What I Have Been Doing Lately

I was absent for a few days because of a few reasons: I was taking an early holiday vacation and I was doing some weaving on two looms at the same time- and time just got away from me. So I am back! And I wanted to show you some pictures of the current weavings in progress and a my thoughts on them.

So a couple of weeks ago I stayed up very late and decided to create warp, without really planning. Just winding it unto to the warping board as I see fit. I wound on about 36 yards of warp (three different warp chains) in two late evenings. And what I learned is that not all late night decisions are good ones, but they could be fixed.

A flub that turned into something that I am actually proud of is a yarn stash busting warp, which consists of an old cone of woolen white yarn that I had acquired, a cone of dark grey wool that was a mill end, and a merino/tencel blend in a rich dark turquoise color. I had gone off of a draft that I found in a book to create a felted scarf with long warp and weft floats. Now- had I been thinking clearly, I would have realized that irregular stripes do not really create a visually appealing scarf for long symmetrical floats:

A computer drawdown to help predict a potential design snafu.
A computer drawdown to help predict a potential design snafu.

I tried a few other computer generated ideas of how I could remedy this situation since the warp was already on the loom:

Hopsack Version
Hopsack Version
Basket Weave
Basket Weave
A small 2/2 Twill
A small 2/2 Twill

I ended up making my final decision while I was sitting at the loom, using a wool and silk blend yarn as the weft and I used a simple twill that reverses direction every 12th pick.

A detail of the weaving on the loom.
A detail of the weaving on the loom.

And on the other loom I have a weaving that didn't nearly give me as much as a headache. It is a simple check using red and purple bamboo yarn, with an accent of space dyed tencel to add visual texture.

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After that last set of scarves with the incredibly complicated 12 harness pattern, I decided that it would be best to do some very simple twill scarves to get back into the rhythm of weaving without trauma.

I am enjoying the process of just weaving without getting frustrated (which was happening with Echoes, I was very happy to get those off the loom). Now that I am back into the swing of things, blog posts will resume their Monday, Wednesday and Friday schedule and I will keep you updated on cool books to read about weaving, some lessons about the whole weaving process and updates on my own work! Thank you for being patient.