jenwren's blog

I've resisted starting a blog for a long time.  I don't know what's changed my mind - perhaps I thought I just needed to try it.  So here's my blog.  I'll give it a while and if I find I don't really like blogging I'll stop.  Just like I've just stopped one of my websites on The Bill (http://www.jenwren.net/).  I will be using that address for some other stuff, like weaving and dyeing, photos and so on, when I get around to it.

So what am I up to at the moment?  Well, on the loom (Ashford table loom 8-shaft, 80 cm wide) I've got a Tencel scarf in a nice braided twill pattern.  It's "wrong side" up on the loom, so I have to examine the cloth beam to see what the "right side" is looking like as I weave it.

As you can see from the photos, the warp is striped, while the weft is black (well, not quite black - I should have used more dye for a real jet-black).  In the first photo, of the "wrong side" the black isn't as dominating as it appears to my eye when I look at it directly.  The "right side" is looking very nice (you might be able to spot a slight reed sleying effect in the lime stripe - it should come out after washing at the end).  I'm about half way through weaving the weft and I hope  to finish it this week because the next project needs starting and it has a deadline of sorts!

My knitting is being totally neglected.  I'm not interested at the moment.  I have a toe-up sock in blue Patonyle I started at the end of October that is going nowhere - probably because I need to frog back below the ankle as I think the foot is too long.  And I have a square I'm knitting for the local guild I belong to, for an afgan that will be raffled to raise funds.  The last time I touched it was SSK while I was in Sydney last month.  I knit ONE row, the put it down and ignored it the rest of the time.  Too many good friends I hadn't seen in ages and too busy talking....  My knitting usually takes place in front of the TV, and being non-ratings season, there is stuff-all on.  Although MythBusters on SBS last night was pretty good.   I'd include Coupling, but I saw all of series 3 & 4 on region 2 DVD ages ago.

The braided twill scarf is off the loom - I finished the hemstitching last night.  I'm glad removing things from the loom is easier than putting them on because I blistered both my middle fingers while tying the warp onto the front beam last week - ouch!  I haven't done that before (and don't intend repeating the experience).

The next step is to twist the fringes at each end.  With 292 ends (warp threads) at each end, this will take me a few nights in front of the television to complete.  If you look at the bottom right of the photo you'll see my braiding tool.  It's meant to be for braiding hair but it does a fantastic job at twisting the fringes for me.  I was introduced to these by Lynne in my spinning and weaving guild and it's the best $7 ever spent!  I'm still using the first set of batteries, but I suspect they may be replaced before this scarf is done.

I went to Kmart today because of a 15% sale and picked up Yes Prime Minister Series 1 on DVD.  I really wanted Yes Minister Series 3 as well to complete my set, but no luck.  I'll probably have to order it direct from ABC shop sometime, though being a 2 DVD set it is $20 more expensive than the others.  Yes Prime Minister is a double-sided disc as well as being dual-layer (DVD-10) - the first disc like that I've come across and it looks funny because there's no label side.

It was amazing to find anything I wanted at Kmart.  Most of the DVDs are arranged "alphabetically" - the alphabet for the average Kmart employee must be different to the one I know.  The Mask of Zorro was under "XYZ" near Yes Prime Minister (which was the sole "Y" title I saw).  But I later saw it again under "M" and I suppose if I looked hard enough they may have had another copy under "T" as well.  I've learnt to be creative about where to look for the title I want and I was only more persistent today because of the discount.  They also had Pride and Prejudice which was tempting at only $42 less 15% (ABC price is $60), but as I taped it when it aired again last year, and as I've seen it countless times already, I passed.

I've finished the braided twill scarf and I'm really happy with it.  For this scarf I left more warp for braiding the fringes than I had in previous projects, and I think the longer fringes are much better.  The pattern has also come up nicely.  The choice of colours was mainly dictated by my trial and error Tencel dying - I picked out some colours I thought worked together from the many I've dyed in the last six months.

I'm considering winding a Tencel warp for painting, but I really must get on with the next project - a baby blanket for an expecting friend of my brother's.  The painted warp ideas I have in my head may just have to stay there for a few more weeks - perhaps I'll paint the warp before the end of the school holidays then weave it somewhere down the track.

I've had some long days this week, and have mostly only gone into my garden to quickly water the plants and not much else.  So I love weekends when I get to spend some time tinkering around and actually seeing how much growing has been done.   The beans reached the guttering on Monday and are now attempting to find something up there to climb on.  I hope they don't find a branch of the nearby Birch tree, or I'll have to climb up there and cut the stems (I'd certainly never reach any beans up that high).  A few flower buds are now appearing so I hope to start harvesting beans soon.   The tomato plant that was supposed to be the Yellow Pear variety was actually the Mini Orange variety as I had guessed.  Must try not to mix up my labels on the seedling pots again next year.  The fruit have been ripening and I've already eaten several in salads.

My chilli plant now has several chillies on it.  When they ripen I will probably use some fresh, but dry any excess.  I have the dried chillies from which the seed for this plant came and they are wickedly hot!  I've been harvesting radishes, beetroot and some of the lettuce, and all of the onions have been pulled up and stored.  I would have planted more radishes, but as I will probably move house in around a month or so, there's no point (I just hope I can get the most out of what's already there before moving).

The baby blanket is just about to come off the loom.  I'll probably then pack up the loom and table for the time being.  I'm too busy during the school term to weave anything and certainly won't be starting anything before moving.

I started the Bob and Weave shawl on Wednesday night - it took a bit of fiddling with the long-tail cast-on before I worked out which bit of yarn I had to go under and which was looped over to do it.  With this cast-on method the dropped stitches won't cause the whole thing to unravel.  Not that I was totally convinced until I did the first lot of dropping stitches and pulled them back to the cast-on edge...  I started out on 4.5 mm needles and have done about 15 cm but I think I should have used larger needles.  So I'm going to do what I should have done in the first place and swatch it on 5.5 mm needles, and I've just realised the mohair lace scarf is on my only 5.5 mm needles and the next size I have is 7 mm - bummer!  If only I could run out and buy some 6 mm needles locally tomorrow - no chance!  I really want to have this shawl finished by early March, but this is looking less and less likely.  I wonder how much knitting can be done at the swimming carnival this week?

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.