Evil String

I've come to the conlusion that string is completely unpredictable and will just arbitrarily have bad days and good days. This has absolutely nothing to do with me, I have no control whatsoever. There was no reason for it to just start working on Monday, all I did was unweave it and tighten the knots that were already there to retension it, so really I should've gotten the same bubbles that I did the last time I tried. But I didn't, it just started to work.

It was working fine until Wednesday when I picked it up and two of my knots just refused to stay tight. Every single time I turned the cards, no matter what direction I turned them in, these two same knots just loosened. I was left with twelve cards worth of string hanging slack. So I would retie the knots, beat, then throw the wefts again. Then when I turned the cards those same knots just gave out again. I tried tying them in different ways, I tried holding the cards differently as I turned, but nothing helped. Eventually I gave up and put it away. When I picked it up later that evening, the knots just arbitrarily decided to hold and I had no problems whatsoever.

Tonight is a different story. Tonight I snapped my weft thread. Twice. The first time was a complete surprise, because I'd hardly put any pressure on it at all. Then I couldn't find it. I was pulling it through to the left side of the band, and it snapped right where it had last turned on the right side. I had to move the brocade weft out of the way completely and dig right into the shed to find it. It took ages. But I found it, tied it off and started again. It snapped again on the second pick, and this time there really was almost no pressure on it at all. I don't know if my thread is just flawed and I'm in the middle of a weak spot, but I can't snap it that easily when I want to. I can't snap sewing thread that easily, and that's pretty easy to snap.

I couldn't find the end this time, and I was starting to get cranky at it so it's been put away. I am not going to get anywhere with it tonight, so I may as well stop trying. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day and the string will cooperate. I'll need to decide whether to wind a fresh shuttle or not.

Better Things

I went to an archery event yesterday. I was called up in court and given something by the Kingdom A&S Minister:

It's the token for winning first prize in a Kingdom A&S competition. My belt won the competition, and my friends kept it secret for two weeks! I must say I was very surprised, I was not expecting it at all. Catalina also said there were two other entries and it was quite close between us, but she didn't know exactly what the entries were.

The rest of the day was really good too. I chatted to Mistress Rhianwen about weaving. She mostly does inkle weaving but the problems I've been having with tension are a universal weaving problem. She suggested I hold the warp as I beat it to stop pushing loose threads into bubbles. She said she'd bring something to the tourney next weekend and we'll sit down and have a good chat :)

In the afternoon I entered an IKAC and shot 122. I was quite pleased as I've been aiming to score 120. This score brings my average up to 125 for the season, so I'm quite happy with my shooting this year. I also did some more work on my red cote the other day and wore it to the event. You may remember the last thing I did to it was pull the top seams in by an inch on both sides. WELL of course this made the sleeve holes smaller, which I should've realised when I went to reattach the sleeves and had to gather them a little all the way around. Duh. So when I wore it at Championship I spent the day with it cutting into my armpits which was just great. Anyway, I took the sleeves off yet again, cut the sleeve holes bigger and then reattached the sleeves, and it is now a whole lot more comfortable. I tried to shoot in it, and while it was ok, I think it's just a little too restricting for archery. I think the mechanics of holding boobies up makes a dress unsuitable for shooting in, especially since it needs to work so hard to turn what little I have into cleavage. The dress is still not done though, my right sleeve is coming unstitched at the elbow, and at hem at my wrist as well.

Tonight I've been tackling my weaving again. It was really good to chat to Rhianwen and some other people about weaving and sewing and stuff yesterday, and I was feeling a bit more inspired again. I unwove what I'd already done, tightened my tension as much as I could, and started weaving again. I found that I needed two hands on the beater to beat tight enough, there's a significant difference between using one and two hands. But holding the weft with one hand and beating with the other seemed to work even when I then used two hands to tighten the one handed beating. The band started coming out a whole lot smoother. What I'm aiming for with the twist patterning is this:

Just really simple textured squares. This photo was posted in the historical tabletweaving facebook group. I'm not quite getting this level of awesome, but I'm getting the ridges where the turning direction changes and the band is relatively smooth. According to the facebook group, when you release the tension on the band there's more shadows that emphasise the squares more. So I'm hoping my band will look more like the picture once I take it off my loom. I also decided to change my threading yet again, so now I have five blocks of alternating threading instead of the three that I changed to from the original seven :P

It looks nowhere near as good as the picture of the white band, but it's definitely an improvement. Besides, the whole point of this band is to practice my brocading and try new techniques with that, so most of the ground weave will be covered anyway. I never expected that a simple twist patterned ground weave would prove to be so difficult. Anyway, I'm using some gold coloured embroidery floss as a brocade weft, and I'm turning it within the shed so you can't see it on the ede of the band. Basically the weft goes out the bottom of the band two card from the edge, then back up for the next pick. There ends up being a little running stitch along the back of the band, top and bottom. So far it's working. Here's my leaf:

It's looking a little wider than on my belt, I think that's because this band is a good 6-8mm narrower but there's still the same amount of length. Buuut at the moment this leaf is 3cm along the band, and it's under tension. My belt leaves range from 3cm-3.5cm, and that's not under tension, so this leaf will probably shrink a little once I take it off tension. I had lots of problems tying off the end of my gold thread on my belt, because I used the same method I use to start and finish bands, outlined here. It's really good for starting and finishing bands, but the poly gold stuff didn't agree with being threaded back through the band and it frayed and it was pretty awful. This was the main reason why I decided to continue weaving the brocade weft in with the normal shed between pattern bits, instead of stopping and starting like they actually did in period to save expensive thread. Besides, two layers of brocade weft thread plus structural weft bulked up the picks a lot. BUT then later after I'd finished the belt I mentioned this to Catherine and she told me you don't need to worry about threading the brocade weft back through, you just stick it out the bottom of the band and cut it off. Ugh. So I'm trying that this time.

And that's it from me tonight. Goodnight!

Issues

I'm having issues. Issues with tension. My fingers have been rubbed raw from pulling 200 individual threads tight, tying them off, then discovering that THEY'RE NOT ALL TIGHT. It's very frustrating. I end up with little bubbles on the surface of the band, above and below. Now, you'd think that by beating the weft and creating these bubbles I would be tensioning the remainder of the warp by pushing the slack into the bubbles, but apparently it doesn't work that way. There's just more bubbles. So I pull the threads tighter from the teeth end and tie them off again, only for bubbles to appear somewhere else.

Anyway, I decided I wanted to try a simple twist pattern. I threaded the two edge cards on either side in one direction, then I divided the middle cards into seven groups of alternating S and Z. The edge cards turn continuously forward, but the middle cards turn four forward, four backward. After unweaving and retensioning and weaving again, I ended up with this:

It just looks like messy weaving with threads all over the place. There's still random bubbly bits, but this is the smoothest I could get it. I don't want a random messy looking band, I want something neat, so I decided to unweave it and change the threading. I left the edge cards as they are, and divided the middle cards into three groups of alternating S and Z. The band is only two centimetres wide, so maybe my seven groups were getting lost in each other.

Can you tell the difference? Other than it looking a bit bubblier and messier, it looks the same. Ugh.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. I'm going to bed.

Experimenting

Last week I got all enthusiastic and decided I'd weave myself a tube cord and make it into a necklace with the leaf pendant dealies that Spoh sent me from Brisbane when she was there for Great Northern War. I decided to use four cards threaded with alternating colours of my leftover silk.

Here's a picture of my legs. I tied one end to my belt, and the other end to a little chair. I had to stabilise the chair with my feet.

I decided to turn four pickes forward, and four back, because I couldn't be bothered dealing with untwisting the warp. I ended up with a zigzaggy pattern. Here it's a bit uneven and spread out, but later I got into a rythm and it turned out quite nice and neat. It took a whole lot longer to finish the cord than I expected, and I ended up with quite a stiff cord. I think I'll go back to fingerloop braiding for cords, it's faster and I end up with a nicer feeling cord.

The other thing I finallly got around to doing was warping up my loom. I had my last exam yesterday, so now I'm completely free to start working on my projects. I've been pondering this band since I finished my belt, I want to brocade my leaf and words again, and experiment with twist-patterning. I also wanted to try continuous warping, which I did today. For a refresher on how continuous warping works, watch this video. I modified it a bit because I wanted to warp straight onto my loom rather than deal with transferring it to my loom. I got my loom out, and remembered this:

I've used sticky-backed felt in my clamp to hold the threads, but the glue isn't very good and it's been sliding off gradually. I can swap which way the top bit is facing, which is why it's all wibbly, but the bottom is just munted. I forgot I was going to buy more felt and replace this lot. OH WELL. I got some cups from the kitchen for my thread and set them up on the floor:

I'm using black #12 perle cotton because it's cheap and I want to experiment with a really fine warp. I put my loom on the table with a heavy bottle at each end, with the idea that I would go around the bottle at the clamp end (and around a straw which I would use to keep the threads organised once I removed the bottle), then I at the other end I'd zigzag through the teeth, but go around the bottle each time so I had extra to use for tensioning and tying. I decided to zigzag from on side of the loom to the other because REASONS. Actually, I forget why. At some point during my ponderings I decided starting in the middle and going around wouldn't work. Anyway, instead of the first card I dropped ending up in the middle of the pack, it ended up on the edge. So I got started and decided the lady in the video was LYING when she made the whole process look easy. I took me a while to get into a rythm and figure out how to hold my pack and stuff. Also this:

I was dropping cards and they were just hanging out wherever they felt like, instead of in a neat pack like the video. I guess this is because they weren't tensioned evenly, but it escapes me completely how you would tension as you go. Eventually I came up with a Brilliant Plan to solve this problem.

Ugh, blogger made my strings look weird. Anyway, this is my whole setup. I tied the cards together! I'd drop another four, then tie them in with the others, then drop another four etc. When I got to the end I slipped the sweet chilli sauce bottle out from the clamp end, leaving the strings around the straw, then rotated the straw 90 degrees and clamped the threads down. At the other end I slipped the mango cordial bottle out, and just held the loops in my hand before cutting them. I was left with what I usually have, individual cards threaded through the teeth, so all I had to do was tighten the tension and tie them up. Overall this method was a whole lot quicker, although I'm not sure that it was easier than threading each card individually. Also, when I went to flip cards and stuff to change the threading direction to how I want it, I found that the cards weren't all threaded in the same direction. Mostly they alternated S and Z, but there were also some randoms in there that didn't fit in any pattern. I guess some cards flipped while I was dropping them, but I honestly expected them all to be threaded in the same direction. Next time I'll pay attention to what happens to the deck as I loop it around the ends.

So my first attempt at continuous warp was a success! Now my loom is all warped up and ready for me to start weaving, and it only took about an hour from start to finish.

Procrastinating

I have an exam tomorrow. This morning I managed to convince myself that I've contracted some sort of horrible disease, so I had to have an afternoon nap to calm myself down. Google tells me scary things. Then I got caught up in my novel and had to read it to the end. I've been attempting study, I just read through my lecture notes but they're full of whining about how much I loathe ergative case and split alignment systems, and linguistics jokes like CLITICS ARE PROMISCUOUS HAR HAR HAR. Very useful.

Another thing I did today was add pages to this blog! With lots of fiddling and mucking around I managed to add a page of links to documentation for various projects that I've entered in competitions. Formatting was difficult because Blogger decides to randomly move things like pictures and we had an argument about captions, but I got there in the end!

I've also included the documentation for my belt. I sent it over to the event with Nathan and Catherine, and got it and my comments back last night! I'm still trying to decipher some of the words. Mistress Rowan was one of the judges and she makes a suggestion for a weft thread, but the only clear words are 'spun silk'. Before that there's a word that I think is 'Gutermann' then one or maybe two words that I have no idea of. Anyway, all three judges liked it, and I got a score of 39/50 which was higher than I expected. I'd like to know what entry won, but the kingdom A&S page is sadly lacking in competition results.

I'm currently thinking up another weaving project. I think I'll get some #12 black cotton from Spotlight and try this continuous warp thing, and weave a short band to practice with a really fine warp just to see how it turns out. I might use the yellow silk embroidery floss I bought to make my purchase up to $10 so I could use EFTPOS at the Stitchers' Corner as a brocade weft and weave my leaf and words again. This time I'll turn the brocade weft in the shed instead of on the edge so you can't see it.

I also have an itch to do some more embroidery. Not my German Brick Stitch but something different. Anyway I should get back to at least attempting to study. Also my jacket smells like stinky fighter and I'm not sure how it got that way.

Finished!

I finished my belt! The last 30cm were the most difficult, and took me an ENTIRE day which I was frustrating, considering most of it was just plain weave with no brocading, but I made it in the end! Yesterday I went out and bought a brass D-ring to use as a buckle, and I just finished sewing it on.

It's really difficult to take a photo of a skinny long thing. My camera doesn't have a panoramic setting, but apparently one of mum's does, so there was a huge kerfuffle while she argued with her technology trying to find the setting. The thing is, she happened across the setting while she was fiddling with the camera trying to take a picture of my sister's art assignment thing about half an hour before I wandered in asking about panoramic things. In the end we couldn't find it, so I just put my belt on the kitchen table and stood on the chairs to try and get the whole thing in. You get a general idea, but here's just the words:

I'm sorry, I'm not very good at picture taking. But yay words! I was pleased in the end with how they turned out.

Whoa my shirt came out all psycodelic, it doesn't look like that in my pictures folder on my computer. Stupid blogger has decided that this particular picture needs to be rotated forwards, so I had to save it rotated backwards so it would end up facing the right way. It also seems to have done weird things to it as well. Anyway, here's me wearing my belt. I was taking pictures of myself in the mirror, and surprise surprise my words are all backwards, so it doesn't matter that it's a bit blurry and weird, because you can't read them anyway! Anyway, here's what the belt looks like when I wear it. As expected, the words are all on my back, but that's ok. In case you didn't notice, I decided to weave extra leaves at intervals at the end of the belt. The whole thing ended up measuring 130cm, which is odd because I'm sure it measured 140 when it was on the loom :P Either it compressed a lot when it was taken off tension, or I just suck at measuring.

I mentioned I had a lot of trouble with the end. I think one reason was because the weaving wasn't in front of me at the front of the loom anymore, I had to reach for it. But what started happening was that the whole band got wider and wider. I noticed because the three middle stripes were getting really wide, but my outside stripes were skinny, but going all wibbly. I measured the width and it was 3.5cm, a whole centimetre wider than I started with. The majority of the weaving actually ended up being about 2.8cm, because it seemed to sit comfortably there once I added the brocade weft. I unwove a whole bunch and struggled to pull it in as I rewove it. I'm not sure why that is, whether it had something to do with being down the other end of the loom or not. The stripes were also quite wibbly, and it was obvious that the very outside cards were the ones being smushed together, while the inside cards seemed to stay the same distance apart. I could only tell this because of the stripes. But there are also bits where it looks like it suddenly gets smaller, but it's only an illusion because the stripes are wibbly. I guess it's just another thing to look into, how the warp behaves. I'm wondering if my other bands have done this and I've just not noticed because the ground weave is all the same colour. It's not just a matter of looking at the twists in each set of four threads, they all look straight, but it's groups of them together, like the ten card on the outside only take up 5mm, but the ten in the middle take up 8mm.

Anyway, I'm going to enter it in the competition, so I better get a move on with my documentation to get it finished in time. I think I might add some extra pages to this blog where I'll put documentation and maybe some photo albums of finished projects, so it's all in one place.

Tangents

I'm having a bit of a crisis. I've finished weaving my words now and I'm quite happy with how they've turned out, and glad I took the time to unweave so much and redo things so it looks right. It was well worth it. Anyway, I was just weaving along last night when I realised that I'm nearly at the end of the brocade, but nowhere near the end of the band. That got me thinking, where is the brocading actually going to be when I wear the belt? The length of the belt should end up being about 1.3 metres, and before I started I was measuring my picks and counting how many picks were in my pattern to try and work out how much ground weave I should make before adding the brocade weft, because duh, the brocade should be in the middle of the band.

But why the middle? Obviously my obsessive compulsiveness took over because THINGS NEED TO BE SYMMETRICAL. Anyway, with all my crises and switching ground weft threads and adjusting the pattern as I went along, there are a lot less picks in the pattern than I originally drafted. The way it is now, I've got 15cm of blank band, then my pattern goes for about 72cm. That adds up to 87cm, which coincidently, is the circumference of my hips, at the top where I will be wearing the belt. So the brocading will start on my left side, and go around my back, and finish where the band goes through the buckle. The whole of the tail will be plain. Hmmmmmm. I'm not sure if this is a good thing, or a bad thing. I could extend my pattern by adding in those other bits that I drafted and decided not to use, but then there won't be symmetry! Anything that extends the pattern will mean sacrificing symmetry, but then again the pattern isn't int he middle so it's not symmetrical anyway. I could add a couple more leaves at intervals down the band, or I could just leave it. Har har, leave, leaves.... I'm hilarious.

Anyway, while I was pondering this I was also wondering what everyone else does with their tablet woven brocaded belts, because I like to conform. I asked the internet, and ended up somewhere completely different. I found this:

Someone wove this as a double-faced pattern and OMG it's amazing. The article I found it in is here, it's about drafting double-faced patterns, which is very interesting, and totally relevent to my search for brocaded weaving :P

I was also reminded once again that I desperately need Peter Collingwood. I need it sooooo baaaaaad *grabby hands* The Book Depository doesn't even have it, I've only been able to find it on Amazon. And it's expensive. There are so many books I want, I have a wish list on the Book Depository but I can't figure out how to share the wish list with people in a vain hope that maybe someone will take pity on me and buy me them for Christmas. I need to be able to email it to my mum, then she can pass it on to my siblings.

Anyway, I want to try weaving a band in 3/1 twill. I also think I want to make a silk hairnet thing, I have a vague idea that I will make one (I have no idea how, some sort of crochet technique? Lacemaking?) with a tablet woven fillet thing around the edges. I think what I need is to go to Pennsic and go to every weaving class available and buy all the materials and things and learn useful things. But Pennsic is so far away and I wants it all now!

But back to the original brocading thing, before I got lost on the internet I looked at Guntram's belts again, and he's got brocading or twist patterning over the whole surface of all of his bands. So I'm still undecided. I'm really bad at decisions because I just don't know what I want. ALSO OMG I nearly forgot, what I should've done to hide the little bits of gold that you can see on the edges of my band, is use a border! So my brocade weft should have not ever gone past the outside couple of cards, it should have turned around inside the band. I will keep this in mind for future reference.

But first, I will clean my room, because I can't see the floor and the cat has made a nest in my floordrobe. Who knows what mischief he's getting up to in my clothes?

Progress... and more unweaving

Last night I finally managed to finish weaving my first word!

Yaaaaay! I ended up moving the o one pick forward, away from the f, to bring them into proportion with the rest of the gaps. Finally I'm happy with the spacing of the whole word.

Today I worked on the second word. Before I went to bed last night I spent some time untwisting my weft and shifting the whole thing down the loom, so I was expecting tensioning issues today. Luckily I didn't have much of a problem, but there are still a few little bubbles where I started up again. Anyway, after a few false starts on some of the letters where I realised I needed to move it forward or back to space it properly, I got this far:

Phone picture! I took this with my phone because there was no one home with me and I needed to see if the fourth letter was recognisable. I sent it to Mister Nathan, and he thought it was an 'n'. It's supposed to be a 't'! It's got a wanky taily bit which is a little confusing. Anyway, I had a look through Guntram's pattern for this alphabet to see if he had a tail-less 't', but instead I found a different one. The 't' in this alphabet for 48 cards only takes up 25 cards, but in the alphabet for 36 cards, the 't' takes up 28 cards and is a little more defined. So I unwove this one and used the other one instead.

Tada! What I've done is take out one pick in the middle hole bits of the 'o', 'u', 'm', 'a' and 'n' letters, and taken the very outside picks off the 'l', 'i', 'u', 'm' and 'n' letters. The only letters that stayed the same as the pattern were 'f'', 's' and 't'.

Also, I don't know that it's very noticeable in the picture, but my second word is slanting to the right. I'm not sure how this happened as I'm quite careful to beat evenly. The only other times I've seen this happen is when I've retensioned the warp and one side of it has pulled the pattern askew, but I haven't needed to retension since the start of the word when I untwisted my warp. The only thing I can think of is that I accidently beat one pick unevenly, then matched every following pick to that one. This is yet another unexpected thing that has happened, but hopefully once I take it off the loom and the whole thing relaxes it won't be so noticeable. At least it's slanting in the correct direction for writing, which probably isn't a period thing but won't look so odd to the modern eye :P I think my width is getting slightly better too. I've given up on measuring it all the time and I'm just going on what looks good to my eye.

More Unweaving

I thought once I'd gotten everything sorted and my leaf looked good, I'd just zoom through the rest of the brocading. I was wrong. Last night I wove most of my first word:

I had already spent some time working out the spacing and stuff, and the f and o came out pretty much perfect. Then I got to the straight up and down letters and I found that their taily bits were really spreading them out. Here I've already given up on having a blank pick in between each letter and just woven them right next to each other, but I want the spacing to be closer like the first two letters. So I put it away for the night.

Tonight I decided that I would unweave back to the o and get rid of the very edge of the taily bits on all the letters. I tried putting the blank pick back in between, but it was too much space so I left it out again.

I think this is worse. You can see f-o-l, then a whole lot of straight up and down bits that all look the same and run together. It should be i-u-m, and you may be able to tell once I've pointed it out, but I don't like it. I think tomorrow I'll unweave it all again back to the f, then take out one pick in the middle of each letter. The pattern is that every stem of each letter is three covered picks, and each space between stems is three picks. So the o has three long picks, three picks in the middle hole bit, then another three long picks. I think I'll change it to three long picks, two middle picks and then three long picks. This will shorten every letter except the l and the i, which are already pretty short anyway. The m really bothers me because of how much it's sprawled out across the band. It's a third of the word all by itself, but taking three picks out of it altogether will squish it together more.

I'm also a little frustrated with how difficult it is to keep the band the same width. I've never had this problem before, and even though I'm paying attention to it it's still going all wibbly. I'm getting better now, it's only going out by one or two millimetres, but it's still quite noticeable, especially in the above picture.

I'm in two minds about whether this is going to end up getting entered in the competition. I think I could get it done in time, but it would be a bit of a rush. I don't want to rush it, but even redoing as much as I have been to get it to look closer to what I want doesn't fix things like the width. The brocade weft is also really obvious on the edges of the band, I can't get it to tuck in like I have in the past with cotton. Anyway, the whole thing is becoming a lot like my pouch. Something not exactly wonderful but something close enough and I'm happy for it to be functional, just not a showcase piece I guess. The only practical thing that would come from entering it would be possibly useful feedback from the judges, although I get the feeling they'd just confirm what conclusions I've already come to, like they did when I entered my pouch.

Anyway, we'll see how I feel the more I get done. Once I get past this first damn word!