Once again I hosted the Scenic Valley Handweaver’s December party at the Oak and Fern Studios. It took a while to tidy up from the various random storing and work going on through the last few months in order to ready the Studio, Fairly Large Room (FLR) and other areas for guests.
This year we put a tree, revealed our new hardwood floors and hung a whole lot more pictures.
Being early December I put the 2 bar gas heater on downstairs and it had the whole area nice and warm well before the guests arrived around midday.
Everyone brought finger food of one sort or another and this year there was a lot more variety after the rather repetitive deviled egg episode of 2023! Food done it was on to the the very brief ‘informal’ meeting which took all of 10 minutes, most of which was me explaining what the 2025 challenge will be – not too many complaints and will post more detail in February when it kicks off. Then the ‘guest challenge’ began – which was modified slightly to be NOT directly associated with weaving, spinning, fiber, equipment, etc – to give partners who may not be fiber people themselves, a better chance at the prize. Guests had to match a question with the number of the piece of art on the wall that contained the answer. It turns out my expectation of ‘this will be easy’ was not quite so!! The winner was Larry with 12 out of the 18.
The gift exchange kicked into action after that and there was a little bit of ‘stealing’ going on, but as the presents were all top notch again most people were happy with their first pick. A bit of intermingling followed and some long goodbyes and we had the place to ourselves again.
Roll on 2025 and a party at some other studio, although I think that is unlikely with this crowd!!
On the upright loom I began another Turkish knotted rug after completing ‘Denim’ last year. This one is called ‘Te Aruhe Kowhaiwhai’. Te Aruhe is ‘the fern’ and Kowhaiwhai is a style of decoration common in Maori meeting houses. It’s my own design and represents the winding fern fronds of our forest home which we call The Oak and Fern. Possibly that means I’ll have to create an acorn pattern for the next one.
Handspun 2 ply cotton woven in tabby on ‘Dot’.
I began learning how to spin cotton a few months back and this woven test is from the first skeins I produced. Lots of ‘character’. I have improved enough that I am now producing a relatively even 3 ply that should weave up more neatly.
Variegated yarn table runner, birds eye twill on ‘George’.
The first table runner from the yarn brought back from NZ is complete. I’ll space out enough for fringes then start number 2. It will be different from this one in that it will have just white yarn in the weft to pick out the birds eye twill a little better.
QR code woven in skip plain weave on ‘Gypsy’.
It’s been slow going on this project as it’s a very manual and intricate process to weave each pick and after I leave it for a while I have to go back and try and remember how to do it to maintain a consistent transition from black to white and reverse.
These are the weaving projects. Next I’ll detail the spinning and will also update the Studio build pages with photos of the progress.
The restoration on the Sears Roebuck Hearthside Loom stalled over winter as I worked through various other projects. But in some unseasonably warm weather today I was able to set up outside and do some sanding.
The heddle frames (6) all need some cleaning, minor repairs, and some replacement parts before the loom can be put back together. I started with one (number 6 as it turns out – some previous owner had marked each with black marker on the unseen ends). I have generally preferred stamping the number into the visible top of the frame and putting matching numbers in the castle to match. Future work once they are cleaned up.
The first problem was the flat stamped heddles were all mixed up direction wise and also in some cases put on the heddle bars intertwined. I took off all the heddles and sorted them into the correct orientation. While they were off I sanded the rust of the heddle bars and put a light coat of CRC on them before putting the heddles back on. This frame had 80 heddles. 3 other frames look about the same amount and 2 don’t have any.
Replacement hookOriginal hook
The heddle frames had two different styles of heddle hooks (and numerous missing). I believe the original were the simple threaded hook with a spring and drilled out dowel. I suspect over time some dowels split or broke and the owner at the time purchased the more modern metal hooks. I ‘borrowed’ some hooks to make up the 4 and in the future will buy replacement metal hooks to standardise. There are 3 heddle bars missing which will need replacing idc. To fit the newer hooks on this frame I had to drill out the small holes with something suitable for the screw part and also drill with a larger drill about 1/8 of an inch to allow for the spring stop to go below the surface of the wood – needed to ensure the hooks were at the correct height for the heddle bar.
The first heddle frame came up OK. It will certainly never rival some of my other looms for looks, but for functionality it will be fine. I’ll wait until just before re-assembly to apply some light oil/wax for protection.
I did sand down some other parts of the frame and will continue with that as I order the heddle bars and hooks.
We are just back from a very pleasant 3 weeks visiting family and friends in New Zealand. While visiting Havelock in the South Island I found a bag of variegated yarn for $10 and thought it might be ideal for a project.
Some of the polyester yarn
As it turns out that happened faster than I thought as our temporary home while in Wellington belonged to our friend Jinnie who has a table loom that was at the time not being used.
For the first time ever I dressed a loom without doing any real calculations first (apart from checking the WPI of the yarn and the dents per inch of the reed in the loom). I wound the warp around the back of two chairs and tied it on to the warp beam and wound it on under light tension ready to warp back to front. With Anne and I working back and front we had it dressed pretty quickly which was good as we had to pack it up the following day so we could drive it and Jinnie up to where she was currently living in Taupo.
After adding some thick weft to even out the warp I threw a few weft picks to ensure everything was working OK and barring one skipped dent there doesn’t seem to be any problems with the straight twill threading. After we left Taupo to return to Wellington Jinnie has continued weaving and some interesting color striping is starting to appear on the cloth.
I encountered a ‘new’ (to me) weaving technique a couple of months back and incorporated it in my entry for the guild challenge which was primarily about color. I wove my color blocks in three different techniques and one was ‘skip plain weave’ a technique often found in rugs which is ‘one sided’, i.e. the back carries floats over multiple warp threads while the front is woven tabby across the width. More on that later.
While working on that project I thought it might be a way to weave a QR code (for Kiwiweave.com) to hang on the wall behind our stall at the 2024 Birchwood Fiber Festival. After much pontificating I finally kicked the project off a few days back and will document it here.
First step was to generate the QR code. A quick google search will show that there are hundreds of web sites that will generate codes for free. You input the URL you require and the webiste generates it in seconds. You then typically download a jpg or png image of the finished product. Try some out. Go for simple, black and white, and don’t add logos.
KiwiWeave.com QR code
Most modern mobile phone cameras will automatically recognize QR codes and pop up the URL which can be clicked on to bring up the web page. My phone didn’t so I loaded a free app that recognizes QR and bar codes and shows you the appropriate information. Useful for checking, at all stages. Using the jpg generated in the first step I then manually drew up the same information on graph paper which I find easier to ‘count’.
Same QR code copied to graph paper.
The sett of the weaving I did for the guild challenge was 10 epi using 8/2 cotton so I duplicated it for this project but calculated the number of ends needed to give a 15 inch QR code with 1.5 inch borders all around. The size of the logo also dictated that 6 warp ends be used in each ‘box’ of the pattern – either black or white and read one line at a time from the bottom up.
Winding the warp took an hour including setting things up then it was a move out to the studio to dress ‘Gypsey’.
The photo’s above (from top left corner – clockwise): The warp wound on to the warp beam. The heddles threaded and reed sleyed. Warp tied on. Floating selvedge weights. Floating selvedges. Warp packed and ready to weave. All of the above took another 6 hours.
The structure is weft predominant and woven in 3/2 pearl cotton. The border is silver/grey and the actual code is obviously black and white. As I had not tried this level of trickyness before I decided a test piece was needed so wove some borders and just one row of squares alternating between black and white. This little bit of weaving took longer than setting up and that was mostly because of the ‘mistakes discovered that had to be ‘unwoven’. The mistakes were largely counting errors as each weft shot (black and white) through the same shed needs to go over three under three. I wove this with the pattern to the top and the floats to the bottom which slows things down and easily lends itself to miscounting – on the real QR code I will flip this upside down as it should be easier to count and manipulate the top part of the shed. The other mistakes were twisting either the grey or white with the black or any other combinations which then did not sit flat or neatly with the rest of the color transitions. The test piece has at least allowed me to work out a sequence where this doesn’t occur.
The whole 25 squaresClose up
Even with meticulous checking there are two errors in the left photo where a weft shot goes over one more warp thread than it should, but this doesn’t show too much and I suspect would not interfere with the camera imaging and working out the URL. I used small plastic shuttles as they have a long thin ‘nose’, next I’m going to find some stick shuttles and see if they make the manipulating of warp threads easier.
The guild already think I’m crazy after tackling the hand tied Turkish knot rug because of how slow it was. I suspect the meeting program where I present this method will only reinforce my craziness. ‘Nothing like a challenge’ I say!!
May was the month for our (a small group of Fiber Artists – mostly from our Weaving Guild) inaugural Fiber Festival. Over a year in the planning and perceived to be a replacement in our region for the now significantly changed Townsend event. I had put my name down to be Vendor Chair (after the years I had done this for the Smokey Mountain Fiber Arts Festival) and we also had several other ‘veterans’ on the board.
Initially we did not think we would have a lot of interest from vendors, but we chose the weekend to not clash too badly with any rival festivals. The Maryland Sheep and Wool was on, but that’s way out of our ‘local’ league. We also had to consider Instructors to run interesting courses as the whole package needed to be attractive to the public who we needed to turn up in their hundreds it was all to work.
Our venue was the Birchwood Community Center (where we hold our monthly guild meetings. We know the folk who manage the place and they were super supportive in our planning and as a bonus they would supply all day food from the (ex-school) cafeteria. It is how they make their little bit of profit for their group. They also hold the Sandhill Crane Festival in January each year a very well attended Festival that has been running for many years
Through lots of planning meetings we agreed on strategies to promote and attract Vendors, Instructors, and the public. This included social media (www.birchwoodfiberfestival.com primarily), mail-outs to guilds and fiber related shops, setting up demonstrations at other fesitvals, TV appearances, and as much ‘sharing’ as we could encourage. Things came together slowly and we ended up with a completely full vendor hall, a good variety of courses on offer and quite a bit of interest gathered from our various appearances.
For the actual festival we started the set up on the Thursday, had Vendors arrive to set up on the Friday and much setting up of classrooms based on what the actual lessons would be. The vendor hall (my part of ship) was the gymnasium which meant a relative easy job setting out the spaces. We had decided that we wanted to have at least 8 foot aisles which allow better two way traffic and hence a traffic flow that goes up and back rather than just a quick one way look around.
The photo’s from top left, clockwise are: the gymnasium (tape marks on floor for vendor spaces), vendor spaces filling on Friday, the next three are the Festival about to open on Saturday morning.
We had good crowds on Saturday and less on Sunday, but a lot of people went out the door with shopping bags which apparently was enough for all but two of our vendors saying they want to come back for 2024. Anne I did well with our towels and Para-tassels and will actually have a booth for 2024, so I had better get going on some stock!
With the wedding coming up in mid-April it was a case of rush rush rush to finish the previous tartan so that this one could be put on the loom and woven with time to spare. As it turned out we were well ahead of the game as it was slightly smaller than the last one and that made it far easier and faster to weave.
The colors were chosen and the warp wound.
The warp was tied on to the previous warp and pulled through the reed then heddles. Not the fastest process, but it went smoothly. After tying on to the front apron weaving was underway in just a little over two days (of part time work).
Weaving the Weddint Throw on ‘Big Mac’
It took three days (once again part time) to finish the weaving – it would have been quicker but an unexpected snag turned up. The knots, from tying on to previous warp, had little ‘tails’ and when a group of them came forward in the last pattern run of the throw they would tangle (behind the reed) and stop a clean shed opening! The solution was to spend half a day snipping the ends off. All that to finish the last 5 inches! Lesson learned. I cut the throw off, tied up the end edge fringes, trimmed them then gave it a delicate wash and tumble dry. Finally I combed out the fringes with a hair brush and it is now all ready to wrap up and post off to New York.
Finished Custom Tartan Wedding Throw
The next project is a run of 20+ cotton towels ready for the May Birchwood Fiber Festival. Always good to have a deadline!
The weaving of the Brown tartan finished a little while back, but I kept the finished throw on the loom as we were visited by my sister-in-law and her husband (the new owners of the throw) and I thought it might be nice for them to actually see it on the loom. They were very pleased with how it came out. We’ll now take it off the loom and finish tying up the fringes on either end then wet finish it. Delivery will be next time we visit their Lookout Mountain home some time soon.
Brown tartan on the loom with yarn for the next tartan.
To save just a little time I will cut of the current tartan and leave the remaining warp threaded through the heddles and reed. I am currently winding the warp for the next tartan – a custom design for Anne’s niece and her fiance as a wedding present in April. By tying on to the threaded warp I can slight speed up the process of threading through both the heddles and reed. I have done this before and while it seems like it would be a real time saver – by the time you tie on every warp thread (or almost all – this throw is slightly smaller) it is quicker but not hugely. I think it might be one or two less steps that could introduce threading errors, which is a good thing.
A fairly simple tartan design but it does look good (on the software)
In between tartans I was working on the 2023 Scenic Valley Handweavers guild challenge which is to take analogous colors from a color wheel and also using black; highlight those colors. I was able to find three colors amongst my stash and decided not only to weave them somehow but also to, on the same warp, repeat the pattern three times using three different weaving techniques. A challenge on top of a challenge as it were!
The colors are from a very simple primary and secondary color wheel and are red, orange and yellow. The first technique was completely new to me and is called ‘skip plain weave’. Often seen in rugs (Central Asian), but also European and Southern American woven pieces. It is one sided as the ‘alternate’ colors float across the back behind the weft faced ‘front’. I have begun the second technique which is Turkish knot pile weaving. When I finish, the blocks will have the pile trimmed quite short. The final technique will be tapestry weaving. The warp is 8/2 cotton, the skip plain weave is 3/2 pearl cotton (left over from tartans) and the pile and tapestry are an acrylic knitting yarn left over from the ‘Four Horsemen’ blanket project. I will then mount and frame the whole thing, tentatively called ‘Blocks of Sunrise & Sunset’, before the deadline in June.
Dressing ‘Gypsey’Skip plain weaveStarting the pile weaving
This project will take a pause while I push through the ‘Wedding Tartan’, but should be ready by the reveal date.
After a week of winding warp (an hour or so a day – then on to studio build work) I had all the warp wound and all ready to go on the loom and there it sat, draped over the breast beam of ‘Big Mac’ waiting for action but I became fairly focused on getting the wiring in the studio ready for final inspection.
Nearly a month later I had everything done and arranged for the inspection which went perfectly smoothly, despite all my worries of tiny things that I thought might derail it! So now we have a fresh blue sticker on our meter box signing off the final inspection. Needless to say it has been a frustrating (at times) process and incurred some more expense (not on the wiring side) than planned, but regardless it is nice to see all the light fittings (bought at bargain prices from Lowes where Anne works) in place and working and being able to plug ‘things’ in wherever I like! We raised a glass of bubbly in celebration then I did an immediate pivot to get back to the tartan.
The dressing has been relatively quick and was threaded front to back. I now just have to tie on to the warp beam, wind it through and tie to the cloth beam – I hope to be weaving over the weekend.
The first task for the new year is (apart from committing to actually post regularly) is to start documenting the latest custom tartan. As you may already know I have designed and woven numerous tartans for friends and family over the last 5 or so years. All starting with our own custom ‘Prentice’ tartan – using colors from the Prentice family crest.
Prentice Tartan throws in pearl cotton
I’ve woven this tartan in handspun/dyed, as well at the above in pearl cotton. Other tartans in cotton as well. The throws seem most popular.
The new project is a tartan throw for my sister-in-law and her husband. They recently bought a ‘mountain’ retreat on Lookout Mountain in Northern Georgia with magnificent views out over GA and AL. As a house warming present I promised a throw and quickly set to work designing/modifying a tartan for their new home. Based originally on the Ralston USA Tartan but modified to include a color for their surname (Brown), I was able to come up with a workable design which they liked.
I matched the colors with the 3/2 pearl cotton available for Yarn Barn of Kansas and they, as usual, delivered quickly. I’ve been heavily involved in the later stages of the studio build for the last year and have just passed the all essential 1st and 2nd electrical inspections and can have power connected at last although as it has often been the case this has proven more complicated that I’d like, with the need for a septic certificate needing to be on file before the power company can connect me. So a slight delay as the local septic inspector is on holiday over the Christmas break – meaning we have a large hole in the back yard until after the 9th! Regardless I can get on with the studio dry walling etc in the meantime. Despite those delays I wanted to see how the colors would work in the tartan so wound on one complete pattern.
One single tartan pattern wound onOne pattern wound on.
With the sett for 3/2 cotton in 2/2 twill being 12 epi the throw will be approximately 4′ x 6′ – adequate for the back of a couch or a comfortable chair. I still have to finish winding on the patterns as well as free up some space to dress the loom as the actual studio still has scaffolding in the center of the room. This was needed to fit the overhead fan while still leaving room for the inspector to see all of the in wall wiring. I’m sure with some careful shuffling I can achieve both.
