30am to have a shower before cooking breakfast. On Monday after we'd packed up and everything was finished, I crashed. I napped at the post revel, then went home and was in bed by 7pm. Tuesday was sort-out-the-baronial-trailer day, and boy was that exhausting. Then I had to go back to real life and face the past two weeks of uni that I'd been ignoring. Except I had an assignment dur on Thursday, and it took me all day Wednesday to turn my brain back on. So by Saturday I had three weeks of uni to catch up on, which I have finally done now!

So now Championship is over and I'm all set with uni, is it time to start weaving my belt? Nope. Bal d'Aneala is on in two weeks, and the other day I remembered that I wanted to enter the A&S competition. This year's theme is flowers. For a long time I've wanted to make an heraldic pouch with tablet woven edges that will actually be a decently sized functional pouch. I love my little German pouch, but it's tiny and not good for much except decoration and carrying around my lip balm. Anyway, here's my device:

You may notice that there is no flower on my device. But there is a leaf! A leaf is sort of a flower, right? Anyway, an ivy flower is kinda ugly

 

So I'm going to embroider my ivy leaf onto my pouch, and enter it in a flower competition. I should at least get some points for creativity :P You may rememeber that my little German pouch was my first attempt at embroidery. I don't think German Brick Stitch will work for me this time, so I've been teaching myself new stitches!

 

I keep forgetting to pick up my camera battery charger EVERY SINGLE TIME I go home. It's very frustrating. So I'm still taking pictures with my phone and emailing them to myself. What you see about on the far left is my first ever attempt at split stitch. It starts at the top, goes around the curve and then turns into stem stitch. Over on the right across the top is chain stitch, then some more split stitch going down. I think I must be mad trying to teach myself these things. I want to get it done this afternoon so I can thread up some cards and try out this tablet weaving edge thingy, so I can finish this project and get going on my belt, since I have less than a month to finish that. I think I like split stitch the best. Or at least I like the idea of split stitch the best. I'm not sure that I'm practiced enough yet to make it look very neat.

Anyway, I should get back to it. I'm optimistically thinking that it'll all turn out fine in the end. Or I'll end up completely ashamed of it and hide it away and start again another time  :P At least I have plenty of purple wool and gold cotton, it's not like I'm trying something new with expensive materials like real gold thread. That's my other project :P

Busy!

I have been so busy! So much busy in my weeks that I haven't blogged about it :( So now I am blogging.

I went to St Basil training after work a few weeks ago. I pulled apart one sleeve of my red cote and sewed it back together all nice and neat. Then I decided that maybe I don't want t do it with the other one, maybe it can just stay the way it is. I dunno. It's just such a pain fiddling with sleeves. I also pulled the back seam in about half an inch, but I have yet to try it on to see how it fits. I intended to do that today because I want to look at pulling in my blue wool surcote, but then I didn't. My next fortnight off from work on thursday night I was asked to stay back, so I didn't make it to college training. I needs the monies for my Pennsic fund. Tomorrow is my next early Thursday so I'll go and try on the red cote, get some second opinions and hopefully get some help with pulling in the blue cote.

I have an idea for the wool cote. I think I'm going to unpick the lining completely, and cut off an inch or so from the front seams where the buttons are. It means doing my buttonholes all over again, but it also may give me a chance to straighten up the edge the whole way down, so hopefully I'll end up with a straight front seam. There's more crooked seams, but the front one is the one that bothers me the most. Anyway, I should only have to do that, adjust the neckline when I sew the lining back in, then reshape the back seam. And I need to make the sleeves a little shorter and slightly tighter. I've decided I want my wool cote to be wearable for Championship, which is in less than two weeks! I'm intending to wear my ginger cote almost the whole event, since I'll be spending most of it in the kitchen. Maybe my red cote too, depending on how I feel about it. But it can get cold at night and I'd rather throw on another layer than get out my thick cloak. We shall see.

Speaking of Championship, it's getting all exciting! I've been a busy bookings officer emailing people about Important Things. I've never sent so many emails in my life. I've also organised a constable for the event AND to hand over my baronial office to :D I've also been thinking about foods. Project eggs benny for breakfast is looking like a go, and we've even started thinkign about what we're feeding people for dinner. Mister Nathan also made me a TAM so I can run the archery stuff :) It's gonna be an awesome event!

Anyway, the main point of this post is to tell you all about what I've been doing today instead of trying on my red cote to see how it fits. I've been drawing! Last week my order of gold thread was finally confirmed and shipped, so as soon as it arrives I'll have all the tools to string up my loom and start weaving my awesome belt of awesome! Except a pattern, I needs to decide what I'm gonna weave with my fancy gold thread. I looked into a motto, and even though I know Mister Nathan was making a joke, I have decided on "Folium saltans in ventum" which translates as a "leaf dancing into the wind" because my main charge is an ivy leaf and I like dancing. It makes sense to me anyway. Anyway, here's a picture of my letters

Yeah I know, what a great picture. When I went to take it I discovered that my camera battery is flat, and my charger is at home. So I've been taking pictures with my phone and emailing them to myself, because the usb cable for my phone is also at home :P Anyway, here's my letters! I'm using the 48 card version of textura quadrata from Guntram. I've also been looking through other heraldic-y sort of patterns from Guntram, and looking at fitting my leaf in there somewhere. I used GTT to draw a leaf

Here's my leaf! Now, the grid in the program is a square grid, but when you weave, the pattern stretches along the band. GTT has a function that shows the pattern stretched how it would when you weave it, but I needed to have drawn my leaf sideways to use it. So I decided to just draw it out to see how it looks

My e didn't fit on the other page, so here he is looking like a little pacman trying to eat the other pretty pattern bit. I originally wanted to put my leaf inside the shield, but it's too small so I couldn't get anything looking like a leaf to fit. I still really like the design, so I might put a chevron inside the shield instead. Underneath is the leaf as a drew it in GTT. It's all stretched and funny looking, so next to it I drew another version that's slightly taller. I didn't count the grid in GTT, and ended up only making it 36 cards tall, so I had some extra room to make it taller. The second one looks better, but I'm not quite sure if it's there yet.

I also like the lions and some of the knotwork with quatrefoils which I might use as well. I might even draw up the little arrowheards on my device and see if I can put them in one of the frames.

So that's basically it from me today. Next week is study break, so I'm hoping I'll have some spare time to finish my blue wool cote whilst preparing for Championship. Once Championship is over I'm hoping my gold thread will have arrived and I can start weaving. I should also start looking at documentation too, I guess :P