Coleus Weaving

The Coleus weaving from Sandra Rude has arrived!. It has a very nifty hanger of transparent plastic looking like an over-sized knitting needle with a knob at each end. The only problem is that the colours in the photo are not good. The light purple should be much redder. I have tried everything on the camera but don't get much change in colour balance out of it.  When we have a really sunny day, I will try again. At the moment the sky is grey and overcast.

The bookbinding classes started up again today and I had a happy afternoon. Here is Coptic book III with its enamelled covers and the paper folded ready for stitching. The paper is Lokta from the Papershed and is heavily textured on one side. Rather nice. I have become a fiend about handmade paper and buy up anything I have not tried before.

As well as the Coptic book, I folded all the sheets for Alice in Wonderland and pressed them. The templates for the sewing holes for both books are made and I might even do some of the stitching at home.

I cannot understand my state of health. It is better today than it has been for months. Maybe this new diet is doing some good. Certainly I felt much better yesterday as well. Today I have had more energy than I am accustomed to!! So I got lots of things done.

This is the warp for Margaret Roach Wheeler's class on 'Designing the Mahotan Way'. It is being held at Reading in ten days time. Today I have threaded up completely, wound on, tied on, checked it, corrected the sleying (missed a dent) and done a header of tabby. The warp is 2/12 cotton and is a mixture of four colours, two shades of red, black and sort of blue-green. I have put on 5 metres of warp 14 inches wide as I want to make a top from the fabric when I have finished.

Today I have finished the covers for a new Coptic book. These are Michael's larger enamel samples. I have mounted them on high-class sycamore, stolen from Michael's musical instrument selection of woods. The wood was sanded down which was not difficult and cut apart with a knife which was tedious but I did not fancy sawing the wood into sections for fear of splintering the edges. The enamels were glued down with Araldite and clamped over night, then polished with beeswax, after a final sanding. The top two are to be used as covers. The lower one was done as a trial. Now I have to see if I can sew the paper and these covers together.

Interesting that, when I opened the tin of beeswax polish, a very familiar smell rose from the contents. It has bothered me for a day or so as to what it reminded me of. It is the polish my mother used for the floors when we lived in Gillespie Crescent in Edinburgh in the early 50s!! How strange. Suddenly I can remember the layout of that house and where the linoleum was.

Midlands Textile Forum (2)

Today I went to a meeting of the Midlands Textile Forum. It was notable for a talk given by Annette Lucas who is currently completing a City and Guilds Level 2 certificate in Couture Millinery. Yes, the hats were wonderful, straws and felts and fascinators which are all the rage with teenagers going to their proms. But her sketch books were stunning. I have never seen such carefully done, totally apposite sketch books. They were A3 spiral bound with thick sketch paper - I am guessing 150 gsm. The pages had a record of how she selected the motifs and the colours and how she carried out the decorative bits. Several flowers were made to the same design but done in very different fabrics, weights and types and all mounted in the sketch book. Examples of different methods of binding the brim of a straw hat were mounted on the same page. Records of suitable colours put at the top of a page. Subsequent pages had apertures cut through so that the colours could be compared with drawings/photos on following pages. The amount of work was amazing. And the examiner will have no difficulty is seeing exactly what she tried and what she decided on.

All this beautifully laid out and a work of art in its self. I feel this is what a sketch book is about. I am almost inspired to try recording my weaving that way - but I bet I wouldn't keep it up for long.

I have completed weaving the colour samples on the Fan Reed and hemmed each end on the loom. I need to have a careful inspection of the samples with a magnifying glass to look for any further errors and then I shall cut off the samples and start off on a length of fabric.  But I need to do my inspection in good daylight and hope to get it done first thing tomorrow morning.

I have gone back to the Coptic book with enamels on the cover. A test piece has been glued on to sycamore, the wood has just been treated with beeswax and is drying now before being given a final polish. It looks good to me and I am just about to cut the two real pieces of wood out of my sanded length of sycamore.

Fan Reed (4)

These are weft colour samples on the fan reed silk fabric (60/2 silk). The three warp colours are light orange, dark orange and red-brown. Each 'fan' is one solid warp colour and each section is separated from its neighbours by four dark blue threads. In the centre of the reed (vertically), the width is two inches for each warp stripe. I have set  the reed down towards one end so that the strip widths are about 2.5 and 1.5 inches. This is so I can see the colour changes. The weft colours used are (from the bottom) light orange, white, red-brown, dark orange. If you examine the colour appearance of each stripe, you will see that the colours are different depending on whether the stripe is weft-faced (2.5 inches wide) or warp-faced (1.5 inches wide). The narrower stripes are nearer the self-colour of the warp. Looking at the colour effects, I prefer the light orange as weft.

I will weave a bit more dark orange and then do some light yellow and any other colour which I can find in the stash that takes my fancy. It would be better to use the light orange as I have have quite a bit of that yarn! Have I said that I dyed the two shades of orange myself? The red-brown is from Fibrecrafts and the dark blue from Handweavers Studio.

Added 2 hours later
The yellow weft is not as good as the light orange so light orange it is.

You will all be wondering why the blue stripes move sideways as the red-brown weft starts. Nothing to do with the yarn but something I had forgotten about weaving with a fan reed. I freely admit to being lazy and this means winding on as few times as possible which means I wind on several inches, maybe five. Well that won't do with a fan reed. When the fell-line is nearest to the breast beam, the reed slants forwards at the fell-line and a different part of  the fan reed beats the fell-line. This does not matter with an ordinary reed which is straight. With a fan reed, the length you wind on is restricted to less than 3 inches.  This applies to the Louet Kombo which has an overslung beater, rotating about a point higher than the shafts. It would not necessarily be true of another make of loom although there you would have the problem of getting the fan reed and its vertical movement installed.

Japanese Purse

A Malvern friend has just been to Japan for four weeks to see the cherry blossom. She brought me back this purse of silk brocade from the Nishijin Textile Centre. Look at the wrapping paper! It is printed with a drawloom. And the box it came in has a very delicate design on it.

I spent a morning last week showing my collection of textiles to her grand-daughter who is doing GCSE in Textiles.  I am still not sure it helped her apart from telling er which local museums to go to. Interesting that she took at least one photo of everything I showed her.

I have nearly finished the threading up of the fan reed project. Should be wound on and tied up today. Then I have check which colour of weft I prefer.

Apart from that, the Common thinks it is spring time. The lime trees and white beams are starting to leaf. The chestnuts are practically out  and the grass is starting to grow.

Interesting Book

Last Wednesday afternoon was spent in Ledbury which is about 10 miles away from Malvern and in Herefordshire.  Very agricultural and quite different from Malvern. It is much smaller than Malvern but it has five high class butchers on the  main street not to mention several green grocers and some good delis. Count in a shop selling a huge range of linen by the metre, a Scandavian shop, several high class dress shops and you have a bustling main street dominated by a 16th century black-and-white market hall. They even have a gunsmith and a shop selling models like radio-operated helicopters three foot long.

There is a secondhand bookshop which has a very large range of books on crafts. I acquired two books there last Wednesday. One is volume 2 of a series on textile museums in the UK - published in 1976. Very useful and interesting. The other is  'A Fashion for Extravagance', by Sara Bowman (ISBN 0 7135 2559 2) and published in 1985 which was just as colour photos in books had become good  and cheap to print. It deals with Art Deco fashion and  is stunning. I have several books on Art Deco and you tend to see the same items photographed again and again. Not with this book. I have never seen any of the photos before. It is mostly concerned with embellishment, embroidery and so on. There are double page spreads where the original design notebooks are shown along side sample embroideries and the final dress. Inspirational! I have already done a draft of a possible silk fabric based on black diamonds with silver centres. And there is a design of pink and silver feathers which I can see as a draft.

The problem that I have is that I can think of workable projects faster than I can carry them out! I can see at least three projects out of this book. I once designed an Art Deco fabric to use as curtains. It was rectangles of different greens and silver all done with double weave and warp and weft interchange. But that never got beyond a draft. I did decide I would have to dye all the yarn and curtains use a lot of yarn so I got discouraged

Warping up the fan reed is slow and I need to do it in the day time in order to have a really good light. The current weaving project list reads


- weave fan reed piece
- warp up Voyager with yarn for Margaret Roach Wheeler's course in May. She says 2 or 3 yards. I intend to put on 5 yards and get a top out of it.
- warp up Megado with tencel and weave.
- dye 2-ply wool in yellow/ochre to use as weft for devore scarf. This cannot be done until I have completed Margaret's course and finished off that weaving on the Voyager.

This will take me 2 months so when do I do the Art Deco stuff not to mention my caladium leaves.  I am still working on the draft for these. But if I get it to work to my liking, I can see it going straight to the top of the project list!

Paper from Kuala Lumpur

Ruth has brought three of the papers she bought for me in KL - five sheets of each  design. They are very heavy because each sheet is thick printed cotton mounted on heavy-duty paper. I have been careful with the scale in the photo and the designs are correct relative to each other. The yellow/orange one has a large repeat and will have to be used carefully. They are all intended for book covers.

I spent the morning sitting around in Worcester Royal Infirmary (WRI) and thought about a draft for caladium leaves. I think I can see how to do to  but have yet to try it out. The only thing I have done towards anything today is  to sand down the piece of sycamore I am going to use with Michael's larger enamels. Just needs a bit more of the finest grade sand paper tomorrow.  I don't fancy sawing the piece up but Michael says we ought to be able to cut it with a knife. It is only 2 mm thick.

Ruth is supposed to be leaving for KL tomorrow night but the volcanic ash might put a stop to that. We won't know until tomorrow morning.