Warping Up

So here is the sectional warp beam on the Megado. Yesterday's faux pas has been removed. Section 1 has been done - took 40 minutes. Section 2 is being done in the photo. It took 35 minutes.

The photo shows the Megado's metal hoops which separate the sections. The ribbon of yarn comes from the warping wheel and over the back beam.   The wheel is off to the upper right.  This arrangement leaves the yarn with a big distance between the back beam and the sectional warp beam in which to wander about. So Michael made a wooden fitment which friction clamps to the back beam and can easily be slid along the back beam from section to section. The two rods are brass rods which are the same distance apart as a pair of hoops and just a little short of touching them. This allows fast winding on of the warp ribbon from the wheel.

Here are the first two sections side by side with the variation in colours clearly visible although these are quiet compared with what is to come!

This is Michael's other helpful gadget - a cross-maker. Lots of people report in Weavetech that they lay the end of each section and just pick off the threads. Me, I am a belt-and-braces person and ask what if   - - . So I have a cross maker. I think AVL has started selling one of these to go with the warping wheel but they didn't offer it when I bought mine. My cross-maker consist of two brass rods inserted just above the clip. What you see in the photo is when the warp is being wound on the warp beam. The four ties are quite clear on the cross.


When all the sections are wound, I pick up all the crosses on the lease sticks and we're done. It works.

Now to wind another section.

Jacket and the New Warp

I have finished my jacket apart from the buttonholes. Dixie Nichols' buttons have arrived and so I might try sewing sample buttonholes tonight. You can see the yellow machine embroidery on the lining of the jacket just by the lapel in the two photos. The lower photo  also shows the lapel cut on the cross. The jacket fits well and I will post a photo when the buttonholes are done and the buttons attached. Husband thinks it is the best thing I have ever made. I think he is prejudiced in its favour by the fact he likes the cloth.

Last night I started out warping up with my multi-coloured warp. This single section was the first and is wrong, wrong, wrong.  The colours look nice and that is about all.

Firstly the counter on the warping wheel gave lots of trouble - like not counting at all. It is working at the moment but there was a flurry of emails to AVL who were helpful but have not yet come up with a solution - except buy a new one. I do not mind that. But I do mind waiting till it gets here!

Secondly I was not careful enough in making sure the next colour to be tied was the right one. However I have worked out a more foolproof method for future sections.

Thirdly, although I thought about it carefully, I have managed to get the colours wrong left to right (nice colours though).

Fourthly I put this  section on to the warp beam back to front. How stupid can you get? My husband said 'Why can't you unwind it and wind it on again?' Well because it has the colour reversal error anyway and,  even if it didn't, I don't think the rewound section would be properly tensioned.

So the day-job can wait. I am going to cut off that section immediately after lunch and wind more sections. That first section took me an hour. I hope I can get the time down as I have 34 sections to do.

New Shuttles

My new boat shuttles have arrived from Bluster Bay Woodworks!!! The front one is leopardswood and the back one is curly walnut.  They are both end-delivery shuttles which I have no experience of. But I hear such good things about better selvedge and faster weaving that I lashed out on these two and a dozen pirns. I just have to learn how to wind a pirn properly and get the tension right. Well actually I just have to warp up the Megado with 34 sections of 41 threads each. I have printed out the threading from Fibreworks at one section to a page. As I do each section, I will identify the correct colours for each thread and write it on the print out. Each cone is already marked with the identifying number from Fibreworks. I can see this being a slow process.

I don't have to have much encouragement to buy another shuttle from Bluster Bay. I have five ordinary ones acquired over the years.  I also have three other boat shuttles of different makes. The Leclerc is okay but the two roller shuttles are a real pain with fine silk. I was very taken with a recent photo in Handwoven - see Page 34, bottom right in Issue 147. This shows Robin Spady's collection of boat shuttles. My first reaction was 'What does she do with them all?' My second reaction was to realise that I was green with envy.

Bluebell Wood

 I mentioned in Playing Hookey that I had bought something and was fetching it from Birmingham today. Here it is - Bluebell Wood by Jennifer Hall of the Midlands Textile Forum. I also mentioned it when I reviewed the MTF's 2009 Exhibition in Birmingham in November. I thought about it for a few days after seeing and then  succumbed and inquired about buying it and was successful. It has come recessed into a box an inch deep which is lined with a green fabric. The whole is framed with glass. So it is well protected. This photo is taken by Jennifer herself. I can see the box lining in the back ground so it must have been taken before the glass was put on. I think if I photograph it now, there will be too many reflections from the glass.

 I took the train up to Birmingham New Street. It was already packed when it arrived at Malvern and, when it pulled out of Worcester, it was standing room only to Brum. The German Christmas Market is on in the pedestrian precinct and there was something on at the Arena as well. So Brum was very busy. I walked through the market  stalls and came to a standstill by a stall which was selling German cakes - listed in English. Now if there is anything I am partial to, it is kasekuchen - not the inferior English product but a true German one. So I asked if the cheesecake on their list was really kasekuchen and could I see it? And yes it was so, we have kasekuchen waiting for suppertime!! The other real oddity is that they had a singer and a band at the top of the Town Hall steps, right by the Floozy in the Jacuzzi and he was belting out Der Tannenbaum with a lot of oompahs from the band.

One result of rearranging the book collection is that I have come across several books I had forgotten about and have put aside to read. So I read The Mediaeval Manichee on the train. I remembered visiting Mont Segur, the last stronghold of the Cathars in France where hundreds of them burnt themselves alive in 1244 rather than be taken prisoner by the Catholics. It is in the middle of a forest. The sort of thing we don't have in the UK any more, miles and miles of rocky hills covered in thick forest. When we got there,  Mont Segur is on top of a high rocky outcrop where no trees can grow and you have to clamber up a very steep path to get there. So we got out of the car (no one else there at all) and looked vertically up to the fortress. All around were hills covered in  forest. No other sign of any people at all, no houses, no cars. And what was worse, it was totally silent. No birds sang. As if the land could remember the calamity and was still weeping for it.

Buttons

I am very taken with buttons and have a collection bought in all sorts of places.  I have been thinking about buttons for my new jacket. Examining my stash, I had nothing suitable and, although I looked at Dixie Nichols buttons,  there was little left for sale. She puts a new set on her website four times a year and you have to move fast to get a set. I had not realised she was running behind until yesterday when I got an email saying she was sorry she was late but here was another offering. So work was abandoned while I investigated.  There were three sets I thought were suitable and I bought what is shown below.

It is worth saying that, when I looked this morning, half the sets had been sold.


I once went to the Kennet Valley Guild wearing a newly made jacket which I was  very proud of. It is woven of handspun merino (spun by my  friend Linda Scurr, Thank you, Linda) and silk. Someone rushed up to me and said 'They are wonderful. Dixie Nichols?' and some one standing behind her turned round and said 'Dixie Nichols? Where? Let me see!!' Not a word about the jacket! It turned out that they both just bought sets they liked and hoarded them. Anyway I am a happy bunny.

Playing Hookey

I 'retired' in October this year. The trouble is that lots of customers are paying no attention to this fact. So over the last two weeks, I have been working very hard. Helping out with a proposal which means asking all the nasty technical questions and telling the potential customer that there is no way he is going to get these for fifty pounds each unless he downgrades the spec considerably, answering questions for a job completed five months (Why don't they read reports a bit sooner?) and generally providing information. I have done very little textile work in the last two weeks and finished up yesterday by being quite miffed. So I played hookey today and they are going to have to wait.

Today we went to Ledbury, primarily to see a textile exhibition but, of course, to visit our Mr Waller, the butcher, and buy a piece of beef for the family who are descending on Sunday.  And of course have coffee and almond croissants upstairs at Ceci Paolo and visit various shops for Christmas shopping and - - . So I am much happier especially since the textile exhibition, UNFOLDED, was quite the best exhibition in the Weaver's Gallery I have ever seen there. The Weavers Gallery is the upstairs of a timberframed building a few yards from Ledbury's famous timber-framed Market Hall. Most of Ledbury is timber framed (14th to 17th century) but a lot of the shops had a Victorian facade put on. You get inside the shop and the roof is held up by oak timbers with carving on the ends (typical of this area) and the infill walls are wattle and daub (interwoven willow plastered up).  The  Weaver's Gallery holds exhibitions of art of all sorts. I have seen  watercolours there, acrylics, embroidery, quilting. This was labelled as mixed media. There were three local artists. Anne Weldon uses Reverse Applique and produces tree scapes in winter. Very details and quite large and all in black and white. For me, the best was a row of rooks on branches. I am inspired by this. I can see a picture weaving coming on even though I said a few days ago that I would give up picture weaving. She does not have a website which is a pity.

Liz Brooke Ward does complex embroideries, several of which are based on lichen or algae. The fine detail of the embroidery is lovely. This is from a card of hers I bought. Naturally the copyright is hers. She has won several prizes and I am not surprised. It is not only the workmanship but the colours and design which are firstrate. Colours for the lichens are blues, greens, yellows and purple.

These leaves are intended as bookmarks!! or small hangings - they have a ribbon attached. They are by Di Wells and I couldn't resisted buying a few as Christmas presents. They are about eight inches long. Much of her work is buildings. I noted a row of multicoloured bathing huts and a town or two. I loved the bathing huts. As you can see from the photo, she has a good eye for colour, or rather, I like her choices of colour. In fact, I rather regret not buying one for me but the rest are all mentally bespoke.

I was very tempted by the rooks but I have already bought a textile piece which I am collecting tomorrow - more on it then. The people at the Weaver's Gallery were telling me about Linda and Laura Kemshall's  show in Hereford, SIX-STRUCTURED. It is on till January 9th and I must go.  My tutor for the City and Guilds in Creative Sketch Books is one of the six.

And now to do more on my jacket.

The Last Book

I have completed the fourth and last book for this term. This is very large, slightly bigger than A4  which I have not bound before. I think it is a mistake. The endpapers do not line up right and it is difficult to deal with because of the size. It probably was not thick enough.  The fabric is white and yellow striped silk this time; the other three were various weights of cotton. The silk was stamped with a sort of seaweed pattern in groups of three in blue, then overstamped occasionally in gold paint. In two places, one on each face of the book, I laid on a rectangle of copper foil and stamped on top of that. The greyish colour is just that, a light coating of silver paint.

The end papers were cut from a sheet of dark blue paper decorated with gold which I bought from Fibrecrafts. They have a large collection of different papers and, last time I was there, I was allowed into the stock room. This was one of the finds. There is not have much left but it would do nicely as a paper on the outside of a book. I will try to get some more.

I still have one piece of fabric big enough for an A4 book but am not happy about this. The reason why No 4 book was bigger than A4 is that I folded several different types of handmade and fancy paper together and these turned out to be bigger than A4. I did not trim or cut the edges as I like the deckle effect and, in any case, some of the sheets would tear rather than cut tidily.

The dark blue jacket is coming along, the body is complete and the roll collar is attached and completed. The sleeves are cut out and had lining fused to them. I remembered at 5 o'clock this morning that I had forgotten about the shoulder pads and fell out of bed to order some from Jaycotts as well as some other haberdashery I need. We had a great shop on the main street which sold everything you could possible think of in that line but they closed up and became a webmail shop for fabrics only. The nearest one now is in the middle of Worcester  which has discouraging car parking facilities.

On Saturday at the Guild meeting, I collected my 12/2 cotton yarn for weaving up Michael's enamels. It is going to resemble a Biblical breastplate when it is finished!

Which brings on to my philosophical musings. Some weavers I know have one draft which they happily weave for ever. Others put on a different draft/yarn every time. I am not quite in the second class but approaching it.  I do wonder if it would be better to stick to one yarn/draft for a bit, say, 3 years. One might get very good at it and yet, I am sure I would  be bored.  I really must stick longer to one thing. Which reminds me that we have three acrylic boxes in the sitting room and looking at them, I realise that the 'seedheads' one in Annuals VI would make a lovely book cover. I wish now I had not been so hasty in taking off the remnants of the warp.