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!

Doubleface

Here I am posting from my new tablet, Timothy. We've had some dramaz talking to the sd card on the dock, but I think we have it all sorted now, so hopefully I'll get to post my pictures! Anyway, on Sunday I warped up my loom to make the strap for my awesome bag of awesome! I did a continuous warp, but I had to do it in two lots because I needed to use eight balls of cotton. It also took way longer than I thought it would, as usual. I also ended up just manually threading the eight selvedge cards because it was easier.

On Sunday night I went to Nathan and Catherine's house to watch Eurovision and have snuggles with the puppy, and Mister Nathan finished my shuttlebeater!

I forgot to take a picture before winding my weft on, but you get the idea. YAY SHUTTLEBEATER! I love it very much, and it smells like oranges because Mister Nathan used his special orange flavoured wax stuff :) Thanks Mister Nathan! I took my loom up to visit Spoh on Tuesday night because she's home for two weeks! I realised I couldn't use my embroidery pattern as a weaving pattern, because the embroidery pattern has zigzaggy stitches, and plain doubleface has all the stitches next to each other. Anyway, I fiddled a bit to see how doubleface actually works. Even though I didn't get much done, I understand more about doubleface and I got to do a lot of unweaving too.

Yesterday I used Guntram's Tabletweaving Thingy to draft a pattern. I haven't used the program much except to print off Guntram's threading diagrams and turning sequences, but actually it's really useful. I drew this:

GTT even changes the colours and stuff, and you can set the threading direction and look at how it will look as an actual band. Anyway, I couldn't fit the motifs on the embroidery pattern in the middle, so I decided to just do the diamonds. It still looks nice. I started weaving this yesterday, but I only got a few picks in before I realised that once again my weaving stretches patterns way longer than they should be, so I unwove it and drafted a new pattern.

It looks ugly and squashed, but then I started weaving it

I think it looks pretty awesome. The bottom looks a bit chunky, so I modified the pattern a little when I got to the top and it looks heaps better. I can't be bothered unweaving it and it doesn't bother me too much so I'll just leave it how it is. You might also notice that my picks get smaller as I go along, which is good. It took me ages to tension it but so far I'm not having any trouble.

I'm pretty happy with how it's going, I think it looks great. I haven't decided which side I'll use for the top yet, I guess we'll see how it looks when I'm done :)

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!