Simpler is Better!

This week I finally got the 12/3 warp re-threaded for a much simpler design.  I had started with this design, which was nice, but it just seemed too busy for me!  It set my mind to re-threading, and so I did, a couple of times, but I got it right!   I basically took out the center patterns and substituted twill.  It makes a cool pattern as I kept the three twill changes.  I started weaving the pattern in white, I thought it would be pretty, but I couldn't see the design!  I switched to a darker weft to do a pattern check.

If you don't count the treadling error, everything was great! I switched back to white and started my towel/napkin not sure which yet!   After an inch of plainweave, I began to envy Carol and her yards of plainweave fabric, and I thought of my favorite towels from the store, simple plain weave, then I thought, why not!  I have hundreds of yards of this warp, let's take a look!

Isn't it beautiful, almost serene!  I say that for today, the fancy stuff can wait, simpler is better! 

Until next time, Happy Weaving, Tina

Just for the Huck of It

This guy's going to Cindy's for a fried chicken dinner.  Yum!

Now that I have your attention with the pineapple upside down cake--no drooling on the keyboard, please!--I will explain my title.  As related last week, I was about to start working on Big Bertha, truly another set of B words.  My, she is large!  But my first project seems much smaller.  Seems, I say because I chose some Huck lace napkins from May/June 2011 Handwoven, Dotted Swiss Huck Lace.  They're so pretty!  And the thread is quite fine, 20/3.  It takes 551 threads for a measly 12 1/2" napkin!  Wooooo!  I wound half of the threads yesterday.  I need to move 200 heddles onto shaft one next week because the half of the design comes from shaft one.  Should be interesting!

  And on the home front, I cut off the first lace panel, destined for the front door, and began rethreading for the two side windows.  I chose the Huck Lace Sampler from the Weaver's book on huck lace, with the lace border treadling.  But it won't be a border; it'll be an all-over design.  If I like it, that is.

I've been knitting a lot, too.  These socks are for me, and I could have used them today.  I can't seem to get warm!  They also have lace in them, between the cables, but it's more of the yarn over, knit two together variety.

It's been too wet today to garden, but the front yard is coming along nicely without my help.  My azaleas are nowhere near as gorgeous as Carol's, but I do like the color.  They have some health problems, which means they'll get pruned as soon as they've finished blooming.  The climbing hydrangeas on either side of them are flourishing, but have no flower buds yet.  I wonder how many years before they start to flower?

  The beds on either side of the front walk are popping out with all kinds of color.  Well, mostly pink and purple, but still nice.  The sweet william seeds I planted last year have take off and are lovely.  Lantana isn't supposed to be perennial, but the pink ones from last year didn't get that memo.  A lot of flowers have yet to bloom but are getting ready.  I learn more about gardening in the south every year, and believe me, it's quite different from the desert southwest!  

So, I hope you'll follow me along with my obsession with huck lace!  It's the current bright shiny thing in my studio.  We'll see how long it takes for me to be over it!

Happy weaving!

Maggie

Oh What a Tangled Web......

Sometimes the TV program that you've tuned into starts with how the story ends.....and that's what you see here.

  So....what led up to this, you might ask.

  Why are Carol and Maggie winding up thread that Ann is taking OFF the warping mill?????

  It was a beautiful morning to be at weaving.  Slowly, the studio starting filling up as the weavers all arrived.  Everyone got to work on their projects for the day.  Lanny had to endure some gentle teasing about his warp.....it really is a good idea to thread the heddles and sley the reed before you tie on the front bar.



  As promised, Carl was set to cut off the rug warp that he's been weaving.

  There were eight rugs on the cloth beam......

..........take a look!

  Eight rugs take more space than we have, so we had to do two roll-outs!



   Tina and I got them cut apart, then Carol joined in to help tie the fringes.  It sure goes fast when folks pitch in and help!!!!  Carol was working on pricing them for the shop upstairs and getting them logged into the master inventory list.

  New rugs for the shop!!!!

  In the meantime, Ann set up the warping mill to wind the warp for her Kentucky Log Cabin rugs that will be going on the rocker loom.  (Just so you know, Ann hums a little ditty while she makes the mill go round and back!)  You can see the rugs on the table where they were waiting to get their fringes tied.

  Yep....that's Ann in the background--just winding away on her warp.....Jinx and Roz are working on their looms.  Carol and Trudy are catching up on news.  Over by the door, you can barely see Maggie at the warping board.

  Maggie is winding Big Bertha's first warp....some napkins in huck lace.  Is that an eight yard warp????

 Linda worked on her placemats while Lanny got started threading his warp.  You can barely see Bonnie....she spent the morning threading her heddles on her warp since the reed has been sleyed.  She does hers from the front of the loom.

  In the meantime, Ms. Ila and LaDonna arrived, and they got busy, too.  Ms. Ila discovered a threading error, and finally found the offending thread.  Now.....to the correction!!!!!

   Allan finally got to weave on the bread cloth warp.  Tina got the threading error fixed, and now she's working on the warp of Ellen's place mats. 


  And, with all this activity going on, Ann just kept on winding and winding.

  Yes......she wound too much!!!!

Now you know why Maggie and Carol were winding thread OFF the warping mill!!!!

It does get lively on Tuesdays at the Center!!!!
Happy Weaving!
LouAnn

Just in Time!

I wish that the camera would be able to capture the vibrant colors in this warp. The main color is turquoise but the other colors in there made this a happy warp!! It's off the loom now and waiting in line to be serged and then washed.  I'm not sure where the time goes because this was the only warp I got done this past week.

 I'd started that baby quilt for our friend who's due May 9. Then this week I found out that grandma and great grandma were going to be in Knoxville this weekend so we arranged to meet yesterday which meant....I had to get that quilt done. Talk about working like crazy to get that finished!
It is hard to take a good picture of a quilt on my cutting table. I don't have a permanent design wall and didn't want to take the time to set it up.
The quilt sewed up nicely once  I had those squares sewn. Machine quilting was interesting. I usually just stitch in the ditch but the pieces above and below those squares were big, kind of cheater, border prints I'd gotten that matched the  main fabric. So I dropped the feed dogs and free motion quilted across the fabric. Also did that in the 9 center squares of the quilt. I've gotten better at doing that. With free motion quilting, you control how and where the fabric moves with your hands. Move too fast in comparison to your speed of sewing and you can get long stitches. Mine have improved, thank goodness.

 Since the quilt didn't look great sitting on the table, I had DH hold it up outside my studio for another picture. Guess there was too much sun.........and don't the azaleas still look great? I guess because we had a cool snap this week, they've continued to be pretty.

 So what do you back a little boy quilt with?  One side was all farms, trains, etc. I scrounged around the studio and found.......cowboys!  Oh yeah, there's a guitar there too. The Mom to be is a good guitar player. Her great uncle was Chet Atkins and she definitely inherited the musical ability.

This week I hope to finish the warp I just put on the loom and see how much serging and sewing I can get done on the pieces I wove the past few weeks! Always more to do!! Oh yeah, I have another baby quilt cut out, just like this one so I'll have a spare when the next baby comes along!
Til next week...
Carol

Playing With Log Cabin

 


  I'm way behind on my mug rug quota, so I decided to put on a warp using the threading for Log Cabin.  I added a marigold thread that matched my Fiesta dishes to the mix to give me six colors, and wound a four yard warp.
  This mug rug has small cotton mop cord for weft, and this is the one shuttle weave.

 

 For the next set, I used two shuttles:  mop cord and carpet warp.   This is where you get those wonderful little blocks that play across the piece.  (And, just in case you are new to Log Cabin, the blocks are created by throwing two shots of the carpet warp to change the block.)

  When you add a darker weft, you get a new look!  After I get the mate for this one woven, I'm going to use some white fabric strips for weft.  I do want to try a small print fabric to see how that does under this threading.
   I think this will translate well into the hot pads that I'm working on for next year's class.

  Boo-boo OR design element?

  It's a boo-boo....I'm just not sure what happened.  My friend Dana thinks it might be a threading error since it only happened in one spot. 

  This is my bead leno scarf that I wove last week, and wore on Sunday.  If you look closely at the middle of the picture, you'll see two threads that ran together all the way up the scarf.  That should NOT have happened!

 I guess this means that I have to weave another scarf  and see if I can do better.  There is a lot of shrinkage, so I think I will add some to the length, too!

  As always, there are so many projects I want to weave, and not always a lot of weaving time!  Isn't that the dilemma for most weavers?

Happy Weaving!

LouAnn

                                                                                                                              

Early Morning Musings

For some reason I woke up this morning at 4:15 am!  I am not sure why, but by 4:45 am I was still awake, so I got up.  I fixed myself some coffee and read quietly for about 30 minutes, then something caught my eye.

Of course it was dark outside at the time, but I thought it would be wonderful to spin up some of the Silver Romney while lost in morning thoughts.

I have been pleased at how this fleece is spinning up.  I at one time thought it was a lost cause, I thought I had ruined it, felted it beyond repair.  But it has been redeemed by the use of combs.  Wickedly sharp combs, but that is what it took!

I have one 4 oz. skein already spun, and I have a project in mind.  I still have to comb another 2 oz. to complete this skein.  I was able to spin 4 of those soft bumps that you see on the distaff before the sun crept over the ridge.

It is spinning up to be fingering wt when 2 ply, that seems to be my default.  If I want thicker yarn I will 3 ply it!

Weaving has not been going as well as it could be I suppose,  I had planned to finish re-threading the Friendship Twill Towels on the little Leclerc, Alice, but I had to go into town today to get some travel vaccines for my trip this year.  My morning flew by, and it wasn't until after lunch that I got back to the loom.

I was nearing the end of the re-thread, and I had an uneasy feeling that the numbers were just not going to work out, so I stopped and counted what I had left to do and indeed the numbers were just not adding up!

I decided that I needed to count how many threads I had. ( Remember, I did not wind this warp I inherited it!)  I ended up with 390 instead of the 392 I thought I had, which isn't such a big difference, and it does not explain why the threading wasn't coming out!

So this is how I left it this afternoon. It is back to the weaving program to see if I can figure out where I went wrong.  (This sounds like a broken record doesn't it!  On Tuesday I finally finished my threading headache at the Center!) Let's see how many tries it takes me this time!

Until next time, Happy weaving, Tina

A Farewell to B

Linda works on B during my hiatus

I've been a member of the Tuesday Weavers since 2005, since that fateful day that I met Carol at the Foothills Craft Guild's Fall Show back in 2004, shortly after I moved to east Tennessee.  After my first project on a table loom, I was moved to one of the Big Girl Looms (sorry, Lanny! I know men weave, too!).  I became acquainted with B.

B's nifty tie-up system

  B is a Norwood loom.  He's lovely to look at, sturdy and strong.  We've been partners for almost seven years now, and if he could speak, I think he'd agree that we've had our ups and downs.  Ours has not been a perfect partnership.  I hate his braking system, and he simply doesn't care.  In fact, it's his braking system that gave him his name.  My favorite curse word is one that reflects badly on the parentage of the recipient of the word.  B is short for that word.  I didn't always mean it as affectionately as I do now.

B's current project

  But we've struggled through, making many beautiful projects, none of which I can now find photos of!  I know I took lots of them, but can only find our current  project, the lovely New Mexico Sunset warp.  I finished our last placemat yesterday, but only because Carol told me I had to!  I had already hemstitched the beginning, so she was right in making me finish it.  And it gave me time to say goodbye.  Yes, he'll be in the same room, but soon, he'll be someone else's loom, with someone else's project.  Someone else will learn the intricacies of advancing the warp on dear B:  loosen the front, stand on the brake release, hope it doesn't BANG and release too much so that she/he will have to get up, walk around the side and wind it back, hoping no threads caught on the sectional beam's spikes.  Ah, yes, dear B! I know you well!

  Next Tuesday, I will move to another loom with a B-word name, Big Bertha.  She is very big.  She has twelve shafts, 60 inches weaving width and a sliding bench.  I'm a little frightened!  But she's beautiful, and I'm sure we'll make many lovely things together.
  Our first project will be dinner napkins, in fine cotton thread, using a huck lace pattern from my new book, Weaver's Huck Lace.  It'll be my first 8-shaft project, and I'm excited to get started.  I picked out my thread before I left the Center yesterday, and I'll pick out my pattern this week.  Then, we'll order the thread for the Lee's Surrender I've committed to making.  I'm excited/scared about that one, but I'm sure it will be an adventure.
  So, farewell, dear B!  I won't be far away!  Big Bertha and I are ready to begin our partnership, but I will come around to visit you!
Until then, Happy Weaving, everyone!
Maggie