Double Cloth Scarf based on Black Jack

Today Michael is being moved from Cheltenham Hospital to Malvern Hospital. I can get there in 5 minutes in a car and, if it snows, I could walk! I think it would take 30 minutes. We are both so pleased. It sounds as though he will be there for 2 weeks before coming home. We need a major overhaul of the house but that can wait until the Occupational Therapist comes to visit. The move was organised by our local McMillan nurse. I cannot say enough good things about McMillan nurses. Over the last two years, they have been very supportive. 

As part of the preparation, I have sent for Mr Darke, our friendly neighbour builder/painter etc who has been rebuilding our house for 20 years. This is to get the loom room redecorated which I want finished by the time Michael comes home. It might seem like a displacement activity but it isn't. We will have to shift a lot of furniture and I don't want that cluttering up the house when we are trying to sort out Michael's living space.

On the textile front, I have repaired and finished the silk double cloth  and pressed it.  The photo on the left  shows it at that stage. It has now been hand washed, dried and ironed and has shrunk from 9 by 51inches to 8.5 by 48 inches. In this photo ,the fringes are quite long. I did cut them to be equal in length but, after washing, they were in a right tangle. Because it is double cloth, the fringes are thick and even after careful brushing, the fringes still looked unkempt and wanted to twist round the next-door bout as can be seen in the second photo.

The knots at the top of each bout can be seen and also the sample plaits. These are going to be much better so that is a job for today sometime. Perhaps because of the background, the second photo is a better representation of the colour and the silk sheen has come out well.

I have also been thinking about waffle weave. I have had it in mind to try this weave out for some years. It is amazing the weave types I still have to try and a reflection on the enormous number of different weaves there are. I sat at the top of the stairs, where the weaving books are and worked my way through a mostly unhelpful set of books. By far the best description is in '8,12... 20, An Introduction to Multishaft Weaving' by Kathryn Wertenberger (ISBN 0--934026-34-3) . I have created two drafts in Fibreworks and found some 2/6 unmercerised cotton in white and red. Quite a change going from 60epi to 20epi! I don't see me winding a warp today. Apart from Michael's arrival in Malvern, I have to go to WRI myself this afternoon for heart tests - I could do without that problem at the moment.

Tomorrow is the start of Kennet Valley Guild's annual weaving course. 6 Saturdays spread over 10 weeks. The first classes are a week apart so that the beginners really get going, then at fortnightly intervals. There are 6 beginners this year and 6 'old hands'. If someone has something a bit difficult to tackle, they come along and do it over the course.  I have a separate half-day to do on drafting. Last year I totally recast it. I used to get them to use paper and pencil but some people found this difficult to  understand - which is always the teacher's fault. Last year, I came up with a scheme which used strips of paper. It went down much better and they got the idea much faster. The text is all written. All I have to do is print out the handout and cut up a lot of paper!!

Black Jack, Lurex and Bright Colours

Now for the second task - the demo. The weavers in our Guild (Kennet Valley) hold a 'Black Jack' project every now and then. It works out at about one every 8 months. This comes from Ann Sutton's book 'Ideas in Weaving'. One of us (Rosie Price) holds a stack of cards and each weaver is issued with two cards, then goes away and weaves what it says. You are allowed to exchange a card if the two cards are totally incompatible like 'bright colours' and 'black and white'.  After three months, every one come comes back with two samples not more than A4 size plus a page of notes. The member concerned keeps one sample and the other sample plus a copy of the notes goes into the Guild weaving book to be consulted by everyone. I scan all the samples and every one gets a bound copy of all the scans and all the notes.

The next deadline is December 2009 and I have drawn 'Use bright colours with a white background' and 'Use Lurex'. Also I was doing a demo on Monday this week at the Guild Exhibition and I wanted something on a small loom to demo next Saturday so I decided to combine all of these and put a warp on the Leclerc Voyager which is my portable loom. In addition, being a mean Scot, I wanted to use up a whole lot of 60/2 silk I had dyed in brilliant colours and then decided they would not do for the current Megado project (of which more another time). But I did not feel enthusiastic about weaving 60/2 silk on the Voyager as it would be slow and might discourage people at a demo. Sooooo -

I decided to do a double cloth in white 8/2NM silk from Fibrecrafts (Japanese spun silk) at 12 epi using 8 shafts. Stripes of bright colour could be included in one cloth only   which I could swop from front cloth to back cloth thus giving me squares of bright colour. This way I could put lurex in the warp along with one of the colours. I put on a warp of 3 metres  for a width of 0.25 m by winding a warp of the 8/2NM and also wound a warp each of orange and scarlet and two warps of pink space dyed plus lurex. Each of the small warps was for a one inch width (sorry about swopping units). I warped up the Voyager from front to back. I do prefer to warp up from back to front but the Voyager is too short between the shafts and the back beam (its only defect). The first nasty problem is that I was warping up using 8 threads of 60/2 silk through each heddle and it was easy to get in a mess. It took a long time to wind on the complete warp - like 6 hours on Sunday. The second potential problem was the Lurex which I have never used in a warp before but I was very careful and had no problems.

The weft is a white 60/2 silk. The coloured squares are an inch on a side. You can see the Lurex on the outer side of the pink rectangles. And what you see is the sample for the Guild because the Lurex unravelled on me! A real mess. I only managed  a length of 8 inches. So the moral is only use Lurex for weft.

I spent Monday evening replacing all the Lurex threads with some Debbie Bliss silk which I had dyed in light blue some years ago.
I have changed the draft as well to provide some more interchange between the white sections of the front and back cloth. I have yet to check the threading and weave a little  - probably this evening.

The 8/2 silk from Fibrecrafts is very soft and has a good lustre but does shed fluff and I wonder whether everything will clog up before I weave this off. I hope not as it looks rather nice.