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!

Compromises

After have done so much weaving over the weekend, but I have also done just as much unweaving. On Friday after I realised what I was doing was not going to work, I did some serious pondering. I decided to try a thinner thread for the structural weft to see if that would help my picks get smaller, but what could I use? I was thinking something along the lines of #10 or #12 perle cotton, but I'd planned this project to be made with period materials, and cotton just isn't period. I ended up going to Spotlight and buying a reel of Gutermann linen thread, and another reel of polyester top stitch thread. I tried the linen first, since this would keep my materials period, and it seemed to work. I got to six picks per centimetre, but when I added the gold the linen really didn't agree with it. I couldn't pull the linen tight enough so the band started getting wider, and I had to really force the gold thread past the linen. Then after four picks the linen snapped.

I gave up at that point, but I brought my loom over to show to Mistress Catherine on Sunday afternoon to see if she had any ideas. I ended up trying a super tough polyester thread as a weft, which I found quite rough and hard to pull through the shed, then I tried my poly top stitch thread, which was a lot softer and easier on my hands as well as being more cooperative with the silk. I also used one of Catherine's fancy jarrah beaters instead of my ruler, which is a lot harder with a finer edge. It seemed to work much better and I could beat the picks closer together.

This is what I ended up with. You can see all the random wefts poking out the top edge, because I was trialing I didn't weave them back through neatly. I was always going to unweave it anyway. The first four gold picks are with the linen and my ruler, then the rest are with the two poly threads and Catherine's beater. It's not very neat but there is definitely a significant improvement.

Yesterday I decided to unweave the entire thing and start again with my top stitch thread, Catherine's beater, and adding an extra 5mm to the width of the band to see if that helped. That's when my stripes started going all crooked. The extra width made the whole thing look a little weird, and the middle stripe was really wide while the outside ones were narrower. The very outside ones were going all wibbly as well. So I unwove all of that and started again, this time with my usual one inch width. I almost wove my whole leaf last night before I started making tired mistakes, but I wasn't happy with it. The gold thread really hasn't been surviving the constant weaving and unweaving, and the gold was flaking off in places, which didn't look good at all. Even though the gaps between floats were narrower, it still didn't look how I wanted it to.

Today I came to the conclusion that I need to pack the gold thread away and not use it until I've had a bit more practice with silk. I have woven excusively with cotton until now, and this is the first time I've ever had any major issues. Cotton just worked for me, both threaded in patterns and brocading, and I've always been able to produce decent bands. Having had no problems ever, I just assumed silk and gold would work for me and I'd be able to make gorgeous bands like Guntram does, but I guess this plan was a little ambitious. I think I'll keep playing with silk for a while and different wefts until I can weave something fine enough to add the gold thread to and have good coverage.

Anyway, I ended up going over to the Stitcher's Corner and buying myself some DMC metallic floss, and some yellow silk embroidery floss. I only bought both because they had an EFTPOS minimum of $10 and I had no cash. Once again I unwove the gold I'd woven last night, and tried with the metallic thread. It seemed to have really very good coverage, so I redrew my leaf since I was still having the problem of it stretching too much, and wove this:

It's a leaf! It actually looks like a leaf! I think we have a winner. I'm going to continue the band, and I may even finish it in time to enter it in the A&S competition. It will be nowhere near the standard that I had in my head when I dreamed up this project, but it will be at least a decent looking band. Maybe in another ten years or so I'll revisit this project, dig out my gold thread and weave it again, this time with appropriate materials and skills.

Things Going Wrong

I have had a crazy stressful week. I had two assignments due, one of which was epic and impossible, I had to move out of the house I was housesitting (and clean it all up to hide the fact that I'm a slob and didn't sweep or vacuum for the whole three months I was there), and I wanted to get my loom warped. I had a very tight schedule to get all these things done, which was completely blown out because I suddenly had no access to vital learning materials because my university's IT department sucks and keeps breaking things. So there was a bit of tears and hysterics this week. But I managed to get it all done!

I started warping my loom last Saturday. This is the first time I've had to deal with proper big skeins that aren't just DMC thread, so that was interesting. I'd been warned about skeins, so I was very careful.

I ended up putting it around my basket, which worked qute well for me. I just plopped the purple one on top of the green when I got up to it, and they didn't argue at all, which was nice. I'd arbitrarily decided before I started warping that I wanted my stripes to go green-purple-green-purple-green down the band. Then after I'd started with the green I started pondering whether purple-green-purple-green-purple would look better. It took me all week and lots of staring at the half-warped loom to finally decide on purple-green-purple-green-purple. So that meant shuffling the cards a little bit, but that was fine.

Yesterday after I'd handed my assignments in I started thinking about weaving. First I needed to decide what patterns I was going to brocade, so I went back to looking at my leaf. I ended up printing off an outline of it and tracing it onto the graph paper.

I've been home since Tuesday night, but I didn't remember to charge my camera battery until I wanted to take this photo. So we've still got phone pictures. Anyway, this leaf looks a whole lot better than my last attempt! I even put in the little veiny bits with the idea that they could work as tie-downs for the brocade weft. I also did my little arrow thingy, I had a vague idea that I'd have a small arrow thingy in the middle of the band, then a big leaf, then another small arrow thingy, then my words, then an arrow thingy, then the leaf, then the arrow thingy. I decided to give up on the cool looking swirly motif thing, since I didn't know what to put inside it.

Then I started weaving!

I'm quite pleased that I chose purple-green-purple-green-purple. I think it needed the darker colour on the edges. Anyway, here's where I realised that my little arrow thingy was only gonna cover the purple stripe in the middle and only a tiny bit of the green on either side. The band is only an inch wide, so it would've just gotten lost. I decided I'd just do a leaf on either side of my words.

Here's where my problems started. I added in the brocade weft and started my leaf pattern, but each thread was miles away from the next one. I decided almost straight away that it was gonna look crap, so I unpicked it and rewound my gold thread to double it over in an effort to make it cover more of the surface. It took me ages to figure out if I had enough gold thread. I decided to put everything closer together, and only do one leaf at the start instead of on either side of the words. Then I had to go to work, so I didn't get to see if it worked.

It didn't work. This morning I wove half of my leaf and it just looked awful.

This picture was actually taken with my camera, since my battery is all charged now. The purpose of my graph paper is to see what the pattern will look like when it's stretched a bit. The actual weaving stretched it double again. Also, if I put the weft over only one card, it gets swallowed up, but if I put it under one card, the warp looks really thick. Anyway, this is half of my leaf. Does is look like a leaf to you? Nope. The brocade threads are way too far apart. I think the problem is that my picks are too big. I get about four picks per centimetre of weaving, but Guntram with a 30/2 warp (just a little bit finer than my cord) and the same gold thread gets at least ten picks per centimetre. That's more than double what I'm doing. If I could half the size of my picks I'd be happy, because it would be like there was a thread in every one of those gaps in the picture above. The problem is I have no idea how to do it. I've been beating as had as I can, the whole loom creaks under the pressure.

Anyway, I'm a little upset because I was intending to get a lot of this done today, and unless I fix it right now I won't be sending it to November Crown to enter in the Kingdom A&S competition in two weeks. I've also spent a lot of money on good silk and gold thread, and I would hate to have to chuck it all. There's no way I'm going to keep going with how it looks now. I thought the tower brocading I did at the start of the year was gappy, but looking at it now it's really not. You can't fit a whole thread between the brocade threads that are there, and you can with space to spare on the one I'm doing now. It's odd because I used thicker threads for the whole tower belt, and the whole thing is done in the same size thread, and I still get four picks per centimetre. I would've thought that finer thread would mean finer weaving, but instead each pick is the same distance apart, but it looks further because the threads are finer.

If anyone has any ideas on how to make smaller picks, I'd be grateful for the advice. I don't know if maybe the tension on the warp makes any difference, or if I need to find something with a smaller edge than my old school ruler to beat each pick. Or if I just need completely different materials.

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!

More Sidetracking

I've spent this last week working on my pouch. It was supposed to be a quick project, but after spending all day Friday on it I sort of lost my enthusiasm. Last time I posted I was practicing some new embroidery stitches. I did some more practice, then I printed out an outline of my leaf and punched holes in it to trace it onto my fabric

 My chalk pencil is really quite blunt, but I couldn't find a pencil sharpener anywhere in this house! I ended up punching the holes with a pen that had run out of ink, then pushing the chalk pencil through. Then it was time for the embroidery! I used some old yellow crochet cotton that I've had lying around for ages. I bought it for making lucet cords but found that it kept snapping from the friction against my lucet. Perle cotton seems to slide around my lucet a lot better so I've been using that instead. Anyway, it's a really good colour so I decided to use it for this. It's three plys, but I only used two for the veiny insidey bits of the leaf.

Once I'd finished the embroidery, I strung up some cards! I think I'd done about two cards before I nearly died from the tedious, so I dread to think what stringing up fifty cards is going to be like when I get around to finally starting my belt. Anyway, after asking the internet I decided to use eight cards, and I threaded them alternating S and Z. Then I just started weaving. I felt a little bit like I was going in totally blind, because there weren't many tips to be found on the internet about how to actually do this whole weaving edges thing. There was just a whole bunch of people saying they'd done it with finished pictures. So I made it up as I went along. My loom was too long for the length I was weaving, so I tied one end to the coffee table leg, and then had this brilliant idea to tie the other end to my belt, so I could easily climb in and out and stuff, and I wouldn't need to waste a whole bunch of weft by tying it around my waist. On Saturday morning I realised this wasn't such a brilliant plan, when I had to go to work without a belt because it was tied to my weaving. It's also a little bit hard to explain to people, that my pants are falling down because I tied my weaving to my belt. Anyway, here's a picture:

I was quite pleased with my embroidery, although the split stitch with only two plys worked a whole lot better, which actually makes complete sense. I don't know that I want to try it with a single strand, that just seems way too tedious for me. I got the look I was after, even if it does look a but chunky. I tacked the edges of the pouch together, just to hold everything together while I did the weaving. What you can't see from this picture is that I really did need a few more cards. My stitching is visible and it's not very neat at all and I don't like it. While I had it tensioned really well between the table and my belt it was quite consistent in that the weaving joined to the fabric on the back, and the stitching was only visible on the front. I thought it was doing it that way because of the direction I was throwing the weft through the shed, maybe I was consistently pulling in one direction. Then I hit the corner.

I untwisted my weft just before the corner, and got some bubbles. I'm too used to being able to separate my cards with the teeth on the end of my loom, but this time I had them all tied together so I couldn't indivivually tension my cards. I just guessed with the corner, I'm sure there's some sort of trick with weaving around corners, but I couldn't find any tips at all. This was the point where I realised that I could no longer control the tension with it all tied to my belt. You can see the fabric pulling already because I was still trying to hold the tension as if it was still straight. It was also around this point that I realised that the other pack was getting looser and looser the more I turned the first one. I decided to catch up with the other side, and from then on I alternated packs with each pick.

I also encountered a problem with my lining. The whole point of weaving the edges is to create a neat edge, so I didn't finish the edges of the fabric beforehand. It was fine along the sides, but when I got to the top the linen lining wasn't sandwiched between the wool anymore. That was when the stitching started just pulling the fibres of the linen apart and it all frayed. At one point there's a whole where the lining isn't even attached, but mostly there's just a messy looking fluff all the way along the top inside edge. The second corner worked out a lot better, and I think that's because it's easier to join two packs of cards together than it is to split them. By this time I'd given up on tensioning the weft with the belt, I basically held the pouch between my knees as I stitched and pulled the weft through the shed, then I held the corner to tension it as I beat it. My theory about the direction I was throwing the weft being related to which side the stitching was visible on fell apart as I wove down the last side. The weaving sort of travels all over the place along the seam

The end result is fine in that the pouch is still very much useable and it was always going to be a possibly dodgy project, but I don't know that I want to enter it into a competition. I feel like competition worthy projects should be of a high standard, and I think I'd be a little bit ashamed at entering something substandard. However, my documentation is 95% finished, because I did it alongside making the pouch. At the moment I'm leaning towards entering it anyway, with no expectations of coming anywhere close to winning, and a paragraph at the end of my documentation outlining what went wrong and how I will fix it for future attempts.

It still needs drawstrings and a hanging cord. I've made one drawstring and I dun wanna do anymore. I'm also pondering whether I want a multicoloured hanging cord. I'd going home tomorrow so I'll be able to pick up some purple thread then, but I might just go with green. All in all this has been a useful learning experience at least. I've wanted to do tablet woven edges for a long time, but next time I will definitely go for 12 cards and whip stitch the edges together before I start weaving. The wonky corners don't bother me so much, I think it's just the nature of trying to weave around corners.