Bits and Pieces

The last two weeks have been pretty hectic, so I'm going to make a list with numbers.

1. I finished my weaving!

I'm pretty damn pleased with it. I ended up with a scarf about 1.8m long. The only bad thing is that it's really itchy! I haven't washed it yet though, so I might get some fabric softener or something and see how it goes with that.

2. I started some tablet weaving!

That's a really bad photo, but you get the idea. It's Anna Neuper's Pattern No. 11 with 41 tablets, plus 4 selvedge tablets. It's doubleface and is going to decorate a cushion in our tent. Our tent is going to be totally awesome at Championship! I'm really looking forward to it.

I started warping up my loom last weekend. My Ashford warping board had arrived so I used that. I warped up 34 tablets before my balls ran out, then I had a problem. I only had three balls of each colour, and I'd used up two of each, so I only had one ball of each colour left and you need two for continuous warp. Laaame. Anyway, I transfered what I had to my loom, and in the process I dropped my cards from a height of about 1cm. It was a complete disaster. I may as well have thrown them across the room, that's how much untangling of string I had to do. I also used my warping board to wind the remaining lengths of string, which I then threaded manually and it took me ages.

Anyway, I've now woven about 90cm, with 70cm left to go. I should finish it this week and then I'm going to enter it into the open A&S at Midwinter.

3. Midwinter Feast! I've been organising it. We have a hall, an awesome team and enough bookings to make a profit. Woohoo! The Taylors are running the kitchen, and last weekend we went to their place for a mini-feast rehearsal type thing. It was pretty awesome. We're serving all the old favourites like bunny stew and venison, and basing almost everything on period recipes which has kind of been missing from the feasts I've been to over the last couple of years. Except for the Middle Eastern themed feasts, but I've been missing the Western European food!

4. Moving house. I moved down to Katanning on Wednesday because I start a new job on Monday. For those of you who have no idea where Katanning is, it's 2-3 hours away from everything cool in the south of WA, like Albany, the southwest wine region and Perth. So it's pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Also it's really cold. But I has a job and I'm living in the Allied Health share house for seriously cheaps. There's also room for my loom! There's a big puzzle table on wheels in the front room with a half done puzzle on it which has apparently been there since forever and no one knows who it belongs to. So the puzzle is going to go back in its box and my loom is moving in! I think I might need to find a stool of some sort though. I shall be spending my weekends weaving, except next weekend when I go back to Perth to run a feast and pick up my loom.

So that's a very brief overview of everything I've been doing over the last two weeks. It's been pretty hectic, but lots of exciting things happening too!

More Weaving

I went to the Weavers and Spinners weaving day on Tuesday, and it was really cool. I stayed for the morning session and just walked around and chatted to people and looked at their weaving. Then everyone sits in a circle to eat their lunch and have a show and tell. Mostly the beginners weave and a couple of more advanced ladies run around and fix things up for them. I wished I'd had my loom with me, but if I had then one of the ladies surely would've unwound it and re-tensioned it.

It did get me thinking about my tension problems though, and later that evening when I rolled the whole thing forward the right edge got even tighter and I just couldn't get the rest of it to match. I was having huge problems opening up a shed because the middle was so saggy, so I stopped weaving and left it overnight. Then I decided to re-tension it myself. I also decided I was bored with plain weave and had a look through my books to see if I could find a nice twill pattern that would be more interesting. Anyway, because I'm INSANE I ended up rewinding the warp so it was even and tensioned and good and stuff, then I cut off the piece of weaving I'd done (it's about a metre long), then I COMPLETELY RE-THREADED ALL MY HEDDLES AND MY REED. I couldn't find anything interesting for the threading that I already had, so I had to change it. I must be crazy, but it's done now and it was so totally worth it because LOOKIT

I MADE DIAMONDS! :D :D It's all even and neat and I seem to have figured out how to keep my edges all smooth and straight too. It's so much nicer to have it all tensioned evenly to start with, so it rolls along smoothly and all I need to worry about is the actual weaving part.

The piece I pulled off turned out ok for a first go. One edge is shorter than the other because of the tension issues I had, and some of the twill sections are really messy because the end warp threads didn't always get caught with the weft. I've put a floating warp on the edges of the diamonds which is working really well for me and probably helping keep my edges neat. I washed the first piece to see what happens with the felting, since this wool is felting wool, and it's only fluffed up a little bit. I was worried it would fluff out a lot and obscure the patterns, but it's not actually made much of a difference. I did put it on the gentle wool cycle, and I'm wondering if the washing machine doesn't heat it past 40 degrees on that cycle even though I set it to hot/warm. We have a commercial top loader washing machine that only has hot, warm or cold settings to choose from instead of actual temperatures. Anyway, I'm hoping to use my diamonds piece as a scarf, and I won't be washing it very hot anyway so if there is more felting to happen then I most likely won't be seeing it.

Other than my weaving, I've been planning Midwinter Feast. It's in three weeks and it's taking AGES to get everything organised and signed off. I really need to start advertising soon or no one will come, because I think most people are thinking that it's not happening this year. It is! I'm working on it and it will be totally awesome with delicious foods and stuff. I even found a really nice old hall that's really pretty and has a convenient wire running along the walls at banner hanging height.

Weaving

LOOKIT MY WEAVING!

It took me all afternoon/evening Saturday to wind a warp, put it on the loom and then thread the first 60 heddles. I need a new warping board especially for warping this loom, because the one I have for tablet weaving doesn't have long enough pegs to fit a proper warp. Also it's made from scrappy bits that Dad had in his shed so it couldn't deal with the tension.

MY WARPING BOARD WAS WARPING! It's all munched and I don't think it'll survive another big warp being wound onto it. I also had to wind my warp in two bits which is not ideal, but it worked out in the end. Monday was spent threading the rest of the heddles and then sleying the reed. The whole process takes ages but it's all very methodical and the warp is always tied up somewhere neatly. At one point when I was half way through threading the heddles, the cat jumped up and walked across my warp at the back of the loom, and it didn't move anywhere. Unless he sits up there and pulls on the strings with his claws, the warp is pretty safe. So far he's more interested in smelling the loom and rubbing his face all over it.

Anyway, I threaded four shafts with the idea of doing a plain weave with the option to fiddle with different sequences and stuff. I got bored of plain weave pretty quickly and started doing some 3/1 twill. Or 1/3, I'm not sure which is which. I didn't roll my warp onto the back roller bar dealie evenly, and my paper wasn't quite wide enough so I'm having some tension issues, mostly on the right edge. Also I have NO IDEA how to keep my width even and not have little loopy bits on the edges from my weft. I think I'm getting better now but I'm not very consistent and can't figure out how to get consistent.

Next Tuesday the Weavers and Spinners Guild is meeting for a weaving day, so I think I'll go check it out and maybe get some tips and stuff. I can't take my loom with me because it's heavy and won't fit in my car, which is a shame because I'd like to show them exactly what my issues are. But they might have some looms warped up for practice, and I'll take lots of photos to show them.