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!

Four Weeks!

Only four weeks and ten hours left until I leave for Rowany Festival, and I'm starting to feel slightly hysterical! Necessary projects are being downgraded to unnecessary, and unnecessary projects are moving off my list completely. I have four weeks to get two massive assignments completely finished and another one started, so SCA projects are starting to become those things I do to procrastinate. Also, I've almost completely given up napping during the week which makes me very sad.

So, what have I done in the two weeks since I last posted?

I made a cotehardie! It's not green! Yay! I haven't tried it on yet because I couldn't be bothered. I'll wear it on Saturday to the WAMA fair demo unless I put it on and something is horribly wrong with it. This is the third cotehardie I've made from my new awesome pattern, not counting my supportive man-shirt, so it should fit fine. I'm not sure what I'm going to use as a lacing cord because I forgot I needed one and didn't get any matching perle cotton from Spotlight while I was there for something else, and I'm not sure I can justify going all the way out there this week. I might just have to pick a random coloured lacing cord from one of my other cotes for this weekend :)

Today was one of those procrastinatey days, and my browser has decided all of a sudden that it doesn't like Facebook and kept freezing every time I logged in. What did I do instead? I warped my loom! I warped my loom for one of those unnecessary projects that has fallen off my Festival list, because I'm going to a demo on the weekend and tablet weaving is a cool thing for a demo. I'm turning one of Anna Neuper's brocade patterns into a pair of garters for my man outfit. I used some blue reeled silk that I bought off ebay before Christmas for really cheap. It's thinner than any silk I've used before, but is lovely and shiny. There are some flaws, some lumpy bits and the skein isn't one long piece, it's a bunch of fairly long pieces tied together. I only encountered one tie today, but could see some more in what was left. I got to use the yarn swift I got for Christmas!

Tory was very taken with the swift and felt the need to rub his face over every corner. He figured out fairly quickly that it turns and that seemed to delight him. Also, I think for the first time ever I'm going to have to guard my string, because apparently this yarn is tastier than any other yarn that has come before, even more tasty than the pegs of my warping board.

Here's the whole setup. The yarn swift is amazing! Best idea ever! That little wooden chair you can see in the top left of the photo is what I used to hang my skeins around, and it's very questionable as to whether some of them are still skeins or a tangled mess of string. Anyway, loom is warped! I intend to use the gold wire stuff I bought for the brocade weft of that belt that was going to be awesome, because hopefully it'll work better with a different warp and a more geometric pattern. I've got some top stitch thread and some upholstery thread to use as structural wefts, so hopefully I'll be able to find a way that it'll all work together nicely. Or there will be tantrums and I'll be going to Spotlight after all to find something else to use as brocade weft. Wish me luck!

Warp

I does have a warping board! My dad is pretty awesome, making me all these weaving things, and making them NICE. I've seen a lot of functional wooden bits and pieces that people have made for weaving, and they're not always nice, just functional. It's fine to have functional things, but it's nice of my dad to put in a little more effort to finish things off nicely. Anyway, here it is!

Tada! Complete with warp. It's 40cm x 50cm, which is a nice small size for storing places, and has heaps of pegs. I can measure out 8 metres of warp on this thing, which is probably more than I'll ever need. SO, how to use a warping board? I finally realised what it was and how to use it from this tutorial. I wanna make that hood by the way. The only thing that wasn't clear to me was the stuff about threading the cards. I get that you need to cross the threads on every pass, like this:

Because crossing them keeps them in the order you warped them, so when you transfer the warp to the loom it's all nice and flat and not all tangled. What I ended up doing was using some things as spacers.

A spare tablet and a pen. These are essential tablet weaving accessories that everyone should invest in, the proper tools for keeping your threads neat. When you awkwardly remove the warp from the board, trying to hold these spacers in place, and put them flat on the couch, you can pull each thread off in the order it went on, and it's all very neat and the string behaves and stuff. It's AMAZING. I had an epic argument with my skein of green silk, so what I ended up doing was warping up the correct number of black threads and laying them out with the spacers between the crossy over bit. Then I used the warping board to measure off two or three lengths of the green silk. I kept having to pull the end of the skein back through knots that had spontaneously occurred, so I wasn't able to just keep wrapping the thread around the board. Anyway, I'd have however many green threads I needed for the next tablet, and I'd pull off the correct amount of black ones from my nice neat row. It worked in the end. That whole process was a little tedious, but when I had finished warping the threaded-in part of the pattern, I had 18 tablets of alternate S and Z threaded to warp. This bit was super easy and quick. I measured off the correct amount of black threads, laid them down with the spacers, and just sat there threading the cards one by one.

I threw a few tantrums during the process, but that's not my fault, my skeins threw their tantrums first. I had epic knots in the green one, then right near the end the black skein decided that it had been behaving waaaay too well, and it spontaneously tangled up. So the process happened over a few days. I was able to literally just get up and walk away from it, because the cat is a very strange cat, and he hasn't yet been interesting in stationary string. He was dead to the world asleep on my bed when I quietly pulled my basket of silk down off the shelf to start warping. I turned around to find him alert and awake and watching me very closely. If I'm making the string move, he wants to play with it, but if it's just sitting there it doesn't interest him at all. What does interest him is little bits of round wood. I've caught him chewing on the pegs of my warping board, and he's almost totally destroyed a pencil I used to hold the end of my warp on my little loom, it's all splintered and covered in little teeth marks. Anyway, I finished warping last night, tensioned my loom and started weaving.

Remember it's supposed to be a black belt edged with leaves? Guess who got her Z and S threading backwards? Yeah. *hangs head*. I bloody hate stupid S and Z threading, it makes no sense to me. I spent ages figuring out which way to thread the cards and I got it backwards. So the first bit is all munted. Then I started troubleshooting, and flipped the cards over. Then the left side started looking closer to leaves, but the right side was different. Different? How can this be? So I compared the two sets and somehow I'd managed to thread two tablets wrong. Luckily they both just needed a half turn, so I did that and kept going. The last two blobby bits it what I got after all that. I dunno. Something is still wrong. The cards are all threaded the correct way, I double checked how Guntram labels his holes and I got it right, and the pattern is not on the bottom. The cards now face the right instead of the left, so maybe the home position needs to change. I'll try that next. Right now I have some study to do before I can go play at Nathan and Catherine's house. I'll bring my loom and work on it there.