New Projects (3)

This blog is more for my benefit than anyone else's. I am conscious that the house has little heaps of things collected together. Each heap represents one project and not much is happening to any of the heaps. Well here they are.

WEAVING
W1) Weaving top on Margaret Roach Wheeler's warp on the Voyager. Not far off finished. Should be off the loom today. Give it a good wash. Make up this week
W2) There looks to be plenty of warp left to do some more samples. I made a mess of two of them. I think I found reading the treadle draft for the table loom difficult so I will put the two drafts on to Fibreworks and turn them into liftplans. Do today.
W3) Finishing warping Megado with handspun and weave this.
W4) Put devore project on Voyager when Margaret's warp comes off. I have dyed Tencel and merino skeins for this. So we are ready for off. I need to decided whether the warp is just wool or is wool and tencel. Must read Anen Field's book on this topic.
W5) And of course the Fan Reed. Being brutal about this project, I have no great enthusiasm for it. I have got the photos I want. Oh well. I ought to try to get it finished by June 12th when I talk to London Guild. You will note that it is lowest of the list of weaving projects.

SEWING

S1) Do the buttonholes in my jacket which has been sitting upstairs since December. This counts as URGENT
S2) Draw up the master block for my dress as fitted in Gill Arnold's course.
S3) Then make up cotton material using that master pattern
S4) Draw up master block from jacket pattern on stiff paper. At the moment the master is on tissue paper which is looking tired.

BOOKBINDING
B1) Finish Alice in Wonderland. This can be done at the class.
B2) Bind three Japanese books as samples using 3 and 4 hole techniques. These can wait until the table comes next week. The contents are all ready.
B3) Do something about birch bark. I may have some next week. Otherwise buy from Sweden. Kirsten kindly sent a Swedish website address which sells birch bark. But my sister says there are two birches down in her local woods and she has noticed bark lying about. She will collect today. This would be an opportunity to  practise flattening the bark.
B4) Take piece of sycamore into class and try to burn letters into wood so as to do title. Angela Sutton will have to be consulted.
B5) Distantly in the future. I have bought some paper from Velma Bolyard and have designed a Coptic binding for it. But the paper is not likely to arrive for another two weeks.

So Order is
W1,W2,W3, W4 until table appears then
S1, S2, S4, B2, S3

B3 is separate and can be done when it arrives. Reading up what to do, it need soaking in a bucket for several days first. That does not sound too onerous to do!!

I feel better already!

Added Later

If you are interested in copyright as it applies to textiles, you might be interested in this

Copyright in Fashion

This is the view from our kitchen window. Hostas being very successful! I have thinned the set peach fruits twice all ready this year. The fruit is about 15 mm in diameter and I will have to thin them at least once more. The soft fruit is all underway and we look to have the usual glut of black and red currants and gooseberries.

 Last night I stayed up late watching  the first Opera program on Italian Opera on the Iplayer. Great stuff.  We had the privilege of seeing Danielle de Niesse on her third performance at Glyndebourne when noone had ever heard of her (She was a last minute stand-in). And she was stunning. Mind you, it is a great advantage to be a stunning looker and dancer as well as one of the top flight singers. And she can't be 30 yet!! But I look at opera houses and everywhere I went when I worked (and there was a lot of travel) I would go to the local opera house. On one famous occasion, I was in Munich with a high-powered technical group of about 25 people for a week. The first evening was spent in a beer garden but I have a limited enthusiasm for beery evenings with 24 males. So the second evening I said I had a head ache and would stay in and rest. As soon as they were out of the hotel, so was I - on my way to the Gaertner Opera House to see 'Cosi Fan Tutte'. It was played with a much younger caste than I had ever seen and played very fast and for laughs. Great fun. At the end, I went back to the hotel on the tram and walked into the hotel with the program under my arm, singing (inside you understand). To find the rest of the group milling about. Doh!! So I told the truth, had a night cap with them and went off to bed. The upshot was quite startling. The next day, five different people approached me very quietly and said the next time you go to the opera could I come too? It turned out that quite a few people cared as little for beery evenings as I did!!

Michael has not been well this week so not a lot of textile work. I have decided to make a major change in working methods. His room is what used to be our sitting room. It is the best room in the house and he can get a good view of the garden. Because I like to work where he is in bed, the Kombo sits in one corner and yes I am using it at the moment but that it is not always true since I have two other looms. So I have ordered a table to replace the Kombo. The crucial thing being that the top is variable  in height so I can work at bookbinding on it, use the sewing machine and also weave on the Voyager. This arrives on next Wednesday. 

A Day Spent Dying

I made up a new batch of KEMTEX Orange acid dye and dyed two silk skeins. First I wound a 75 gm skein of Uppingham's two-ply pure merino and dyed it lemon yellow. This is for a devore project. The yarn is lovely but causes havoc if used for a warp. So I am using TEXERE's two-ply wool in the warp. It has come out a wonderful colour.

This is a piece of sanded sycamore left from doing the book covers for Michael's enamels. Three different methods of applying dye have been used.
1) Procion MX (green + rust-brown)
2) Acid Dye Emerald
3) DEKA Silk Paint Green

All the samples were all painted in a rectangular shape. The DEKA Silk Paint has only crept a very little, the acid dye has crept more (look at the irregular edges) and

the Procion MX has invaded  everywhere. The Acid dye has separated as well leaving  a blue edge to the sample.
The lower photo was taken after ironing the piece of sycamore (with a parchment separator). When it had been ironed for several minutes, I took a damp cloth and rubbed each patch of dye. You can see where I did this on the Procion MX and Acid dye patches and the damp cloth picked up a lot of colour. When I did this to the DEKA Silk paint patch, there was no colour on the damp cloth and no change to the appearance of the patch. So it is safe to use DEKA Silk Paints.

Caladium Flower

This blogging lark - -

has made a difference to my life!

If I had not seen the Coleus weaving in Sandra Rude's blog and followed it up so that eventually I became its proud owner, I would not have had the courage to write to Velma Bolroyd, she of the Wake Robin Paper Mill and ask if she would sell me some of her handmade paper. I am so pleased she said yes. I have worked out a book design to use it already!! These blog people, they don't mind you writing to them at all. And in passing, a wake robin seemed to be a trillium. I have had some in the garden but they didn't like it and died.

This is a badly focussed photo of a bloom on Magnolia watsonii. All the other flowers had been shrivelled up by the heat of the last few days. It is a small tree and, to me, it seemed a bit short on leaves. 

Returning to book binding, my tutor says that wooden covers were the thing in Coptic times and my book with Michael's enamels mounted on sycamore is just right. I am taken with the idea of having book covers of birch bark which I saw used in a purse in Birmingham Museums Warehouse with Margaret Roach Wheeler.  I have now read up how to prepare birch bark. I have several birches in our garden and nearby and I was going to visit them with a knife but this is a bad idea. You kill the tree. So you have to buy the bark or find a wood with cut down or dying birches in it and then take a knife to it. These days you could get arrested for that. I have found a supplier in the States but I can see trouble with importing wood into the UK. I once had to oversee the sending of two very large antennas to Canada and there was a major carry-on about the wooden crates which were specially built to fit them into. We had to have a special Certificate - and pay special money too. Anyway if anyone knows of a source of birch bark in the UK, please get in touch. It is used in basket making. I suppose that anywhere in the EU would do. Scandanavia?

Fan Reed (6)

This is the Fan Reed silk just off the loom. After washing and ironing, it was beautifully soft. This evening I have done the write-up for the Complex Weavers Fine Threads Group, printed 40 copies, cut up the cloth into 40 small samples and stuck them onto the printed sheets with archival tape. And parcelled them up.

I am not tying on again because the tension in the warp is quite good so I have done it with sticks and the sticks will be tied on. I also repaired a few errors in the warp. I found there were errors in sleying which I did not want to redo. So I added in threads and sorted out the right selvedge.

I must say that the quality of weaving is not up to standard. It is all too easy to lose a thread or two with the narrow sheds I have to work with. I estimate I have 2 metres or so of warp left and I MUST TRY HARDER!!!

The acid dye came today but I will not have time to do any dying until Thursday morning. Tomorrow afternoon I have the bookbinding class and, in the morning,  I shall call on a Magnolia watsonii in flower in a friend's garden! There will be photos here soon.

Fan Reed (5)

This morning I managed to take the series of photographs I need to explain how a fan reed works. I have turned them into a Powerpoint presentation but thought I would attempt to turn them into a Picasa Slideshow for this blog.

 First, how does it work? Mine is a 15 dent/inch reed 20 inches wide and 5 inches high. On the centre line, every fan is two inches wide and runs from 1 inch at one side to 3 inches at the other side.

Basically the warp stays constant in position and the reed moves up and down so that some sections of the warp are squashed together while alternate sections are further apart. The 15 dents per inch on the centre line becomes  30 dents per inch at one end and 10 dents per inch at the other.

How you achieve the movement of the reed will depend on the loom you have it mounted in. I rather fancy that an overslung beater is best but that is probably because I have implemented mine on a Louet Kombo. The actual motion is achieved by winding two screws up and down.

This is a SolidWorks drawing of the mechanism. The inner two vertical rods are long screw threads. There are wingnuts under the lower wooden beam for the reed which are manually adjusted together to drive the reed up and down.

Now you have to decide what 'pattern' you want to weave. Suppose you fix a step in vertical reed movement. If you throw a weft three times each time you move a step, you get a linear pattern, looking like a triangle. In practise as you turn round to go back, you will not maintain a sharp kink and  the triangles will be rounded. You can vary the length of a pattern repeat by throwing more or less weft shots per step. I do not like this linear pattern and have experimented with a number of curved shapes. I now use an approximation to a sine curve (computed using EXCEL) which does require a variable number of wefts per step.

There are problems in using the Fan Reed

- you cannot use the whole height of the reed. The top is limited by where the upper threads of a shed are and the need to have enough space in the shed for a shuttle. I bought two tiny shuttles from Bluster Bay specifically to use with the Fan Reed  but I still 'lose' the top 15mm - and to make the pattern symmetric you cannot use the reed to the lowest point but must stop 15mm above the lower edge

- you need a high tension in order to give the shuttle a surface to glide on. And this very light shuttle is not ideal.

I am weaving 60/2 silk and there are additional problems in weaving silk at 48epi with the Fan Reed.

- because the cloth is sometimes warp faced and sometimes weft faced, unweaving is a real problem if you make a mistake. The shafts have to be well balanced and equally hung - and that is not easy on the Louet Kombo.  A tie up system like the LeClerc Voyager which uses Tex-Solv would get rid of a lot of these problems

- it is very slow. I reckon to be an average weaver. I can manage better than 3 seconds per weft throw on my Megado. It takes me 50 minutes to do five inches which works out at 12.5 seconds per weft throw. This is mostly a function of my mechanism and yes, I can see how to automate it using a stepper motor and a lot of money.

It is a waste of time, in my opinion to do anything but tabby with this reed, though maybe you could use twill. I am disapppointed at the number of errors in my weaving. Possibly weaving with a thicker yarn would avoid these errors. Most of what I have done has been 60/2 silk although the first thing I did was 10/2 cotton in a triangular pattern.

I have taken photos of the current cloth at the top and bottom of the reed and at three intermediate positions with the current weaving.  For those of you who are still with me, try this Fan Reed Slideshow.  Click SlideShow at the top left  and then immediately go to the lowest central part and click on the plus sign until the 3 seconds reads 10. Then you can use the right and left arrows to move through the Slide Show at your leisure. I would like to know how readers manage with this Slide Show.