Friday, June 26, 2015

On the Looms Finally

This week has been a really good studio week for me here at Farmstead Studio.  it seems like forever since I was able to dedicate a full day upstairs but, I got to spend a whole day and 1/2 uninterrupted time, winding, beaming, threading through heddles and reed, and getting the first tentative picks thrown on my red on red placemat project, to see if I got it right.  I did thread it correctly, but I wasn't happy with how the selvedges were coming out with the turned twill treadling.  That is what I had to talk to Carol about on Tuesday, and we came up with a plan to try.  We decided to reverse the threading on the edges.

You can't see the pattern in the foreground at all, but it will show up once I get rolling.  I'm still not sure about the selvedges, but I am going to give it try.  I have one other idea to try if our plan doesn't work.


So basically that is one loom loaded and ready!



Next I needed to adjust the warp on the blue jean placemats.  This is a warp weighted project and I had woven until the rocks that I use for weights were up to the trapeze!  I had decided that at that point I was done for the day, since I also wanted to reroute the warp a little.

A few, maybe 20 minutes later, Loom number 2 was ready to go!  YAY!

(I couldn't get the picture to upload here, will try again later)

Then I had to re-weight one of the other warps I have on my third loom.  This is  a white 12/3 cotton warp.  It is fabulous for napkins and things like that.  I think it took me about 10 minutes to get loom number 3 ready to weave on.  Yay again!


I have quite a bit of variegated cotton slub that I think I will put to work on this warp!







Lastly, I worked the majority of my time on my loom with the 8/4 natural cotton that has been my baby blanket warp.  I am re-threading it to make some t-shirt rugs.  The re-threading went really well, it took some time, but not a ton.  I set to work re-threading it through the reed,  I wantedto use every single dent in the reed, and I was sure I got the numbers right.  so you know what happened don't you?


Yes, I ran out of reed before I ran out of warp!  I guess I will have to recalculate again!  Anyway, it won't be long before this loom is ready to go too, once it is, I will have 4 out of 4 looms in action.  Be still my heart!





It has been a long road getting excited about the projects in the studio again, I think I may need to do some smaller projects to break up the long warps I am used to doing.  For example the Baby blanket warp was the third 40 yd warp I did with basically the same project.  No wonder I got bored with it!  To top it off, the blankets never sold very well at the shows, though they made excellent baby shower gifts!  Anyway, it is all food for thought.

The Nigora goats are growing, in size and in number.  One of my friend contacted me to let me know she was selling her Nigora wether, that is a brother to one of mine.  Well of course I bought him!  That brings me up to 7 Nigora goats.  I dearly love looking out over the herd, it gives me a sense of satisfaction.  The range of color in these fleeces is from white to charcoal, just lovely!  I did a post about this years fleeces on my blog,  Farmsteadstudio.blogspot.com

I am thrilled to have had some weaving content for you today, I have been plying yarn as well, but I will save that for another day.

Until next time, Happy Spinning, Knitting and Weaving, Tina

2 comments:

LA said...

You got a lot done! I really enjoy having different projects on different looms! A little here, a little there!

Theresa said...

Tina,
I bog down terribly with long larger project and simply love having shorter interesting project on the loom to play with. Red placemats how wonderful will those be! Happy weaving.