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