And We're Off...

...to the American Craft Council show in San Francisco. Tomorrow is booth setup day, and the show runs Friday through Sunday.

The floater frames for the newest 4 weavings had been assembled and painted two days ago, but the paint wasn't dry enough for me to mount weavings in them until today. This is what my work table looked like as I raced through the last-minute framing tasks:

This is the dahlia, mounted on a canvas stretcher and held in place within the floater frame by shims - thin pieces of wood wrapped in paper towels. The shims keep the canvas stretcher from moving around inside the frame and ensure that the spacing is correct. Then I flip the whole thing over and drill holes for 4 screws to hold the stretcher to the frame.

Four frames, 16 holes and screws, 8 tiny eye-bolts, 4 hanging wires, 8 felt corner-protection pads, 4 labels - whew!! Now I've got to pack so we can leave early tomorrow...

Hope to see you in San Francisco.

Framing

Doesn't look much like a weaver's worktable, does it?

Hammers, drills, staple guns, and a hand-vacuum? Well, not unless it's time to assemble frames for a number of new weavings. Then, the weaver's worktable looks much more like a woodworker's table.

I've got 7 new pieces mounted on stretcher frames, fitted with new custom-sized floater frames, and ready to be boxed up for the American Craft Council show this coming weekend. See this page for info about hours, location, etc.

That big black rectangle just past the drill is the back of one of the new pieces. My mounting method creates a completely finished back. No loose threads, no selvedge edges or serged (nonselvedge) edges, just a smooth back that shows only the back of the frame and a sheet of black foam-core board that covers all those loose threads and untidy edges.

Cut Off

Today I cut off the four pieces I've woven on the current jacquard warp:

Not bad for less than 10 days' work!

This is how the loom looks in front and in back:

The next few days will be spent mounting and framing these, as well as some of my earlier pieces. If I can, I'll post photos along the way.

Too Much Excitement

Okay, so I'm weaving along yesterday on the dahlia image, and between one pick and the next, I hear a sudden, sharp "pop." Turns out one of the drive cables simply snapped right at the pulley on top of the loom. There are 12 drive cables, one for each module.

The cable is responsible for lifting hooks and knives. On module 8, a piece about 6 inches long broke off:

In the photo above, the broken end is circled in red. Luckily, there was a lot of excess length on the remaining end of the cabl, which meant that the cable was long enough so DH was able to loosen all the cable connection points and move the cable 10.5 inches along so that the extra length let it reach all the way around its prescribed path. The extra length is circled in green.

It sounds like an easy task, but keep in mind that there's a tensioned warp on the loom, which makes it very difficult to reach certain parts of the loom. Both the woven cloth and the unwoven warp block access to critical areas.

However, as soon as the cable was back in place, I was able to continue weaving. Here's the dahlia at 600 picks (with 800 still to go):

Today I finished the weaving, and will cut off the four pieces I've woven and get them ready to mount and frame. There's only a week until the American Craft Council show!

Next Up

The next flower on my list is a dahlia, shown below indexed to 15 shades of 3 hues, and 1 or 2 blends of two of the hues (green + white for the border and parts of petals, for example, and fuchsia + white in some of the petals).

The image will be rotated 90 degrees clockwise in weaving - the color chips are the "bottom" of the image, and are cropped off before I go to the loom.

I wove 300 picks before quitting time:

California Mid State Fair, Part 2

The fair includes all the rodeo competitions one would expect at a fair in the Western US. The local favorite event, though, is limited to small children:

These sheep aren't sheared in advance, so there's plenty of fleece to grab. No rope, saddle, or bridle on the critter, but protective gear required for riders. This event is a laugh riot. Between kids squealing and sheep baa-ing and parents cheering, it's good noisy fun (for everyone except the sheep - look at the determined scowl in the one in the photo).

California Mid-State Fair

Earlier in the summer, I entered 2 jacquard weavings in the local fair. Today was our day to go to the fair, and I found out that one of the pieces won a first prize, and the other won a second prize. Woo-hoo! The prize money is in the $10-15 (US) range...

The fair isn't about grown-ups, though, it's about the kids. Especially the 4-H kids. This is a *big* 4-H area. 4-H is an organization for elementary-to-high-school-age kids, who raise farm animals and in the process learn a lot of grown-up lessons: economics, business negotiations, showmanship, care and nurturing of animals, responsibility, public speaking, and a lot more. Everyone I know who spent  some time in 4-H as a kid has nothing but good things to say about what the experience taught them.

So we spent quite a bit of time roaming around the animal barns and show arenas. The lambs are a big task for a kid - a 6-month-old market lamb outweighs most teenagers, and has sheer terror on its side. Right before the animal is going to go into the ring for judging, it gets a bath and a haircut. I kid you not, there's an area set aside as a sheep shower! (The handlers got as wet as the lambs.) Then they go to a grooming stand for a last minute shave:

And then the kids change into their 4-H uniforms (white shirt, white pants, optional green hat and/or kerchief) and take their animals into the judging ring:

Some of the younger/smaller animal handlers need help controlling their lamb, so there were a few older/bigger 4-H-ers available to assist in the task of wrangling unhappy lambs.

It's a real treat to watch, and an even bigger treat for the kids who win ribbons! A ribbon means the kid earns more per pound when selling the lamb to a local butcher/grocer. This is what rural California is all about. Practical, sensible education in skills that the kid will need as an adult. The lambs? Not so much. They made an unholy racket baa-ing loudly to tell everyone how unhappy they were about the whole event!

The Mum on the Loom

This photo was taken at about the 2/3 mark:

For some reason, my camera can do a pretty good job reproducing the colors of the thread in the shuttles, but not the cloth itself. It really isn't this dull and drab...

Next Up

The next piece is another of the pixelated flowers - this time, a gold chrysanthemum:

Before quitting time today, I wove the bottom border (a blend of green and gold), and tomorrow will begin the body of the image. I'm planning to weave this one and perhaps one more, then it'll be time to start mounting and framing the finished pieces.

The American Craft Council show in San Francisco is coming up on August 2, 3, and 4, so I need to get some pieces finished before then!

Second Rose is Woven

Here's the upper portion of the weaving, photo taken halfway through the top border:

On to the next piece! Details and pictures to follow...

The Next Big Thing

Here's the image I'm working from. Ignore the bright red border - in substituting weaves, that becomes a 50/50 blend of two of the yarn colors.

















First of all, the blue-violet I had in the stash was more of a blue-with-a-hint-of-violet than the color chips in the image. Second, I decided that using a white yarn would be too dramatic a contrast, so I looked in the stash for light-value alternatives. First I lined up the blue-violet and red-violet with a lavender - too grey, and sad looking. Then I changed out the lavender for the same bubblegum pink I used in the previous piece, and the combination looked cheerful and happy. Okay! Here's the piece at 500 or so picks:

And at about 850 picks, when I quit for the day:

In looking at the photos of the weaving, I suspect that I may have got the red-violet and blue-violet shuttles in the wrong order from the beginning; the pink is definitely where it should be, but I'm not sure about the others. However, I'm really liking how this one is turning out so it hardly matters! This is what we call a "feature" and not a "bug."

Weaving!

After some discussion, DH replaced two hooks on the jacquard loom. It is never quite possible to be sure whether the hooks were really bent, or whether the act of mucking about with them solves some unseen problem, like lint clogging the channel the hook rides in, or some other obscure but invisible condition. Whatever.

The important result is that after the replacement, and a few minutes of lifting a plain-weave sequence, everything began to work correctly. Hooray!

I started weaving the rose image I posted here. After 350 picks it looked like this:

The colors of yarn I had in stock are close to those in the image, except the "red" is more of a "red-orange" hue.

Once I begin weaving, and if everything is going smoothly, I tend to just keep at it until my stomach starts complaining that dinner is due, so before I realized it, I had reached the 1000-pick mark:

Every project I weave on the jacquard teaches me something about color. The border, which appears to be pink, is actually a 50:50 blend of the pink and the red-orange yarns. They're so close to the same value, you can't see them as a blend, you only see a solid color. And where the bubble-gum pink blends with black, it's not pink any more, it's more in the range of lavender-to-purple. The red-orange is browned by the black, and of course the yellow becomes green when it's in the minority compared to the black. The mysteries of color...

I only have about 200 picks of this piece left to weave tomorrow, then I'll begin the next one.

Tightening Loose Threads

In a comment on yesterday's post, Diane asked, "How do you tighten individual loose threads? I'm looking to avoid untying the entire bout. Do you wrap it around that pin?"

I agree - when lashing on, untying an entire bout means undoing the lashing cord back to that bout, which takes an inordinate amount of time. I much prefer to apply discipline to individual threads!

If I've only woven a few picks, I wrap the loose thread 5 or 6 times around a pin and secure the pin weftwise in the web. If I've woven several inches, and if I can trace the loose thread back to the lashing-on knot, all I need to do is pull the thread back toward the knot until it's the same tension as its neighbors. The woven web usually keeps it from sliding in the reverse direction.

I keep a tiny crochet hook (the size used for really fine crochet lace, inherited from my grandmother) near the loom to make it easier to pick one thread out of a bout at a time and tighten it. I'll try to remember to post a photo of it - another of those handy tools "adopted" into my weaving tool-kit.

When a tension problem happens in the middle of a piece - for instance, because a hook begins to misbehave and that thread doesn't take up at the same rate as its neighbors - I'll just tighten the thread right there in the middle, and after the cloth comes off the loom I pull the loop to the back of the cloth. If the hook errors show on the face of the cloth, I repair them with needle and thread.

Funny how "weaving" includes so many tasks that don't involve a shuttle!

P.S. Here's a photo, with my fingers in the shot to show scale. The hook is less than 4 inches long. On one side it says "Empress" and on the other either 6 or 9, but I've no idea what size numbering scale is used on crochet hooks this small! It's perfect for my task, in any case.

Debugging the Warp

The warp is sleyed and lashed onto the apron rod.

 The smooth, slippery cord I use to lash onto the apron is wrapped around a tool from the knitting shop - I think it's sold to hold different colors of yarn for intarsia knitting? Anyway, since I'm lashing on a lot of bouts of warp, it's a long cord and the plastic "bobbin" keeps it under control.

After completing the lashing and adjusted the tension on the 1/2-inch warp bouts, I've woven a few inches in simple structures (plain weave and 1/4 satin) to debug any problems in the warp. Usually, the problems are related to tension - one thread in a group is looser than its neighbors, so it doesn't want to lift when it's supposed to (or it lifts when it isn't supposed to). The pins with big round heads mark threads whose tension I've had to tighten for that reason.

If you click the photo above to enlarge it, you can see the wooden handle of my sleying hook, with one thread on top of it. This one isn't a tension problem, but instead probably a bad hook or one of the other tiny parts that can cause the thread to fail to behave as expected. In the two inches of debugging weaving, it never lifted at all - it's just a loose thread dangling under the woven web. I've checked to see that there are no crossed threads or sleying errors, and nothing shows up in my examination of that area of the warp. Tomorrow, DH will help me replace the hook and we'll hope that fixes the problem.

Then I can begin weaving some new designs!

A Thread Under Tension...

...is a well-behaved thread. During the sleying process, I use a Photoshop-created design file to lift the warp ends four threads at a time. This makes it much easier to be sure I'm grabbing the right four threads for each dent in the reed.

However, the lifting action of this jacquard loom means that all threads are lifted, then the selected threads stay up while the remainder sink to their rest position. All that lifting and sinking means that the threads I have already sleyed have a tendency to sneak out the back of the reed if I'm not careful.

Which is why my collection of fishing weights make sure the sleyed ends stay where they belong until I've got them ready to tie onto the apron rod.

Progress

The warp is finally tied on and pulled through so that the knots are past where the beater and reed will be. I've cut off most of the length of the old warp ends, leaving only a small amount so I have plenty of room to thread the reed - that's tomorrow's task.

This has taken a very long time, partly because my back keeps complaining about sitting in one position for so long, my hands don't like the knotting process much, and we've had interruptions in the form of house guests. While they were here, we took a day off to do some serious wine tasting at a couple of the area's best wineries - Tablas Creek and Denner - both of which produce Rhone-style wines. Yum!

Still Knotting

At this point, I'm about 5/6 finished: 10 out of 12 modules knotted and ready to pull through.

Tomorrow would see the job finished, but I'm going to take a holiday, and attend a wine-tasting-group event, and then host guests for a couple of days.

I hope your summer is progressing nicely!

Let the Knotting Begin!

After beaming the 30 sections of black 20/2 mercerized cotton for the next jacquard warp, this is all the yarn I had left - 4.55 ounces. About 2,400 yards. There might have been enough to add another yard to each of the 1,440 ends. Oh, well; The warp is a done deal now.

Next, I got the new warp arranged on lease sticks.

The next step was to get the old warp sections combined onto a single set of lease sticks - I had previously left the outer four (on each side) modules-worth of black cotton on one set, and the remains of the white warp for the ecclesiastical stole on the center four modules on a second set. Too much hardware in the way!

That will be my workspace for a few days. I'm now chugging along with my favorite knotter. When the knotter is working right (or perhaps I should say, "when I'm working the knotter right...") this is the result - a tidy little knot with tag ends clipped short enough so they don't add to the tangle factor when threads are being drawn through the lease sticks and the heddles.

By dinnertime, I had knotted something like one and a half modules worth of warp:

There won't be much in the way of excitement for a few days. This isn't one of the more thrilling aspects of weaving...

The Two-Thirds Mark

Twenty sections down, ten to go.

Tomorrow should see all the sections wound, and tying on begun.

Happy Fourth of July!

We had peach and plum pie for dessert. How about you?

Yesterday afternoon we got an email from Uncle Jim. The stole arrived yesterday, he loves it, and everybody's happy.

Here's another design you may see on the loom soon:

First, I have to get a fresh warp on the loom, tie it onto the ends of the old warp, and pull through the heddles. That's going to take a few days.

Some New Designs

One of the comments (sometimes almost a complaint) I hear most at shows and exhibitions goes like this. "Oh, it's so much like a photograph!"

I'm going to weave some new designs that really won't look like a photo, rather (I hope) like an abstract image. Here are a couple of examples:

Can't wait to see them on the loom!

What's different about these designs is that there are no shadings from bright to dark, just blobs of solid color or value. Click to enlarge the images, and you should be able to see what I mean.

The Stole is Finished

Well, it's finished except for one last step. It needs a plied cord that runs from one shoulder seam to the other, to keep the stole from riding forward. Keeping the shoulder seams on the wearer's shoulder helps the stole hang straight, and keeps the back neck edge from getting worn by rubbing against the outer garments or the neck itself.

I'll use some of the 8/2 Tencel to make the cord, and probably buttons or hooks to fasten it at both ends.

Then it'll be time to get back to the looms. There's a warp partly beamed on the dobby loom, and black mercerized cotton waiting to be beamed on the jacquard loom.

I've been working on a lot of new jacquard designs in a somewhat different style from my past work, and can't wait to see how they weave up!

Whew!

The high pressure system has broken up (or moved eastward) allowing the ocean breezes to blow inland again. The temperature has dropped to 80(F) as of 5pm. Monsoon clouds overhead, moving rapidly eastward with the wind. It's probably raining at high altitude; none of the water is reaching the ground, but the cooling effect is wonderful. We hope the weather will be back to normal soon!