Recently in Weaving Category

If you haven't already heard it from me and you hadn't already guessed from my last post that something was up, I'm moving house.  I've got a job in Sydney that starts next Monday, so I leave tomorrow.  However, my belongings won't be moving until the school holidays - I have to find somewhere to live in Sydney (no easy task at the moment!).  So far I have about half of my things packed, with the rest to be done over Easter.  Until then I'm staying with my brother, Tim, and Jenny B.  I'm very happy about the job (at "a school in Sydney" - that's all the detail you're getting) and I'll be even happier when I've secured somewhere to live!

Sadly, it meant the weaving project I was working on with the handspun silk had to come off the loom.  It wasn't going anywhere because I still wasn't really happy with the warp, and had realised I'd had the perfect yarn for the warp in my stash the whole time (duh!).  So once I've moved and settled in, I'll make another attempt at that project.  And there's a definite positive in having an income again - I can continue to support my fibre and book buying habits!



Here's the coloured merino I mentioned in the last post.  I've also started spinning a little bit of the silk hankies for variety.  The spinning wheel is coming with me to Sydney tomorrow.



And here's the current sock - nearly at the toe.  You may notice I'm not using my bamboo dpns - I had to go up to 2.75 mm needles with this yarn as it's just a smidge thicker than the sock yarns I usually use, and I don't have that size in bamboo.

Last, but not least, good timing has seen me finally finish the web site I have been working on since January for the local yarn shop, WOW Wool on Wheels.

Some appalling length of time has passed since I last warped up my loom (about two years, eek!), but I've finally done so.  But this warp has been less than nice to me.  It started off being too wide and too weft-faced (I would run out of the handspun silk weft without sufficient length for a scarf), then I made two threading errors (near the middle, so nearly half had to be re-threaded after adding string heddles), so after nearly a week, I've finally got this warp on the loom for the third time...



It's still more weft-faced than intended, but the silk handspun will more than make it to the other end of the scarf, and the silk is pretty...

Meanwhile, having taught a sock knitting class last Sunday, and having another one to go next Sunday, I'm sick of the sight of socks again.  The jaywalkers are thus making only slow progress.  I have several other things I could work on if I were not so lazy, as each requires a gauge swatch and some thought before commencing.

And since my last post, I have also been helping with my Spinners and Weavers group garage sale and move from behind the town pool to the Showground.  The new space is a great improvement and already looks much better than in the photos on the site.  I nabbed some of the boxes after they were emptied and brought them home for when I eventually move house.

I won't bore you with why I've been too busy to post - just put it under the heading of "school".  I'd rather cover the more interesting things I've done in the last nine weeks.

In early November, my Spinning and Weaving group had an Indigo Dye Pot day.  It wasn't just indigo dyeing - there were some other methods employed, but as my interest was only in the indigo, that's all I participated in (I can do other types of dyeing any time I like).

I had 400 grams of Bendigo 8 ply cotton in 'snow', and a tencel warp (which I still haven't weighed)  prepared for the indigo pot.  Indigo is an interesting dye - as I understand it, the  indigo is insoluble in the oxidised blue form.  To dye fibre, you need to put it in a reducing vat, which is an alkaline solution.  It is soluble in this solution and is a bright green colour.  Where the solution is exposed to the air, some of the indigo becomes oxidised and forms a skin on the surface.  Ours looked sort of metallic-coppery on top.  You dip the yarn into the vat for long enough to take up the vat solution, then remove it slowly so that the excess liquid in the yarn runs back into the vat before it can oxidise.  We weren't very good at that part, so vat solution went all over Pauline's lawn, turning the grass blue!  We then hung up the dipped skeins and they were left to oxidise and turn blue.  Mine seemed to take forever - whenever I opened up a bit of a skein to look inside, there was lime green fibre, which then  exposed to the air would oxidise and darken, eventually becoming blue.  The indigo was tending to form a skin on the yarn preventing the oxidation until it dried out a bit.

Then came the rinsing.  Lots of rinsing.  I made lots of buckets of yucky, murky blue water (so more of Pauline's lawn turned blue).  Thankfully, Pauline has a couple of rainwater tanks (as well as a town supply) from which we took the water, and it has rained a fair bit since, so she won't have ended up short of water.  Then I took them home and rinsed them some more and hung them to dry.  Once dry, I wound the cotton into balls and rechained the warp.  I'll probably rinse the tencel warp again before I use it as I want to team it with a pale weft, and I don't want the colour to bleed (much?).  Rinsing it again will indicate if it's going to be a problem.

I've knitted a couple of swatches in the indigo dyed cotton so that I can modify the pattern I intend to knit from it.  The pattern is the Denim Pinafore in Erika Knight's "Simple Knits for Little Cherubs" designed to use Rowan Denim yarn.  Rowan Denim yarn shrinks by something close to 20%, but in length only.  My indigo dyed Bendigo cotton won't do anything like that (and my stitch gauge is way off the pattern's, while I like the drape produced), so I practically have to rewrite the pattern.  Knitting with it is divine - it has come out quite soft after all the washing, and it has a nice variation about it.  The pale stitches here and there are from where the  skein was held while being dipped in the vat and consequently didn't take up much dye (and I unwittingly did that with every skein).  And I suspect the slight dark/light variation over the rest of the yarn was caused by the solution in the skeins being held in the fibre towards the bottom of each hanging skein while the oxidising took place.  I like it a lot.

And until I actually rework the pattern, I can't cast on.  I'm actually WIP-less at the moment.

If you were wondering about the baby blanket I had been working on, wonder no longer.  It's finished, and has been for a few weeks.  I hadn't mentioned it because we wanted it to be a bit of a surprise for Louisa, who received it on the weekend.

And I think I'll keep this post short as I'm dead tired.  Which has a lot to do with my neighbours-from-hell arriving home from a few weeks away at 1 am this morning...

Last year I entered several items in the local show, some photographs (up against lots of absolutely fantastic entries) and a baby jacket knitted from cotton.  Because it was cotton it has to go in a miscellaneous yarns section, and ended up being one of only two entries.  So the second place I received for it didn't really feel like an achievement.

This year, I didn't bother entering any photos (the quality of entries was absolutely outstanding again), and no knitting, but I put the braided twill scarf into the weaving section.  I had to take it to the showground on Tuesday after school, and because there was no steward for the weaving, I'd had to hand it over at the main office without the full paperwork having been done, where it was placed in a pile of stuff from which I feared it would never be seen again.

But I think I achieved something this year...  Not only did I take first place in the class ("hand woven article using commercial yarn") - the little blue ribbon, but I was also awarded the "best piece of weaving" prize overall - the big gold ribbon, beating entries by both my weaving teachers (obviously I have absolutely the *best* weaving teachers!).  Not bad for someone who's been weaving for nine months.  Unfortunately, there being no steward for the section, nobody contacted me to tell me I should be at the parade to collect the "prize" (an empty envelope...  It was sponsored by my spinning and weaving group and I'll get it later).

For the two nights of the show (Friday and Saturday) I've been helping with the spinning and weaving group's display, demonstrating some extremely bad weaving (not my loom so I'm not used to the shaft arrangement, and I talk too much while demonstrating and forget which shafts I should be lifting next!) and getting a lot of the Bob and Weave shawl knitted.  I'm nearly at the end of the second ball of wool.  It's now getting so large I won't be able to carry it to school to work on at lunchtimes for much longer.  And it definitely won't be finished by next weekend as I had originally hoped.

Next weekend will be a busy one: Mark and Tieneke's wedding on Saturday and Jean and Stephen's wedding celebrations on Sunday (they married in January).  So I'll be flying down to Sydney for the day on Sunday (pity you can't knit on planes these days).  This means I'm trying to get double the usual amount of class prep done this weekend.  Arghhhh!

And by the way, the caramel fudge was delicious.