Moonlight Over the Pacific Shawl and a Quick Fix

I am thrilled to be black in my blog after months of being locked out. I wrote this post early last summer, but could not post it until now, when all of a sudden WordPress let me know that I had comments to respond to! I had to jump through some hoops to validate myself, and I may need to go through the same hoops after I close the site, but right now I am just pleased to be able to post again.

While playing with Little Flowers novelty yarn in a few scarves last spring, my idea took shape for a shawl to enter in the Hui show Surrounded by Water, which was scheduled for summer 2023, while we would be in Michigan. I decided to use several shades of aqua and teal 8/2 tencel from my stash for the warp, with two balls of Little Flowers in similar colors with glints of gold, and the same yarns for the weft. Little Flowers has been discontinued, so I am carefully using up the balls my stash. I arranged the colors so the lightest aqua area was in the center, with greyed teal next, and dark teal as the outside border. I also planned to start and finish the shawl with a band of the dark teal at each end.

When I initially measured out the warp, I forgot to calculate the width to check how wide it would be. After I had sleyed the reed, I realized it was not as wide was I wanted. Oops. I did not want to make the dark teal border any wider. Fortunately, I had plenty more of the greyed teal and my new trick of using folded and pinned paper strips to secure the cross made it relatively easy to add two more inches to each side. (I will do another post about this later, but this is what it looks like during warping.)

The photo shows the yarns sleyed in the reed, looking down over the black cover on the loom bench and the loom treadles below. I sleyed the Little Flowers yarn in the reed with the tencel, but it is in separate bundles with papers pinned to hold the cross.

I just had to pull out the dark teal that I had sleyed in the reed on the outside edges of both sides, carefully move the dark teal bouts to make room to insert the new bouts of greyed teal onto the lease sticks, put the dark teal border sections back onto the lease sticks,  and then sley the new sections and the dark teal. The papers kept the threads firmly in place so it was easy to handle the groups of threads. A bonus is that after I cut the warp bundles and took off the papers on the cut side, the remaining papers also slid down the warp bundles as I beamed the warp, simplifying the process of keeping the bundles in order.

This photo shows the bouts of yarn sleyed through the reed, threaded through the heddles, and attached to the back beam (out of sight), this time shown from the front of the loom with the bouts of yarn stretched out ready to beam onto the back beam. You can also see my plastic bag taped to the beater to hold the plastic and elastic hair ties that I use to bind the bouts of yarn before I take them off the warping board. In this photo the extra bouts of greyed teal warp have been added to both sides, and the dark teal borders have been replaced outside of them after the warp has been widened. In this photo you can also see that the Little Flowers bundles are held in separate “lease sticks” made of two flat shuttles and bound together with painter’s tape, resting on top of the main warp in its longer lease sticks, which are elevated above the breast beam with two plastic bobbins so the threads can move easily through the loom.

The weaving went smoothly. I basically followed the warp sequence, and wove about the same amount of weft for each corresponding area of warp color, which I could “eyeball square” as I wove, instead of trying to measure things precisely.  Since the shawl was much longer than it was wide, I had to repeat the sequence. I first reversed the sequence, and the did the whole thing again. I thought the result resembled the way the ocean color varies in patches, and the glints of gold in the Little Flowers added to the effect, so I called the piece Moon over the Pacific.

This photo shows a section of the finished shawl, with the twisted fringe combining the tencel and Little Flowers at the far left. From left, there is a dark teal section, which crosses the dark teal warp to make a square border, followed by a wider section of grayed teal, and then a double width section of light aqua, followed by the reverse of each color to the next band of dark teal at the right. the Little Flowers are woven it, but the tufts of the flowers stick out on both sides of the fabric.

I managed to finish the weaving and take it off the loom but then I had to pack up and leave for Michigan. After getting settled at the lake, I did the finishing, registered for the show, and then packed up the shawl and one of the two yellow scarves with little Flowers that I had made before I left, and mailed them off. They arrived safely and my friend Liz Train is going to pick them up if they are not selected into the show.

This is the finished yellow tencel scarf on our picnic table at the lake, with the tufts of Little Flowers sticking up in red, orange and lavender. Because the theme of the show was Surrounded by Water, I called the scarf something about the beach at the edge of the water.

Postscript: both the Moon over the Pacific shawl and the yellow scarf were juried into the show.  They didn’t win any awards and weren’t sold, so I am happily wearing the shawl and may either sell or give away the scarf to someone who wears those colors.

Playing with Little Flowers I

Just got back into this site again after a long hiatus, and also discovered that this post was not actually posted, so I am going to do it now.

My hairdresser, who buys a lot of my scarves, asked me to make a black one. I could not imagine doing a solid black scarf so negotiated that it would have little dots of color in it. I weave scarves in either 8/2 tencel or 20/2 silk. Decided to do this one in Tencel, which sells for less than silk.

I warped the loom at 24 epi for 2/2 twill. There was a bunch of novelty yarn in my stash, and I found a partial ball of Little Flowers novelty yarn in a variegated red, enough for 16 ends, so I put 8 ends on each side, spaced randomly. Photo below shows those ends on two flat shuttles taped as lease sticks to be threaded into the same dents as the black Tencel. Photograph is looking down at the front of the loom, with the reed on the left, the lease sticks taped to the front beam on the right with the black warp on them. I have made a short approximation of lease sticks with two flat shuttles taped with blue tape. This holds the Little Flowers threads that sit above the black warp. This makeshift gadget was not attached to the loom like the main lease sticks holding the black warp, but in the photo is resting on the shuttle race.

Extra lease sticks added to control the Little Flowers for warping

After I threaded the black warp, I set up my gadget to hold the Little Flowers, which initially was located above the main lease sticks so I could decide where to insert each Little Flowers end through the reed. Then I went to the back of the loom to thread the heddles, at which point I decided which of the two threads in one dent of the reed to add the Little Flowers thread to.

At both the front and back of the loom, I use loops of linen cord to attach the groups of threads to the front and back metal rods, rather than doing a traditional tie-on with the main thread. This saves more of the valuable yarns for the actual weaving. Once each bout of threads was tied together and they were secured to the back beam with a loop in the linen cord, it was ready to beam on. Threading took a long time because the black warp threads were hard to see, and then I had to be careful to keep the novelty threads separate when winding on.

The Little Flowers twist randomly as you weave and show up on both sides of the scarf. And of course they also show up in the twisted fringe. The client was pleased with the result, as was I. Here is the first finished scarf, delivered in time for her upcoming trip.( I always put two scarves on a warp, but had to cut this one off to meet her deadline.) I had forgotten to take a picture, so took this photo in the beauty shop, on the tissue paper. The ridge in the middle is just where the scarf was folded. You can’t see it very well in the photo, but this scarf also has my trademark of teardrop beads tied into the fringe. Initially, my hairdresser did not like the idea of the beads, but after several more scarves, she said now she loves them.

I still had enough to make the second scarf afterwards, which I have kept for myself. The only problem with this warp is that the random placement of the Little Flowers is different on the two sides. I had divided the Little Flowers into eight threads on each side, but did not pay attention to how I was placing them (it really was random!) and I did not notice until the weaving was well underway that they were more cramped together on the right side and more evenly distributed on the left. I think that is one of those things only the weaver would notice, but is worth paying attention to next time.

Apparently Little Flowers has been discontinued, but I still have several more balls of it in other colors. So I decided to make two more scarves in light yellow Tencel, with Little Flowers in yellow, orange, and red. This time I spaced the Little Flowers more evenly across the width of the scarves. I ended up with two scarves plus two little squares as samples. The photo below shows one of the finished scarves, which I brought to the lake when we flew to Michigan for the summer last week. They already had the fringe twisted, but I had not clipped the ends or done the wet finishing before we left. I wet-finished them last night and did the final pressing this morning, and then laid one scarf out on the picnic table on our deck to photograph it. As you can see, the effect is rather different with the Little Flowers evenly spaced across the width of the warp, but still a bit randomly placed. You can barely see the beads in roughly every third fringe. The teardrop beads often come in variegated colors, so these are yellow with little blobs of red or white in them, which looks like they were made just for these scarves. Sometimes they end up near the top of the fringe, and other times near the bottom, so that, too, is rather random. It is a little hard to see because the fringe also has the tufts of yarn making the Little Flowers. I don’t really like the way the Little Flowers twists into the fringe, but I don’t think it would work to leave them loose and just twist the main warp in the fringe.

We have a juried show this summer and the registration and take-in are in July, so I brought along the yellow scarves and my main entry, which is the culmination of my experiments with Little Flowers. That will be the next blog post because I haven’t even twisted the fringe on that piece yet.

Actually, I just did post what I thought was the post AFTER this one, so pardon the odd order and repetition. Everything has changed since I last used this blog.

A New Granddaughter

I have been locked out of my blog for a long time, but have finally figured out how to get back in. Lots has happened in the meantime. We are now still in partial lock down due to the coronavirus pandemic, which means more time to weave. I am now trying to catch up. I reviewed my file of weaving photos to figure out where to start and found the blanket I wove for my new granddaughter, who is already two and a half.

The summer just before she was born I bought a lot of yarn on the mainland for blankets, forgetting that they have to be very washable. so I couldn’t use them. I ended up weaving her this one. I rarely do pattern weaves, but this one caught my eye and I bought the yarn and the pattern for a dip-dyed baby blanket from Webs. Actually, in a burst of enthusiasm I bought enough yarn to make three using different cotton warp colors and acrylic and cotton weft, but only made the first one, using yellow 6/2 cotton for the warp and weft of Sheepjes Whirl, an acrylic and cotton yarn that comes in a big “cake” with color changes. I learned years ago how to deal with yarns with chromatic color changes: you wind a bobbin, then wind that onto another bobbin. it helps to wind a bunch of bobbins at once, keeping the bobbins in correct order. I wove it on a Gilmore loom at the weaving class at the Honolulu Museum of Art School, where I take the class for the companionship, and to help keep it filled.

Dip-dyed baby blanket

The pattern is a diamond twill. Every time I weave something in a complicated pattern I get started and then remember that I really don’t like to weave complicated patterns! That is why I only wove one of these blankets. This one has relatively simple threading but it changed direction after 12 ends, and then changed back after another 11, so I ended up with one section at the far side that had an extra four threads. Worse yet, there was a 22 pick repeat, which drove me crazy. I made a key to tack onto the loom, but it still took me a long time to understand how the pattern worked and to be able to see when I was making a mistake.

The pattern directions recommended using a temple. I have some but not one wide enough for a baby blanket. Fortunately, I have learned how to make a much easier-to-use temple out of a couple of lengths of thin ribbon tied to S hooks at one end and paper clips at the other. The paper clips hook into both selvedges of the weaving and the ribbons with the S hooks hang over the sides of the loom. That keeps enough tension to prevent the warp from pulling in. It is really easy to move the paper clips every inch or so–so easy that I now use them for nearly everything I weave.

The pattern had interesting directions for finishing the blanket. I first wove 3/4 inch in sewing thread (I bought some in a pale yellow that fit into my regular shuttle) and then a couple of inches of the yellow cotton warp, and did the reverse at the other end. Then when I finished weaving, I just had to zigzag the raw ends on the sewing machine. After I had washed and dried the fabric, I folded over the sewing thread portion as an inner hem and pressed it flat, and then folded the yellow cotton in half to make a plain color border. It made a neat edge quite painlessly.

So I doubt I will ever weave another baby blanket using this frustrating pattern. The extra yarn has been added to my stash. I don’t usually weave with cotton, so I don’t know when the 6/2 cotton will be used unless I violate my longstanding vow never to weave dishtowels. I can probably use the cake of Whirl as warp in a light shawl with a fine mohair and silk weft. I have already made a couple of such shawls using similar cakes of chromatic yarn as warp. That is actually easier than using it as weft because you don’t have to worry about double-winding the bobbins. They are light enough to wear in Hawaii.

Designing (and Redesigning) at the loom

I have been super busy and after going to Convergence (the big weaving convention) last summer, I did not have time to weave until early November. That was partly because the fall weaving class filled up before I could apply, but I really would not have been able to attend every week anyway, because of trips to Prague in September and Japan in October. I  missed entering two local shows, but still had time to put some things into the Honolulu Museum School of Art Holiday Sale. My inventory was pretty low, so I wanted to make a couple of new scarves to include.

These are the yarns I found for the scarf: the skein at the bottom is what was left after I did the warp. The two large cones are 20/2 Japanese silk, and the small spool is polyester and nylon thread from Giovanna Imperia.

I started poking around my studio and found one skein of lovely hand-dyed silk that had lost its tag. I remembered that I had bought it at the Castle Farms Fiber Show a couple of years ago, and that it came from Canada. It was in soft shades of yellow, pink, and a light coral that was a blend of the two. It was thicker than the 20/2 silk I have been using recently. It wrapped at 8 or 9 epi, so since I wanted to do it in twill, I set it at 12 epi. The skein measured 52 inches around. I set the warp length at 104 inches going one way around my warping board to try to keep the color sequences and measured 96 ends plus two longer ends for floating selvedges. For weft,  I found cones of 20/2 silk in pink and coral, and some very fine iridescent thread from Japan in a similar color that I had bought at the Giovanna Imperia booth at Convergence. I bought it in several colors because there were sample scarves on display in which it was used with a spaced warp, creating beautiful bands of the iridescent weft threads. I also found a sampler from an old workshop that had a similar spaced warp and a small section of very fine metallic thread, so I was ready to experiment.

I threaded the silk warp 2 ends per dent in a 6 dent reed, leaving some two dent spaces at two inch intervals. I first tried using the iridescent thread along with one of 20/2 silk. After a couple of inches of twill I could see that it wouldn’t work. The spaces were not big enough, and the 20/2 silk was obscuring the fine iridescent threads. Since I had plenty of all the weft yarns, but didn’t really have enough extra warp for experimentation, I cut through the weft in the spaces, and pulled it all out. I thought I would try fewer but wider spaces, so I re-threaded quickly and tried again, this time with just the fine iridescent thread as weft. After an inch or so I remembered that the sample scarves at Giovanna Imperia were at least 20/2 silk if not finer, and they were also plain weave! With twill and a much thicker warp, the warp threads at the edges of the spaces were sliding into the spaces and it just did not work as I had imagined. I cut the weft through the spaces once again, and pulled it all out. Re-threaded once more produced an 8 inch wide warp with no spacing. That was still plenty wide for a silk scarf.

Close-up of my rosy dawn twill scarf, showing the border.

Using two bobbins of 20/2 silk, one of pink and one of coral in my double bobbin shuttle turned out to be just right for a 2/2 twill if I kept the beat gentle. The color changes in the warp were subtle; they appeared as faint, shifting stripes that do not show up in the photo. Because it seemed a bit plain, I added a couple of very narrow stripes of pale yellow Debby Bliss Pure Silk at both ends. This discontinued Debby Bliss knitting yarn is soft and thicker than the main weft, so the weft stripe stands out and I only needed three rows of it for each of the two stripes. The scarf wove up quickly and I cut it off the loom, leaving just enough extra warp to tie on a new warp at the same sett. Calling it Rosy Dawn, I finished the scarf with some matching beads in the twisted fringe just in time for the first take-in day for the sale.

The finished rose-lavender silk scarf. The fringe shows the colors of the rose warp, which is balanced by the lavender weft.

There were two additional take-in days for the sale, so I went back to my stash to look for something else that I could tie on. I found a larger skein of hand-dyed silk in shades of rose that was a similar weight, though it wrapped at about 10 epi. I had several cones of 20/2 silk that I thought might work as weft, using two related colors at a time. This time I didn’t bother trying to preserve the color changes in the warp, but I wound off half the skein into a ball so I could wind two threads at a time to measure off a 5 and a half yard warp. I just barely made it, with 96 threads but no extras for the floating selvedges. I tied it onto the old warp and beamed it on fairly quickly.

This time when I started to weave I discovered that the new warp was indeed finer than the first one, and 12 epi was too loose. I still wanted to do the scarf in twill for better drape. After some quick calculations, I rethreaded it 2-3-2-3 in my 6 dent reed, or 15 epi. That was perfect but was now just 7 inches wide. However, now the doubled 20/2 silk was a little too flimsy for the weft. I checked my stash of Debby Bliss Pure Silk, a discontinued loosely spun silk knitting yarn that I had bought up at several knitting stores on the mainland when it was being closed out. There were several small skeins of

lavender that turned out to be a nice contrast with the rose warp. Used singly, it was just the right weight for weft. I added floating selvedges of pink 20/2 silk that completely disappeared as I wove. By the time I finished the first scarf for the sale, I liked it so much that I decided to make the second one just like it for myself. I finished weaving both scarves and cut them off the warp, leaving enough to make something small with what was left.

This aqua mohair, silk and wool shawl is around the corner from my scarves

I’m glad I went to the extra effort to put both old and new pieces into the sale, even though I only had ten pieces in total. At the opening I was surprised to discover that mine were the only weavings in a sea of fused glass, jewelry, ceramics, and turned wood. Fortunately, fiber arts were also represented with a lot of hand-dyed silk scarves and a few baskets.

My scarves displayed on a rack. From left to right, aqua silk ikat, Rosy Dawn, white wool with pink dice weave, and a wider silk-wool and mohair scarf with leno bands. The two small pieces at the ends are pieces I wove from leftover warps and turned into “collars”

These small mats were pieces I wove off of leftover warps. They were priced low and were the first pieces to sell.

Weaving a White Wool, Silk, and Mohair Shawl to Order

Just after New Year’s last year my friend Susan Pharr e-mailed to say she was coming to Honolulu and invited me to dinner at Morimoto in Waikiki, which happens to be one of President Obama’s favorite restaurants. We had gone there for dinner once before and it was wonderful. I was still recovering from hip replacement surgery and had just graduated from a walker to a cane, so my husband dropped me off at the restaurant.We ordered the fois gras chawan mushi again along with some other treats. Everything was just as delicious as before .

During the dinner conversation Susan discovered that I weave and expressed interest in having a white or cream shawl made. When I called Bill to pick me up, I asked him to bring my pile of finished shawls so that she could see some shawls of different weights. We sat outside while she looked at them. She preferred the ones I have been weaving with finer wools and lace weight mohair. The next day she e-mailed to say she had read my blog and wanted to order a finer weight shawl in white or cream.

Closeup of Susan’s shawl, showing the subtle cream and white stripes. The shiny ones are single ply silk.

I usually weave in blended colors, so for me the most difficult decision was how to make an all-white shawl. As a starting point I had a full cone of white Jaegerspun Zephyr, a beautiful fine silk and merino wool , but couldn’t imagine weaving the whole shawl just in that one white yarn. I had relatively small amounts of two weights of 100% silk: some shiny pure white Gemstone soft twist singles silk, and  some Henry’s Attic Cascade petite that was more of a cream color. The Zephyr was considerably finer than the silks, so I decided to use it double in the warp. To supplement that array, I ordered a skein of fine wool, silk and cashmere yarn in cream, and several balls of white lace weight silk and kid mohair yarn for the weft.

Then the fun began. I measured out several wide stripes of the Jaegerspun Zephyr, and some narrower stripes  of the cream 2 ply silk and the shiny single ply white silk. At the loom, I played with the arrangement of the stripes and ended up framing the outer cream silk stripes with very narrow bands of  the shiny silk singles. After I had strung the main stripe arrangement on the lease sticks, I randomly added single threads of the cashmere into some of the Zephyr stripes. The cashmere blend was a bit darker than the cream silk, but threading it together with the doubled Zephyr threads kept just subtle traces of it without distinct lines.

Here is the finished shawl, draped over a chair on our lanai.

I wove the shawl in a simple 2-2 twill, using my double bobbin shuttle for the weft of one strand of Zephyr and one strand of the lace weight silk and mohair yarn in each pick. I brushed it very gently with a dog brush as I wove to bring up the mohair, which created a soft halo and blurred the stripes. I wove the shawl about 94 inches long because Susan is fairly tall. After taking it off the loom I realized that I had started and hemstitched the beginning with the shiny silk, but had finished the other end with the Zephyr and mohair! After pondering for a while I decided I liked the Zephyr and mohair better, so I painstakingly picked out the silk hemstitching and two starting rows of silk plain weave, and redid the beginning hemstitching off the loom, to match the Zephyr and mohair I had used at the end. After twisting the fringes, I washed the shawl gently by hand, dried it flat on a towel, and then steam-ironed it using a linen handkerchief as a damp pressing cloth.

Susan in her garden in Cambridge wearing her new shawl draped around her shoulders.

Me modeling Susan’s shawl on our deck in Honolulu.

Bill took a photo of me wearing the shawl before I mailed it off to Susan. After she received it, her husband took a photo of her wearing it. So here it is, worn in two different ways by the two of us, in two gardens at

opposite ends of the United States.

Yarn Shopping in Tokyo (and two Flea Markets)

I am in Tokyo for three weeks of research and of course, a bit of yarn shopping and flea market visiting on the weekends. The first Sunday my yarn and flea market shopping friend Yasuko and I set off for a new flea market in Tachikawa because our favorite at Togo Jinja has closed permanently. There wasn’t much to see, and it was the first time ever that I’ve gone to a flea market and not bought anything.

Our next stop was Yuzawaya yarn store in Kichijoji, which used to be our favorite. Originally this was a really big yarn store right next to the Inokashira line train station, but a few years ago while the station was being renovated they moved to two floors of the Marui department store a few blocks away. We went to Marui, only to discover that Yuzawaya had moved again, this time into permanent quarters in a new building next to the station. I don’t know if it was because of the move, but the selection was not nearly as good as in past years.

Two different blue Leafy washi paper yarns from two different yarn stores. The top one is blues and greens, while the bot

I had an order to fill for a friend in Honolulu, who wanted four skeins of Leafy washi paper yarn in a variegated blue for which she had given me a color number. However, it turns out that Leafy changes color numbers every year, and this number was a couple of years old and sold out. There was a new blue and green one, so I bought four skeins of that. That was the only thing I found of interest at Yuzawaya in Kichijoji.

We then moved on to the Okadaya yarn store in Shinjuku, which in the past has not been as good as Yuzawaya. This time, it was better. They had a second blue Leafy, this one with some tan in it. I bought four of those and my friend can take her pick. I will add the other one to my stash, since I often weave with Leafy.

We also discovered a really interesting knitting pattern for a sort of neckpiece-shawl that used three balls of an Italian variegated yarn called Mela Naif, which is 45% cotton, 42% wool and a little polyamide. Yasuko was first buying it to knit summer socks, but then we saw the pattern by Bernd Kestler in a kit. We each decided to buy the yarn for the little shawl, but they didn’t have the color we wanted in the kit. A little negotiation produced a substitution so we were able to buy one kit plus another set of three balls of yarn in a different color combination. That was it for the first Sunday. I had to finish half a sock for my husband before I could start on the neck piece, but fortunately, the smaller needle that I use for the heel and sock bottom was the right size. So soon we were both knitting our neck pieces.

First three triangles of the small shawl, which will have eight when finished. Triangle shaping made with short rows. Design by Bernd Kestler.

The designer calls it a shawl because it does barely cover the shoulders, but he suggests that it can be expanded if you want a real shawl. It is made up of triangles that are produced by the same stitch we use for short row heels, so as soon as we figured that out, we felt very confident. It took me a little while longer to figure out how to read the Japanese knitting pattern, which is very different from a standard American one and has extensive diagrams of the stitches plus some helpful photos on the back to show how to do the required

stitches.

Glass beads with large openings similar to Pandora beads. I’ve turned two on their sides so you can see the mottled pattern that has some lavender in it.

The following Sunday we went in the opposite direction to a new (to us) flea market at Tomioka Hachiman Jingu in Monzen Nakacho. This one was quite large and had lots of interesting things. There weren’t many kimono but we both were entranced by two trays of beads with little picks for picking them up, sort of like eating escargot. I sometimes put beads on scarves and shawls, and after picking around for a while I found eight of the same pattern beads, similar to Pandora beads but a much more reasonable 100 yen (a dollar) per bead. They are too big for scarves, but I bought them thinking they might work for shawls, where I sometimes put in two or three rows of a fatter weft yarn and leave the tails hanging, and then attach beads to the tails. It helps weight the ends of the shawl and adds a nice finishing touch, but requires that I take careful notes to make sure both ends are reasonably similar and that I have enough matching beads. Now that I’ve taken the beads out to photograph them, I think they are probably too heavy to use on the finer weight wool shawls I’ve been weaving recently, but I’ll find some use for them. I also bought a 1950s Japanese movie poster of a film based on some famous early postwar antiwar books, but that’s another story that doesn’t belong in this blog!

Noro Kibou yarn for a Baby Surprise sweater. The yarn is 54% cotton plus wool and silk, so I think it should be hand washable.

After our success at that flea market we went back to Shinjuku for lunch and then discovered that there is a new Yuzawaya on the 11th floor of the Takashimaya department store near the South entrance to Shinjuku station, which has been built up in the last few years. This one had a better selection than the Kichijoji one, and I ended up buying some Noro yarn called Kibou for a Baby Surprise sweater I need to knit this summer. Later we gravitated back to Okadaya, where they had a new stock of Naif Mela with a lot of new colors. I bought another three balls for a second of the Kestler shawls.

Naif Mela yarn for a Kestler shawl in reds, pinks, and grays.

Then today I went to Kichijoji to have lunch with two of my former graduate students, Chris Bondy and Eiko Saeki, who met and married in Hawaii and are now living in Kichijoji with their charming two-year old bilingual son Aiden. After lunch we went for a walk in Kichijoji because they wanted to show me a new weaving shop that is near Avril. The weaving shop is run by a grandson of the founder of Saori weaving. It has a bunch of Saori looms–to my surprise, they even had a very wide regular two harness Saori loom plus a narrower four harness one. They offer one-shot classes with pre-warped looms, but the main offering is similar to a gym: for a monthly membership fee of 10,000 yen (about $100), you can come in and weave as much as you want. To make this feasible, they have a system where at the end of a weaving session you remove your warp from the loom, leaving it threaded and attached to small removable front and back beams. It is then packed into a box for the next time you come. Meanwhile, the loom is available for anyone else to use, with a different reed and beams. (I took some pictures of this shop with my IPhone and can’t get them off until I get back to Honolulu, so those will be added later.)

Two skeins of kasuri (ikat) dyed silk from Avril in Kichijoji.

A few minutes more walking through Kichijoji’s fascinating shopping area and we came to Avril. Although I love to go to Avril, usually I find it too expensive. They actually sell yarn in 10 meter lengths for several hundred yen, which is prohibitively expensive if you are used to buying weaving yarn by the skein or cone! This time I lucked out. They had some lovely hand-dyed silk in skeins of about 90 to 95 grams, at 10 meters per gram, which worked out to about 90 to 95 meters–plenty for a scarf. They were selling for roughly $35 a skein, which I thought was reasonable for such silk. I ended up buying two skeins. I will use them as warp stripes, measuring the warp so the color patterns match up for a kasuri or ikat effect. The yarn feels a little stiff on the skein, but they had a sample scarf that was loosely woven using the yarn for both warp and weft so that it had a plaid effect. I don’t like to do that with these types of yarn, but the good thing was that the finished scarf was very soft and did not have any of the original stiffness.

All in all, I’m happy with my yarn shopping on this trip to Japan. I will be back for a couple of weeks in July, based in Yokohama for a week at a conference, and I had been thinking that would be close to the Kamata branch of Yuzawaya….

Purple Plus Orange Does Not Equal Brown!

It all started with a sale item I couldn’t resist. After I had finished laboring over plaited twill last summer, I wanted to do something fun and familiar. I began with a cruise through the local weaving store in our village, The Yarn Market. (I’m not being quaint. It really is the Village of Beulah!) The owner, Michelle, was away, and someone else was minding the store.

A pile of Elizabeth Lavold Silky Wool with a sale sign immediately caught my eye. I have used it before as warp for shawls. There were several skeins of a bright orange, so I started looking around the store for other things to go with it. The helpful lady minding the store kept showing me browns and tans, which I kept rejecting. Then I spied a Plymouth Yarn superwash merino sock yarn called Happy Feet in a beautiful variegated combination of orange, taupe, maroon and purple. I grabbed it and then started looking for some other yarns in those colors. I found a soft merino, silk and bamboo yarn called Nuna in a quiet purple and an orange-red that was a little darker than the orange silky wool. All of that would work for warp. There wasn’t much mohair, but I found two balls of a soft rust that would work, and I threw in a ball of light purple mohair just in case. On my way to the counter, I also noticed some baby alpaca lace in both purple and maroon that could be used with the mohair.  The woman minding the store was astonished when I put my pile of harmonizing orange and purple yarns on the counter. It was definitely a weaver’s color combination, not a knitter’s.

The orange dominant shawl displayed on a chair on my deck.

As usual, I measured bouts of different yarn combinations for the four yard warp. I combined the orange Silky Wool with the slightly darker orange Nuna, then combined the variegated Happy Feet with the purple Nuna. I added a couple of smaller bouts combining the orange Silky Wool with the Happy Feet. Then I laid out all the warp chains on the loom and started playing. I ended up putting the purple in the center and the orange on the outside, with the orange and Happy Feet making a narrow transition stripe in between. I threaded each yarn individually in an 8 dent reed. To bring the rust colored mohair a little closer to the other colors, I combined it with the maroon baby alpaca lace, and used my double shuttle to weave with both yarns at once.

The mohair was pretty heavy, and in a 2-2 twill it pretty much dominated the purple section, so the receding purple shows up at close range and only appears to shade the orange at a distance.  I was using a light beat with the mohair, but still found that I was eating it up pretty quickly. There would not be enough for the whole shawl, so I started putting in some wide stripes of the light purple mohair, also combined with the maroon baby alpaca lace. Those stripes brought out not only the plain purple, but the variegated Happy Feet. I reversed the twill direction for the purple stripes to make the weaving a bit more interesting.

Since I now weave my mohair shawls about 92-94 inches long, I carefully measured the weft stripes so the two ends would match, writing down the number of inches for each stripe. When I was still well short of the halfway point, I had finished half of the light purple (which I had wound off onto several bobbins so I could divide it in half). There would not be enough rust mohair unless I added something else to the weft. Fortunately, in my small stash at the lake I found most of a skein of a slightly darker purple mohair of similar weight.  I wove a wide stripe of that, then wove the rust mohair to the the midpoint of the shawl, and worked the measurements in reverse to get to the end of the shawl. With two stripes of the darker purple, I had just enough mohair to finish. The purple weft stripes had turned the pattern into a sort of giant plaid, but everything harmonized and I was very pleased with the result.

closeup of mohair embroidery on orange shawl.

As I was laying it out to cut the fringe, I discovered a weaving error in one of the darker purple stripes, where I had inadvertently messed up the twill sequence. There didn’t seem to be any way to repair it by needle-weaving, but then I remembered “surface design.” So after I finished twisting the fringe on long car trip across Michigan, I embroidered a simple three-petal chevron or flower in purple mohair, right over the top of the mistake! I did the same with the other dark purple stripe to balance it.

The shawl is warm because of the thick mohair, but is also quite light because the sett is a bit loose. The overall effect of this shawl is basically orange, with some purple stripes. I had enjoyed weaving these colors so much that I wanted to do another one, this time emphasizing the purple. I went back to the Yarn Market and bought some more of the Nuna and the Happy Feet. I still had plenty of the orange Silky Wool, and I thought I had enough of the baby alpaca lace. All this yarn came home with me at the end of September.

This is the lighter purple dominant shawl.

First I had to finish setting up the AVL Home Loom that my neighbor Helen Friend had given me, which I had transformed into an 8 harness loom with a kit from AVL. The loom had been dismantled to bring it across the street to my house, and after I had all the new harnesses and treadles added, the brake did not seem to be assembled correctly. When I sent a photo of the brake to AVL, the President quickly saw what the problem was and told me how to fix it.

This time I put 6 inch stripes of the purple Nuna and variegated Happy Feet on the outside, and used two 1-inch stripes of Silky Wool and  Happy Feet to separate three 3-inch stripes of orange Silky Wool and darker orange Nuna. I used a 10 epi sett this time in a 10 dent reed, because I would be using lace weight mohair for the weft to make a shawl that could actually be worn on cool evenings in Hawaii. For the weft I used the purple baby alpaca lace and some lovely hand-dyed soft lavender Silk Mist that I had picked up at a Sweet Georgia trunk show at my other favorite yarn shop in northern Michigan, Wool and Honey in the village of Cedar.

This is how the two shawls were displayed in the show.

This shawl was a dream to weave on the AVL loom. I had enough of the mohair this time, but with the tighter sett and closer weave I was worried about running out of the purple baby alpaca lace. At the same time, I was weaving another shawl in the weaving class at Linekona that used the maroon baby alpaca lace, and was also running short of it. Since this is a fairly common knitting yarn made by Plymouth Yarns, I called around the local yarn stores in Honolulu. Sure enough, Sue at my favorite Honolulu yarn store, Isle Knit, had one skein in each of the two colors I needed. Much faster than trying to order them from the Mainland!

The second shawl appears more purple overall, but because the mohair is so much finer the orange sections appear more rose from a distance. And as with the first one, the variegated Happy Feet that brought all of the yarns together livens up the purple areas. This shawl is wonderfully light and airy, but still warm and quite firmly woven. It is definitely my favorite.

I put both shawls into the Handweavers’ Hui fall show as a single color study entitled Purple Plus Orange Does Not Equal Brown!  They hung the purple one on the wall, with the orange one draped over a mannequin in front of it.

Fun Weaving with Fleece

One highlight of my summers in Michigan is the Fiber Fest at Castle Farm near Charlevoix. We don’t have such big exhibitions in Hawaii, so this is a real treat. There are a lot of vendors with sheep farms, and one such vendor, Lavender Fleece Farm, was displaying big, shaggy fleece rugs, using a combination of white and colored fleece. It was a kind of weaving that many people did in the 1970s, but I had not seen anything like it for a long time. The owner generously explained how she did it.

Label for the Leicester Longwool locks.

I had been looking for something to make for my grandaughter, and thought this would be perfect. I bought three pounds of washed white Leicester Longwool fleece and then scoured the rest of the exhibit looking for colored locks. Several vendors had small amounts of dyed locks in purples and related shades and I ended up with both regular fleece and some mohair. I also picked up a couple of skeins of white wool to use as warp. Worried that I might run short, I also bought a ball of fat white roving and another ball of gorgeous hand-dyed roving that had a bit of glitter in it.

My treasure trove of washed Leicester Longwool locks plus plus some small packets of dyed locks, plus white and rose-coral roving with a bit of glitter in it

When I returned to Honolulu last year my big countermarch loom needed repair, so I set up the fleece rug on a loom at the Linekona weaving class. It was a relatively short warp sett at 6 epi, so the warping was quick and easy. I drew a rough cartoon of the design I wanted, using the colored locks to form a loose flower in the center of the rug. At both ends, I added some bands of roving, including a stripe of the colored roving, to balance it and make sure I would have enough fleece for the whole rug.

Then the fun began. Following the vendor’s instructions, I wove about four picks of plain weave and then in the next shed, I laid in locks of the fleece. I could pull the segments of fleece apart easily, to get a small amount of the locks to weave with. It was even easier than rye knots, because they did not have to be looped around warp threads. I just would lay in a bunch of locks across a few warp threads, leaving the ends hanging out. I overlapped them to make sure there was lots of shaggy fleece. It was slower than regular weaving because I was laying in the locks of fleece by hand, but it still went fairly quickly.  When I got to the flower part, I was painting with the different colors of hand-dyed locks, and the mohair and fleece locks mixed in easily. It took me three or four of the weekly classes to finish the rug.

This is Abby’s fleece rug, with the pink and purple flower in the center.

The vendor had told me she did not do any special finishing but that if the rug got dirty I could wash it in cold water. So I just allowed for enough extra warp for the fringe and cut it off the loom (as always, I had hemstitched both ends on the loom). I gave it a twisted fringe to finish both ends.

There was some warp left and I did have some fleece left over, so I wove another strip of the fleece locks, not knowing what I would do with it but not wanting the fun of weaving with the locks to end. That strip ended up being just a few inches wide. I had hemstitched both ends, and I left a couple of inches of warp on both ends, but it was too short for a twisted fringe. .

After I took it off the loom, it looked like a big fuzzy pink centipede, with all those warps on both sides. I decided to turn it into a toy for my granddaughter and sewed in a couple of black yarn eyes.

Pink centipede made out of end of the rug warp. The warp ends made it look like a centipede.

I submitted both the rug and the centipede in the Hawaii Craftsmen Fiber Show, but neither was selected by the juror. At Christmas time I took both to California and gave them to my granddaughter.

This past summer I went to the Castle Farm Fiber Fest again, and was reminded of how much fun it had been to weave the fleece rug. On an impulse, I bought another three pounds of Leicester Longwool locks from the same vendor, and bought more colored locks from two or three other vendors. I have brought this bag of fleece back to Honolulu, but have not yet done anything with it.

Closeup of white locks, purple dyed locks, and the rose-coral roving, ready to be made into another fleece rug.

Adventures in Plaited Twill

I have been intrigued by plaited twill for some time, so I thought it would make a good project for my loom at the lake that was newly upgraded to eight harnesses. I had a skein of purple tencel that I had handpainted in Teresa Ruch’s dyeing workshop.

Purple handpainted tencel warps, dark one on right

Actually it was the result of my ignorance of dyeing fundamentals. In that workshop my first effort was dyeing another long warp length of tencel and bamboo using purples, reds, and blues. I did not know what I was doing, so I ended up putting on way too much dye and it looked almost black. When I asked for help, the response was to get another skein of yarn and sop up the excess dye! So this skein was what I had used to clean up my mess.

My friend Nancy Sack had woven a tencel scarf in the Linekona class using a cone of 8/2 tencel in Eggplant as weft. She kindly lent me the rest of the cone, which matched my handpainted skein nicely. After a bit of research, I used a plaited twill draft that was recently published in Handwoven, but is also found in an much older twill book as well as in Nancy Alderman’s Mastering Weave Structures. It is basically a 3/1 twill, set up so that it produces a “woven” pattern that looks like twill strips have been interlaced in a kind of diamond pattern: that is plaited twill. Because it is a 3/1 twill, one side of the finished product shows the warp yarns, and the other shows the weft.

I soon discovered that weaving plaited twill takes a lot of concentration! Arguably, it takes even more focus than doubleweave herringbone, because there is a 20 pick repeat. My draft had my left foot alternating between  treadles one and two, while in between those two picks my right foot moved across the other eight treadles sequentially and then went back across the sequence. So I had to keep track of which treadle my left foot had just done, and where I was in the right foot sequence. It was all logical and straightforward, but any interruption because of the Tigers baseball game my husband was watching, or the dog coming up to say hello, and I would lose my place. Worse yet, the pattern is so complex that you can’t really see mistakes right away. They only become apparent after you have woven a few more picks and then notice that the diamond pattern is out of line. To make matters even more difficult, the top surface as I was weaving was showing the variegated painted warp, which obscured the plaited twill pattern.

I managed to weave enough of the warp for a scarf, and cut it off so I could tie on another warp to use the same treading and tie-up. As soon as I took it off the loom I could see several mistakes, but it was still a very interesting scarf. My conclusion was that I could not enter it in a show or sell it because of the mistakes, but that I could wear it and use it as a sample.

I tied on a coral variegated commercially dyed 8/2 tencel warp, paired with a solid coral tencel for weft, and ambitiously made it long enough for two scarves. Because this time I really wanted to get it right, I watched carefully for mistakes and went back and unwove them. That was hard to do because the variegated warp obscured the plaited twill pattern.

Plaited diamonds are barely visible with variegated warp as top side of weaving

Alas, after a while that made the edge threads of the variegated tencel start to fray and break! The first couple of times it happened I simply cut off the short piece and re-tyed the warp to get past the frayed part. But it was getting very frustrating. After producing two short lengths and one barely long enough for a real scarf that I thought was perfect, I gave up in frustration and cut off the rest of the warp. I was thoroughly sick of trying to weave plaited twill!

I brought the plaited twill pieces back to Honolulu this fall. The first show of the fall was the Hawaii Craftsmen Show, which usually includes a small amount of weaving. By this time I was getting a bit bolder and I did want to enter some pieces. I reasoned that the juror for the Craftsmen show was not going to be a weaver, and might not even notice the mistakes. So I submitted the purple plaited twill scarf and a couple of other things. The juror picked only the purple plaited twill scarf, apparently because it was hand dyed and he liked the colors.

Purple plaited twill scarf in display case at Hawaii Craftsmen Show 2013, variegated side up.

When I went to the opening I was surprised to find that the purple plaited twill scarf was not hanging loose on the wall, but had been artfully laid out in a closed glass case! Whew! The handpainted warp side was up, obscuring the mistakes, and no weavers could inspect it closely. Imagine my surprise a couple of days later when a weaver who was sitting the show called to tell me that it had been sold! My first reaction was guilt, but then I decided that it was after all craft, not commercial perfection, and I should just be happy that someone liked it enough to buy it.

Right after that show ended it was time to submit items for the Handweavers Hui fall show, called the Joy of Weaving. This time I had some shawls to enter, and what I thought was the “perfect” coral plaited twill scarf.  I thought it could stand up to scrutiny by the experienced weaver who was judging the show (and who happened to have been my own first weaving teacher). As I was turning in the pieces, I noticed to my horror that there was one error in this plaited twill scarf as well. Emboldened by my previous experience, I simply turned it so the mistake was not immediately visible, and submitted all the pieces.

Closeup of coral plaited twill scarf, showing coral and variegated sides and the distinctive plaited twill pattern.

The coral plaited twill scarf was accepted into the show and the exhibit designer, Diana Tusher, folded it artfully so that both sides of the plaited twill were visible, but the error was not. It didn’t sell, but again, nobody noticed that it had a flaw in it.

Meanwhile, I figured out a way to turn one of the shorter pieces of the same coral plaited twill into a cowl. I had already twisted the fringe, so I put a mobius twist into it and hand-sewed the ends together so that there was fringe on either side. It just fits over my head and makes a lovely cowl that shows both sides of the plaited twill. And this one has no mistakes at all!

Some pieces in recent shows in Honolulu

I have been away from this blog for over a year. Busy busy busy, with barely time to weave, let alone blog about it! This will be a quick post to follow up on some of the earlier ones. Then I’ll try to do some new ones with all the weaving I’ve been doing. This is a good time to get back to blogging. I am on sabbatical for the year, and right now I am home recovering from total hip replacement surgery—plus a repair surgery 10 days later.  Since I can’t weave right now, at least I can catch up on blogging about weaving!

Last year I blogged about three double-width herringbone twill blankets in different color ranges that I wove. As planned, I entered all three in the Hawaii Craftsmen Fiber show last fall. I called it Three Color Studies in Herringbone Twill Doubleweave and tied the pile of blankets together with some of the yarns from each one.

Pile of three folded twill blankets in different stripe combinations

I had carefully hand-sewn tapes on the backs so they could be hung, but to my surprise, the judge decided they should be displayed in a pile on a low stand. I was even more surprised to win the award that our Hui had contributed to the show.

proud weaver with pile of blankets

Then at Christmas time I sent the first one (purple and soft green) to my son in Portland and took the second (rusts and beiges) to   daughter in California. I kept the third (blues and greens), which goes beautifully in the living room at our summer cabin. I makes a very cosy throw for a nap, and when the weather gets cold, it really comes in handy.

I also blogged last summer about using paper yarn to make some yardage for a suit jacket with a complicated Fibonacci sequence to do the stripes. Our Handweavers Hui had a first-ever Yardage Show last spring, which was held in the big, open lobby area of a major office building downtown. The area has a very high ceiling,so it was perfect for hanging lengths of handwoven yardage. I submitted the Fibonacci yardage and another piece. During the opening I noticed a teenaged boy inspecting the weaving very closely to see the Fiboonaccci sequences!

The second piece of yardage I submitted was made out of a huge stash of recycled sari  silk yarn that my Nepalese graduate  student had brought back for me the previous summer. I  always like to have some  function  in mind even if the piece is submitted as yardage or a simple hanging. Since recycled sari silk makes terrific placemats, I planned a warp long  enough for ten placemats plus a header  for hanging the yardage.

My two entries in Canvas of the Weaver show. Fibonacci on left, sari silk on right.

I called it “Dinner Party for Ten” and alternated the chenille weft that I use as filler with the sari silk between beige and black. The chenille is also used for the borders between mats that will be folded under as hems when I cut them apart. It worked both as a wall hanging with some color variation and horizontal stripes, and now all I have to do is cut the mats apart and hem them.

Guess I’d better get busy and sew them up as Christmas presents.