Author name: ozweaver

After a winter of dreaming about weaving, it was hard not to get right down to it when I returned home.  During the 8 weeks of waiting for surgery, then recovering and waiting for the pathology reports I distracted myself with knitting.  Last week I finished the warping process and got down to weaving!  Boy, it feels great!

Some weavers have asked for more info on this project, so here it is.  The warp and weft are two entirely different colorways of Just Our Yarn “Almaza,” which is an 8/2 tencel thread.  One colorway is a bit on the cool side, with blues and purples, jazzed up with a bit of acid green and soft roses.  This is my warp.

The weft is a rather bright analogous colorway of watermelon, coral, pale peach, and cream that is very slightly yellow.  It looks like candy.  It’s NOT a colorway I would ever buy on purpose!  And yet I did, at the suggestion of Cathie and Diane from JOY.

Here is a bit of plain weave showing the color interactions.

The weave structure and the two very different colorways are creating an amazing fabric!

I planned the fabric at 35 ends per inch to weave a fabric with enough body for a garment.  If I were weaving a scarf I would have used fewer ends per inch.  My weave structure is a blend of plain weave with lace floats in the warp and weft.  I am using one of the designs in the book Sixty Scarves for 60 Years that the Greater Baltimore Weaving Guild published a few years ago.  The name of this pattern is “Raku” by Carol Bodin.  I am sorry to learn that this book is now out of print.  Time to consult your guild library!

Carol Bodin describes this structure as a lace overshot.  I can’t follow that.  To me it seems like a lace structure with advancing lace modules of 1-2-1, 2-3-2, 3-4-3, 4-5-4…etc with a plain weave structure surrounding the lace elements.  Make sense??

I put the basic weave structure into my PCW program which I wrote about here.  Then I had to make the BIG decisions.  The pattern moves across the warp in one direction only.  Did I want that or did I want a mirrored repeat at the halfway point across the warp?  Did I want to mirror every pattern repeat?  After sampling these ideas in PCW, I decided to leave the structure in its simplest form.  Mirroring every repeat made a very busy fabric that looked like a headache waiting to happen!

The width I have on the loom is 16″ which means I’ll be using two lengths of fabric for fronts and backs.  I can mirror the weave structure when I put the garment together.  To make any mirrored design elements in the fabric would have made the overall design too fussy.

This is less fussy:

I’ve woven 3 1/2 yards of the lace structure, and now I think I’ll switch to plain weave for the next 2 1/2 yards.  This way I’ll have some complex fabric for the body of a jacket and some plain weave for front bands and sleeves.  It would have been so smart of me to choose a garment pattern before I began to weave, but that’s just not the case.  This is a case of wanting to weave the fabric and the devil make care what it becomes!

When I’m not weaving I’m enjoying the garden.  August is almost here, and the heat is starting to build.

I’ve had a couple of wonderful experiences that have inspired my weaving ideas lately.  More on that next time!

Area 4 of the Connecticut Guild of Handweavers is setting up a monumental weaving display in Old Lyme, at the Historical Society on Lyme Street.  This location is the old grange building.

One of our members, Stephanie, has temporarily brought a large Clements loom to the building in order to demonstrate weaving traditional coverlets for the next few months or longer.  It is a behemoth of a loom, with a 9-foot weaving width!  It takes four people to weave:  two people sit on the bench and coordinate working the two sets of treadles, while another two people have to stand at the sides of the loom to throw the shuttle, catch it, and send it back.  This will be a challenging exercise in team work!  I can’t wait to try it!

Right now we are winding a 9-ft. wide sectional warp of moderately fine cotton.  We have 54  2″ sections to wind.

As you can see, it takes a few of use to beam the warp as well.  It will certainly be a project that involves all of us helping out in various ways.  Several members plan to weave coverlets for themselves, and the rest of us will be needed to stand in as the team of four weavers.

Jody got a photo of me at the other end of the loom.  The loom is on a stage so there is terrific lighting.

We are meeting on Tuesdays and Saturdays to work on this, and we plan to be weaving the first coverlet by the last week in July.  If you are in the area, stop by on one of those two days!

Meanwhile, at home, I have been working on an old Torchon lace project from a few years back.  I cut off about a yard of this lace a couple of years ago to embellish a linen tank top.  It’s a small lace edging that would be perfect on a baby garment. With the baby arriving in December, I need to churn out this lace, especially if I’m also making the garment to go with the it!

This has led me to time how long it takes me to make this little lace edging.  Two repeats of the pattern is one inch long.  I can do two repeats in about 25 minutes, give or take.  Hmmm… that amount of time sounded pretty discouraging to me until I then calculated that one yard of this edging would take about 15 hours to weave.  That sounds much better to me.  I’ve been working on it a couple of hours a day since Saturday at my monthly lace meeting.

When I cut it off for my linen top a few years back I only left about four inches attached to the pillow.  Today I measured it and found that my efforts here and there over the past few days have advanced the edging to 20″!!  That should mean that I have less than eight hours to go!

Last Friday, when I attended Kathi Spangler’s funeral mass, I met three very intriguing women in Kathi’s life:  her daughter, her sister, and her mother.  I was moved by how much they looked like her, how much of her I could feel emanating from each of them.  It was quite comforting to know how she lives on in each of her close relatives.  Of course she lives on in each of us, but it shows in her female relatives because you can see Kathi looking out from their eyes–young Kathi in her daughter’s eyes, a very familiar Kathi in her sister’s, and the Kathi we will never get to know in her mother’s eyes.  These three women were wearing scarves Kathi  had made for each of them, and the women of our guild had a good showing of Kathi-inspired ‘surprise’ scarves.  It was a moving celebration.

One day last week, two friends stopped by my house for a bit.  Jody returned my little container of limpet shells that I collected in the Bahamas, and we spread them out on the kitchen island to pick out a few buttons for the first baby sweater I’ve knitted.  Here they are!

The little limpets on the bonnet will be used to attach a ribbon on each side for tying.  I just need to find a good color of cream …or maybe one of the warm colors in the limpets…for the ribbon.

In my studio I have some yarns that Kathi shared with me that are waiting to become fabric.  I will enjoy thinking of her as I dress the loom and weave.  Right now I’m struggling to thread the pattern and wondering what has happened to my brain.  I’m making a LOT of mistakes in what should be a simple huck threading.  I’m hoping its just a temporary residual effect of anasthesia and not that I’m truly becoming feathery…

Regret is an emotion I try not to nurture, but I almost named this post ‘regret’ — I’m fighting the urge to give into it.  I got the shocking news last night that one of my local area weaving friends died…. unexpectedly to me.  I did not even know she was sick.

Some of you know that I am a relative newcomer to this area, so I haven’t known the local weavers here for very long.  Some of them have been so generous in including me in local events and welcoming me into their magical circle of friendship.  Kathi has been that kind of friend to me.  In the small amount of time I have lived here, only four short partial years, Kathi has been a good friend, and I have seen first hand what a marvelous weaver she was.

In this photo she is wearing one of her handwoven scarves, which reminds me how she loved jewel tone colors like what she is wearing here.

When Convergence was in Rhode Island, in 2014, she was in charge of setting up an exhibit that would greet visitors who entered one of the sites off the conference grounds.  It was the entrance to a building downtown Providence that, I believe, is part of URI.  The exhibit on display within the building was ATA’s small format tapestries, and all the windows at the entrance to this building were filled with various kinds of weaving done by Rhode Island guild members.  It was a visual feast and it let you know immediately that you had arrived at the right location.  It was a grassroots effort to get more weaving in public spaces, and it was beautiful.

One day last fall Kathi invited me to meet her in Rhode Island, where she lived.  We met for lunch and then she took me on tour of URI’s textile department at the Kingstown campus.  First she showed me the exhibit on display in the gallery, called “These are a Few of My Favorite Things,” which was a lavish collection of pieces chosen by the staff and the curator, Margaret Ordonez.

I hope Kathi realized how much I loved this entire experience.  The exhibit included so many amazing textiles from the past several centuries that included handwork from many cultures.  We met Norma Smayda there who was visiting with a few of her students.  When Kathi introduced to me Ms. Ordonez, we were treated to a tour of some of the textiles currently being restored by students and also took a look at some of the classrooms.  Boy, if I could do it again, I’d be a textile student at URI!

Kathi did a lot of work for the Connecticut state guild, and this is something I can barely record since she was involved long before I ever moved here.  While I have lived here she was the head of a committee to grant scholarships for weavers to attend various conferences around the country.

Last fall our local group had a long weekend workshop with Sarah Fortin.  We all brought handwoven yardage that we then assembled into jackets based on patterns that Sarah had developed over the years.  Kathi’s jacket was one of the most interesting.  She had woven a variety of twills on one warp using neutral creams, greys and blues.  Because she had changed her treadling throughout the yardage, she had quite an interesting mix of pieces to go into her jacket.  I kept hoping I’d see her wear it one day.  I never saw it finished.

My local weaving group remembers Kathi for her easy going attitude and terrific sense of humor toward trying new techniques.  I was lucky to take two workshops led by Kathi where we made what she termed “Surprise Scaves.”  For these workshops Kathi brought a rainbow of ProChem MX dyes in little squirt bottles, a large pot black acid dye, and a pot of dye discharge.

The process she taught was folding silk chameuse scarves (dry!) in shibori style manner, and binding the folds with rubber bands.  We then used the squirt bottles to apply color to our folded scarves. We set the color on our dry scarves with vinegar from another squirt bottle  After that we put our folded scarves in the hot black acid pot.  Then we took off the rubber bands and readjusted them in a random way and dunked our scarves in the exhaust bath.  After removing and cooling a bit we undid our little bundles and everyone had a stunning scarf!  It was completely unpredictable and yet also magical!  I participated twice in this workshop, but but the time I joined this group this was already a popular workshop, so the group does it almost every summer.  In fact, we plan to do one in the near future in remembrance of Kathi.

This is not a great representation of her ‘Surprise Scarf’ technique.  I was looking for a photo of all of us happily squirting dye while scarves were drying on the racks, ruffling in the breeze….alas.  Maybe someone from the group will send me a photo.  Meanwhile:

I know that Kathi was very active in both guilds in Rhode Island and Connecticut, so many of those members have far more memories of her than I do.  I regret that I will not get to know Kathi  longer.  She was one of my favorite friends, however new our friendship was, and she was also one of the most creative and experienced weavers I have known.  I am trying to focus on how lucky I am to have gotten to know her, however briefly.  Her funeral is Friday, and I intend to wear a surprise scarf to the service.