New Adventures

Time for my monthly report! I always have the best intentions to do more SCA things and blog about them, but my life is a little too topsy-turvy at the moment. My last post was about the last thing I made, the double weave cloth. I ended up turning it into a pleated apron and entered it into the open A&S at Championship, where it came second, Yay! I don't have any pictures of it and I left it in Perth, so that will have to come at a later time.

Championship weekend was really great. Spoh came back from the snow so we set up our big tent again, this time with added improvements! I didn't take any pictures but it's looking pretty great now that the spokes have been lowered to the correct spot at the top of the valance, and with the extra painting we did along the valance. I spent the weekend keeping busy as lady in waiting for Sir Eva and later for the B&B, and relaxing the rest of the time. There was good food and good weather and I really didn't wanna go back to Katanning afterwards.

In other news, I'm not living in Katanning anymore, I've moved further south to Albany. I was poached from Katanning and offered a contract in the Subacute Care ward down here at Albany Hospital, and I jumped at the chance because it's pretty much my dream job. For those who don't know where all these places are in WA, I has a map!

I have amazing Paint skillz. So as you can see, Perth is a 4.5 hour drive away, and that's only because it's pretty much a straight line all the way up at 110km/h. The nearest SCA group is Vallon d'Or up in Balingup, which is a 3.5 hour drive away because it's all twisty roads. BUT there are a few members of Vallon d'Or who live down here in Albany, so I'm in the process of getting in contact with them to see if we can get some stuff happening down here.

So far I've been down here for a week and I'm staying temporarily in nurses quarters, which is actually a massive house with lots of rooms and a really nice ocean view. It's way nicer than the hospital house in Katanning, it's even got a spa in one of the bathrooms. Technically I don't think allied health staff are supposed to use the house, but I was given six weeks to find my own place, which I've done. I'm moving into my very own rental next weekend, and I'm looking forward to it. Once that happens I can unpack my loom and get going on another project. As far as my job goes, I'm on a rolling contract until the department gets around to advertising all the positions in my unit, which could take anywhere between three and twelve months to finalize. Then I'll have the option to apply for my job as a permanent position. So at the moment it looks like I'll be down here indefinitely, and once I'm settled in my own place I'll make a push to get SCA stuff happening.

Albany is at least way more happening than Katanning. There are shops open on a Sunday and more to do to meet people than just playing hockey. Watch this space!

Double Weave

I've been weaving! I decided to try my hand at double weave because it sounded exciting and I like the idea of weaving a decent width of cloth that can be turned into something rather than just weaving scarves forever and ever. Anyway, I used my Petlins 16/2 linen for my weft, and spent all of last weekend making a warp and dressing my loom. I ended up with 480 ends, which is an awful lot of heddles to thread. The 16/2 linen I got from Glenora Weaving and Wool that I used for my weft turned out to be really quite coarse and rough feeling. The Petlins linen was significantly softer. Anyway I'm not sure if it was because of the rough linen but the weave ended up not packing down very well so it was a very loose weave that looked and felt a lot like hessian fabric.

I also had some dramas when I put my warp on my loom. I swear I looked away for two seconds and when I looked back the warp had moved on my raddle. It was two inches narrower on either side, which was really weird. Also I ended up making up two separate warps because the pegs on my warping board were too short, and because they got moved around a lot they ended up a bit tangled. I spent ages winding the warp on my loom and untangling it as I went, and because of the issue I had with my raddle the warp threads ended up crossing each other and they were wound on the loom narrower than they should've been. Anyway, it was much less of an issue than I thought it would be as I wove, although I did end up with some saggy warp threads and I had to make sure I combed the warp with my fingers on the back of the loom every time I wound it on.

Double weave! This is where two layers are woven at once, one on top of the other. There are heaps of options for weaving like this, you can cross the warp threads through both layers to end up with cool patterns and a weave that is twice as thick as normal, or you can join the layers at both ends to make a tube, or at one end to make a piece of cloth twice the width of your warp. This is what I did. I wove a plain tabby weave using four shafts, one layer on two shafts and the other layer on the other two shafts. Since I have ten shafts, I can potentially weave a piece of tabby woven cloth that is five times the width of my loom, which I find quite exciting. Anyway, here's a picture:

It's not a very good picture, but you can see here I've lifted up the shafts of the top layer so you can see between them, and they're joined on the far side. I had to be really careful making sure my edges were consistent, especially the edge with the fold because that was to be the middle of my fabric. It took ages to weave because two picks were only really one, because I needed to go across and back again to cover the whole width of the fabric. There was a lot of hoping as I wove, because I couldn't really see the bottom layer and had to just try and weave consistently without really knowing if it was working. Pulling it off the loom was very exciting.

This is it, fresh off the loom! The fold looks weird because I couldn't lay it out completely flat since it was so used to being folded, and the weave is a bit wibbly from being wrapped around the tension bar of my loom. But it worked! I ended up with 132cm in length, and 69cm in width.

Here's a close-up of the fold. See how it's quite a loose weave? The stripey bits are because my reed was threaded in a 2, 2, 3 pattern because I have to just make do with a 14dpi reed. So it's not a true even weave, but I think it looked kinda cool. Next I tied off the ends and threw it in the wash for fulling. The washing machine in the house I'm living in is connected to the hot water, but I don't think it's turned on and it doesn't have a hot water knob. I tried washing it in hot and the machine didn't fill up with water, so I filled in with hot water from the tap with a saucepan which was a very ridiculous thing to do. Anyway, I washed it with soap and fabric softener, then put it in the dryer on hot, then washed it again with more fabric softener and put it in the dryer again. This is what I ended up with:

I lost 20cm from the length and 10cm from the width, but it's much softer now, and the weave has tightened up a bit.

I'm really quite pleased with how it turned out. It has quite a nice drape too. I'd originally planned to turn it into a smocked apron, but now I'm not so sure. I think a decorative apron would have been made out of finer, more tightly woven fabric. This fabric will be great for an apron, but I think it would lend itself to a more functional, plain kind of apron. I think a smocked apron will have to wait for another day when I'm better at weaving and can try my hand at using finer yarn.

Tomorrow my fabric is going to be turned into some sort of apron :)

The July Weaving Saga

I can't believe it's August already! The time has just been flying past. I had planned to do a lot more SCA related stuff in July, but those plans sort of fell by the wayside.

First of all, I ran a feast! In the week leading up to it I felt a little bit like I was trying to herd cats, but in the end it turned out really well. I had a lot of positive comments about the food and the hall, and I thought it was really nice to go back to the kind of medieval feast we used to have, where we focused more on period recipes and ingredients rather than just having a roast dinner. I entered my tablet weaving in the A&S competition and it won! I was a little surprised because it wasn't my best band ever, but it was a bit of an experiment and I put a lot of work into documenting it really well.

Once the feast was over and my report was all finalised I'd planned to do a whole lot of weaving down here in Katanning on my weekends. My first problem with that was that my loom will not fit into my car. It's way too tall for the boot, and even though it will fit in the back seat, there was no way it would fit through the door and past the front seat. It was also too wide to fit in the front seat and still allow me to shut the door AND change gears as I drove. So my Mum and sister had a day trip down to Katanning and brought it with them the weekend after the feast. Then I had some problems getting some yarn to weave with. I'd ordered some Treenway silk and also some tencel from Webs, but the Treenway stuff takes about a month because they have to dye it and then ship it from the US, and some of the colours of tencel I ordered were out of stock so Webs is waiting until they come back in stock before they post the whole order together.

Anyway, I decided what I'd really like to do while I waited for the US stuff, was order some linen from Petlins and try my hand at doubleweave. I thought that it would take maybe a week at most to get across the country, since most things I order from over east arrive fairly quickly. Well. First of all even though they say on their website that they ship the same day or next day after payment clears, my order wasn't shipped until over a week after I paid. It does not take over a week for payments to clear. I also never got a receipt or confirmation of order, just an email to say my order had been posted. It did only take a week to get across the country, which would have been fine except the idiots posted it to my billing address instead of my postal address. So last Friday I got a text from my Mum to say that I had a package. In Perth. A three and a half hour drive from where the package should have been posted to. Not happy Jan. After spending the day pondering my weekend and rescheduling things, I ended up driving up to Perth and spending the whole weekend there. I emailed the Petlins people to voice my displeasure, and they've decided to ignore me. So I think I'll be finding another supplier for linen yarn, which is a shame because Petlins has a really good range.

When I got back to Katanning I did some calculations and realised that I need more linen for the plans I have in mind. I went searching online and found some linen of the same size at Glenora Weaving and Wool, which is another Australian supplier. I tried to order two cobs, but they only had one in stock, so the lady emailed to ask if I wanted natural or half bleached instead, and replied to say no, I'll just take one cob of bleached. Then she replied to ask if I wanted some 16/1 that I could use doubled, and I said no thanks, just one cob of 16/2 will do. Then she RANG me and left a voicemail message to ask if I wanted 16/1 that I could use doubled, so I emailed her AGAIN to say NO THANKS JUST SEND ME WHAT I BLOODY WELL ORDERED and was almost at the point of cancelling the order. Apparently she's posted it now with a seven day receipt (I have no idea what that means) and another receipt will be emailed to me. It hasn't been yet so I have no idea how or when I'm supposed to pay for it.

Meanwhile, good reliable old Treenway silks dyed and posted my order, and it arrived on Wednesday. I am now in the process of warping my loom to weave one of the Two Skeins, Two Scarves free patterns that Treenway sent me. Finally! I've been down here for five weeks and I'm only just warping up my loom.

So that's what's been happening. I also brought some fabric and my pearls down in the event that I somehow found the motivation to tackle a goldhaube for the Saxony gown I've been planning since forever. I also brought my embroidery down but I've completely lost enthusiasm for it, even though I'm over half way through it.

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.

May Update

What have I been getting up to in May? I'm still unemployed so mostly I've been hanging out with Spoh and helping to refurbish our tent. I did a little bit of blacksmithing to make hooks to hang from the spokes of the tent. Spoh did most of the work and I acted as third hand and did some twisting of metal which was cool. We also added some extra bits of fabric to the socks that the spokes slot into. That was a bit tedious, sitting with a pile of canvas and pulling out each sock to cut it open and hand stitch extra fabric onto it. But it was worth it because the spokes now sit in the correct spot. The canvas has stretched a little in weird places so it's a little wibbly, but not really that noticeable. We also did some more painting on the valance, and now it looks FIVE HUNDRED MILLIONTY times better, and more like the pictures. Last weekend my Dad left us unsupervised in his shed and we used POWER TOOLS and stuff to clean up all the wooden poles and make some toggles for the door. We also oiled all the wood so it's all nice and won't go crazy if it gets wet. We can now put up the tent in about 15 minutes, but it does take both of us to get the centre pole up. We haven't waterproofed it yet because the weather has been sunny but cold with about 50% humidity and patches of cloud that sometimes rain, and the waterproofing stuff says it needs 12 hours to dry in warmer than 20 degrees with low humidity. We want to do this properly, so we decided not to just wing it and hope it turns out alright. Hopefully when Spoh gets back from skiing again the weather will be a bit better and we can waterproof it then. Spoh was also very industrious and sewed up bags for all the wooden bits and the tent itself, and made a bunch of curtains and chair covers and things. She also made a cushion and table runner that need some trim, so I think I'll make up some doubleface tablet weaving in one of Anna Neuper's patterns. I tried to buy some size 10 DMC balls from the Embroidery Den, but their website's broken and they haven't answered my email or fixed it yet.

BUT BUT I don't care anymore because yesterday was my birthday and Nathan and Catherine got me THIS:

OMG MY VERY OWN LOOM! Catherine's Dad MADE it when he was doing weavy type things and it's pretty awesome. It's been sitting in storage for some time now apparently, so now it's ALL MINE. It's got ten shafts. TEN. Count them. I'M SO EXCITED. I had to just stare at it for ages because I had no idea where to even start, or what to do with TEN SHAFTS. I think I might just ignore eight of the shafts and try dressing it for a plain tabby weave. I hunted all over the Googles for shops in Perth that sell cones or skeins of yarn for weaving, and eventually found one place that sells cones for knitting machines. For a while there I thought I'd have to order some yarn online and then WAIT UNTIL FOREVER for it to arrive so I could play with my loom.

I also had a brilliant idea. Back in January I left a bunch of old textbooks and stuff at the UWA secondhand bookstore, so I decided it was about time to see if any of them had sold. All the expensive ones sold and I got $103.50 to by ALL the yarn! Then I went adventuring out to the yarn shop, which is actually the bottom floor of a house and it looked like it wasn't a shop but then it was! The owner guy was fabulous and very helpful. I wanted to get some cotton or cottolin to start with, and they had this great mercerized cotton that was all shiny and looked like it'd be really easy to manage, but it only came in cream or baby pink. So I went looking and then there was some TEAL and it was 100% WOOL and then I'd bought it along with some brown AND I'M SO EXCITED IT WILL LOOK AMAZING but it's felting wool so will probably be an absolute pain in the butt and there will be tears and tantrums. It was fairly cheap too, only $33 for a 350g cone. They also had some polyester stuff that came in ALL THE COLOURS which would've been my second choice because there was also teal, but it was about the same price as the wool, so wool won.

Last Friday I went to the craft fair and bought some small 25g skeins of silk because they were shiny and I couldn't resist. But there was also a display from the Weavers and Spinners Guild of WA, so I got talking to the ladies there and I think I'll go along to their next weaving meeting in a couple of weeks, and see if I can do some workshops to learn some stuff instead of trying to muddle along completely on my own. I don't think my loom will be going with me though, there's no way it'll fit into my car.

Stay tuned for my next entry, which will undoubtedly be about how evil string is and whaaa whaaa whine whine warping is tedious :)