Finished!!

By weaving all day, I have finished the fabric for the small NC. 3.7 metres of it. And only five inches of waste at the end of it. I have hemmed it on the loom but not cut it off because I need to think of what I am going to do next just in case I want to do something which could use that threading. So I will sit on it till Sunday. Tomorrow I am going to a class where I will learn about the Secret Belgian Binding. I have heard one story about the name but will hear what the tutor has to say before I commit to print.

Have I said that the vegetable plot is providing veg, in particular some spectacular lettuces,radishes, spring onions. And the French beans are looking good.

Posted with Blogsy

Festival of Quilts

I went to the Festival of Quilts in Birmingham today. Now I have sore feet! It has got a lot bigger since I attended last which was two years ago. Lots more stands and lots more quilts on show. I bought very little, which is good, but inspected and had demoed several sergers. Ruth and I are thinking of buying one jointly so I was inspecting the market. The only thing I bought were some sewing machine needle packs at the Bernina stand! Oh and some lovely marshmallows covered with toasted coconut.

No photos of quilts because the camera battery needs charging.

This morning I wrote a review of the Designer Bookbinder Exhibition and I have woven more than a yard of the small Newbury Coat. I might be finished tomorrow.

Designer Bookbinders Exhibition

I went up to London yesterday (Tuesday) to visit the Designer Bookbinders annual exhibition in  St Bride's Foundation off Fleet Street. Stunning but not easy to photograph because everything was behind glass.

The under layer is vellum painted with watercolours and the red leather on  top has been cut away.

 

In this one, the leather has been coloured and painted.



The orangey coloured stuff is a painted underlayer of leather. There were 59 bindings and 40% of them were from the USA. Quite amazing. I feel I should go away and not mention my bookbinding ever again.

I walked back to Waterloo Station over Blackfriars bridge with life bustling up and down the river. Note the London eye.

In the afternoon we walked round to the Savile Gardens - about 45 minutes and here we are having a posh tea in the café. Shown are Ruth, my daughter, and her daughter, Charlotte, who has just got a good degree from Reading University and is going to work for BP in September. We are all very proud of her. Note the scones with clotted cream and jam. None of us wanted any supper.

The Small Newbury Coat

I tried to answer a comment or query yesterday but Google swallowed it. This only happens on the iPad so I guess I have something set up wrong .

In 1811 a millowner in Newbury bet a local squire a thousand guineas that his workers could start with fleece at sunrise and have a fitted coat finished by Sunset. He won his bet and the original is in Caughton Court, a local stately home. In 2011, Kennet Valley Guild was prevailed upon to do a reenactment which was pure unadulterated hell. But we did complete it and the local MP wore it at the end of the day. 

There was a lot of yarn and fleece left over at the end and someone decided the Guild should make a coat for a ten year old with these leftovers. The idea was to take it into schools. However I  ended up with weaving and I laid down conditions. The most important was that the fleece should be spun and plied. The 2011 exercise used singles because it would have taken too long to ply it. And of course that made the weaving murder. We had two looms and between three and five people at the back of each, mending breaks as fast as they could.

So first we got someone ( Jean McVeigh) to work out a new pattern. I believe she made a toile from it and tried it on her grandson who is the right age. I was given the dimensions of fabric needed last February and a spinning team under Sue. Davies and Yvonne Withers and Janet Dunbar was created. They spun lots of yarn and plied it to the size requested. This has all been delivered to me and dyed and wound up and tied on a dis now a warp on my Megado. I am using the leftover yarn from 2011 for the weft as that does not matter being singles.

Hence the Small Newbury Coat. And I have woven 1.5 metres of it.

I am in Ruth's house today. I have been into London today to see a bookbinding exhibition of which more tomorrow  when I can unload my photos. I walked back to Waterloo station over Blackfriars and stopped to admire the Thames. Lots of boats. Lots of people. Who needs the Åland Islands when they have London and the Thames?

Megado Weaving

I spent Sunday morning dyeing yarn for the weft of the small Newbury Coat. 4 lots each of 200 gms.

Here they all are hanging up to dry. The shading from right to left is a function of the light from the window. I managed to get these pretty indistinguishable except for oen skein which looks totally different from the others anyway. Must have been a different breed of sheep.

And here is a close-up of the weaving. Now the weft yarn is dry, I can get ahead. I have 1.5 metres so far. There are 4 metres in all.
I have been playing with drafts based on Charles Rennie Mackintosh chairbacks.

And the back view is

Unless I weave this in 90/2 silk, this is going to be way too big.

 This is cut down and would appear as isolated motifs supposedly on a fine worsted. But still awfully large. I need to get this printed out lifesize. I might cut down the size of each square and see what that looked like. I fancy the multi-coloured draft  but I would a motif size of a couple of inches. Time for revision.

Dyeing in the Churchyard

At the August Guild meeting, we always have Dyeing in the Churchyard. Goodness only knows what we will call it if we ever stop using church halls for our meetings. Anyway, in all the years, I have been with Kennet Valley, we have managed to avoid serious rain. Oh the occasional little shower but yesterday! Fortunately Yvonne Withers (thank you, Yvonne) brought two Gazebos which were placed side by side just by the back door so it was two steps to the back door. The rain was so heavy that you got drenched in that distance. And every now and then one of the gazebos would chuck out its holding of rain and there would be squeaks from some poor unfortunate dyer but no rainwater was allowed into the dyepots!. There was a great deal of laughter and some wonderful dyeing, all natural and including cochineal.

There was quite a lot of indigo around. Note the nice space dyed skeins in yellow, green and blue. Mostly I minded the indigo vat but I did overdye a scarf of mine.

This is much better than the original which had a spaced dyed warp but a white weft.

I spent the first 30 minutes this morning washing all the bowls, basins et cetera from yesterday and then set about acid dyeing some more weft yarn for the small Newbury Coat. It is 0900 hours and I am halfway through my second bath. I only have one shuttle full of weft yarn left and I will get through that in 30 minutes of weaving so more dyeing is urgently needed. I aim to do another two lots this morning. Each 'lot' is 200 gms. I desperately want to get this piece of weaving finished. I cannot do anything else in the studio because of piled up bags of yarn for it.

 All those plastic bags are full of yarn and there is another bagfull in the sittingroom where I am turning balls into skeins ready for dyeing. I want to make a shirt before I set off for France which means finishing the weaving by next Saturday. I can wind a warp meantime but I may do what I have done before in good weather - retire to the patio with it. I will weave to the end of the yarn I have dyed and then do the sums for the next warp.

I have been thinking about journals, as a result of receiving a present from my sister which consists of a book on journals by Gwen Diehn and a shoulder bag all neatly fitted with paper pads and pencils and - - -. The question is, 'Does keeping a blog mean you don't keep a journal?' I think not. A blog is a record (for me at least) of what I have been up to. But only occasionally is there an entry about what I might do or have discarded thinking about and why. In other words, for me, a journal is a working record. I used to keep one but I think I might  go back to keep one, if only because I have three things I intend to do shortly and I think I might get them all onto one warp.

Megado up and running

The new warp for the small Newbury Coat was tied on before I left for Convergence. It is now wound on and tied on.

 Lots of skeins for the weft have been prepared and are ready to be dyed on Sunday. But I am not dyeing all the yarn I have because there is far too much. I will take some to the Guild tomorrow and see if anyone wants to dye them. I will have an indigo vat and am going to try an experiment. I dyed a warp some weeks ago and wove it up with a white weft yarn. The warp was blue/green. Being honest, I do not like the results. Far too much in your face. So I thought I would try overdyeing with indigo, just a little bit to see how it goes.This is a direct result of the Convergence course Rosie and Debbie went onl post teh. I have usually weave up a space dyed warp with a white weft. I have gone off that idea completely  and have become much fussier about the weft.

I have been thinking about the BLURB book on Michael's painting for too long. I cannot remember whether it is one year or two since I abandoned it but certainly a long time. This is due to me not liking how I was laying it out. I eventually decided I had to include some details of his life and wrote to several people to get the facts. This data has all turned up at which point I realised that the book was on my laptop - which was one reason I was unhappy - not a big enough screen. So yesterday I installed BLURB on my desktop and set about changing  the book. I have revamped what I had written and put in a lot more of his paintings. Going well.

I took this through a window and it was raining hard but it does show how well the campsis is doing. There are several clumps of flowers over the climber