Monthly Archives: October 2009
Catching up with the WiPs
I can’t believe it’s the end of October already. Just in the past week or so the leaves on my neighbors’ trees have changed colors and fallen off (into my yard), the weather has been cooler and rainy, and my birthday is tomorrow, this has all just happened all of a sudden. I think I’m getting sick, I’ve been feeling a little dizzy all week and I keep having these moments when the room will spin out of control like I’m crazy drunk and I have to lie down where I’m at until it passes. This means that I haven’t been able to walk or do yoga all week (no balance, I almost passed out doing yoga the other day it got so bad) and this is driving me crazy, I can’t stand not being able to keep my regular routine. Needless to say I’ve been spending lots of time curled up on the couch with a lazy dog and my blanket and last night I just gave up and slept most of the evening. It sucks and I hope it passes soon because there is no way I can afford to go to the doctor.
Let’s get to the fun stuff, shall we? How about my projects. I usually just like to have one thing on the needles at a time but right now I’m working on two. The Herringbone sweater is just about done. I started sewing it up the other night and now I just have one seam left but I can’t seem to find the time to sit and sew it. One of the cute details on the sweater is that it buttons on one of the front raglan lines and I’ve almost decided to skip the buttons and just sew it up instead. I think I’ll sew that side seam and try it on before I make my decision. Maybe I’ll get to it this weekend.
Here is some of the progress on Heroine. I’ve knit the back and one front and I’ve made it through about half the second front now. The size 13US/9mm needles make for some fast knitting.
And last is this little panel I’m weaving. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it when I’m done, maybe weave a strap and make it into a little bag or something. I love this diamond pattern the texture is great. This whole thing is kind of a pain to weave with the string heddles and the floating selvedges and the fact that my loom feels so huge. So I’ve spent my week looking at eight harness floor looms, specifically the Schacht Baby Wolf. They have a 26” weaving width and they fold up pretty small so I think it’s my best option for my small space. It also costs almost $2000 so it’s going to be a while before I can buy one. I’ve thought about just getting a table loom since I’ll be able to afford one by the end of the year, but I think I’ll just wait and get a floor loom since that’s what I really want anyway.
Have a happy Halloween and a great weekend!
Woven Shibori Scarf
Today is nice and sunny so I was finally able to get a picture of the scarf after the second dye job. I love this dark blue color and in person there’s little touches of purple, very subtle. I’m more happy with this than anything else I’ve dyed, it came out exactly how I wanted. All that cotton had to be taken out today, so I sat with a pair of scissors and a darning needle (to untie the knots, which didn’t work very good) and cut and pulled out all the threads then I twisted the fringe.
After a couple hours of cutting and twisting I had a bunched up mess of scarf so I heated up the steam iron and lightly ironed out the pleats. I wanted to keep some of the texture but open it up enough that you can see the colors between. In these pictures you can see where some of the dye bled into the pleats, especially the red dye, but I really like how it looks. I probably could have pulled the strings a little harder and that would have kept the dye from bleeding so bad, I think it adds a little more depth.
And here’s a close up, you can really see the pleats here and the color is better, too. I just can’t describe how much I love this scarf. I had thought about making a few to sell but I’m not sure it’s worth the effort, between the weaving, string pulling and tying (and cutting my finger), to the dyeing and finishing work, I just don’t know if I could make enough money to make it worth the time and effort. I meant to keep track of exactly how much time it took to make this one and I forgot, I’m so bad at tracking things like that. If I had to take a guess I’d say it was around six or eight hours of actual work, most of that was weaving and tying the strings then the finishing, the dyeing didn’t take long and I could dye more than one at a time.
Anyway, here are the details:
- Yarn: Most of one skein of Lion Brand Fisherman’s Wool in Natural, dyed with Jacquard acid dyes in Sapphire & Sky Blue then over dyed with Vermillion and Jet Black
- Loom: 32” Ashford Rigid Heddle 7.5dpi
- Finished size: I didn’t measure it, but it’s around six inches wide by about seventy inches long, slightly pleated and the length is excluding fringe
Tomorrow we’ll look at my WiPs, my coat, the Herringbone sweater and my new weaving project. I’m off to eat some home made mini Tollhouse cookies, yummy.
Dye Day
Yesterday I decided to finish off my woven shibori scarf so I sat myself up with the loom in front of the TV and two hours and a couple cheesy History Channel shows later, the scarf was done. Here it is shortly after I cut it off the loom. You can see that the front and back are the same with the little loops of crochet cotton. I sat here last night and tied the loops at the selvedges (and cut my finger on one loop, I was pulling too hard) and then today, I dyed.
Here it is after the first trip through the dye pot, it’s actually brighter in real life. I went with the blue, this is a mixture of Jacquard sapphire and sky blues, squirted on the scarf at random. I like it but it’s quite a bit brighter than I wanted, in person it’s almost a primary blue color, I always forget how bright the sapphire blue is. So I over-dyed it with about a quarter teaspoon of vermillion and an eighth teaspoon of black. It looks so much better now, the dye took differently in spots, so it’s this mottled dark blue and the insides of the pleats have a touch of light violet and pink. Very pretty. I tried to get a picture of it after the second dye bath, but the clouds are heavier now and the pictures kept coming out blurry. I’ll get some tomorrow. I’m going to let the scarf dry tonight and then undo the ties tomorrow and we’ll see how it looks. I have to admit that I’m a little excited by it, this is so fun.
Not only did I dye the scarf twice today but I also warped the loom again. I saw this post on rigidheddleweaving.com about using string heddles on the rigid heddle loom, this way you can have an infinite number of heddles. I picked out a three heddle pattern from handweaving.net, now that I look at it I think it’s the same pattern from the video on rigidheddleweaving.com, and tied up my string heddles. I used the same method to tie my heddles as this video from WeaveZine, it seemed easier than tying each heddle individually and wove my header, but I haven’t had time to start weaving the actual pattern yet. I’m always amazed by how many different things you can do with such a simple loom. No pictures, it’s too dark, they wouldn’t come out right, but I’ll get some later.
I’ve also been knitting but I’ll save that for another day.
Progress
It feels pretty good right now to not have a work project. Don’t get me wrong, I love knitting for KnitPicks and I always enjoy what I do, but sometimes I need a break so I can make some things that I want to make. And I’m doing that, right now. First on my list is this scarf. This is my woven shibori experiment, still in the weaving stage. I think I’m about three quarters of the way through it so I should be able to dye it next week, sometime. If you’re curious about how this will work, there’s an article on WeaveZine, but the short of what you do is weave the scarf with some thread, I’m using cotton, to make a pattern on the surface of the scarf and when the weaving is done, you use the thread to bunch the scarf up, tie it off, and dye it kind of like tie dye. I haven’t decided what color I’m going to dye it yet, I’m trying to decide between the traditional route of blue (to make it look like indigo) or something nontraditional like a chartreuse or hot pink or purple.
I didn’t realize how much I missed weaving until I started this project, I really need to weave more. And I think I’m going to start saving up some money for a floor loom, something small, though, like a Baby Wolf. I don’t have room for a floor loom, at all, but since it folds up and doesn’t take up a huge amount of room even when it’s unfolded, I think I could squeeze on in. The looms are expensive, between $1600 and $2000 is what I’m finding but I’ll probably try to find one used, so it will be a while before I can afford one. I talked to my mom about it and it looked like her eyes were going to pop out of her head when I told her how much they cost. Apparently she didn’t even realize that my rigid heddle loom was almost $200, I thought I told her when I bought it but I guess she forgot. Fiber arts are expensive hobbies.
Back to the projects. I started Heroine Wednesday night. This is an old picture, I’ve finished the back and started the front already. This is made with worsted weight yarn held double and US13/9mm needles, so it goes pretty fast. I’m trying to knit slower than my breakneck work knitting speed so I can actually sit back and enjoy the process of making it, rather than just speeding through. It’s tough, though, I’m so used to having to knit as fast as I can that to purposefully slow down is killing me. Besides, I kind of need a coat.
Other than weaving and knitting as fast as I can, I’ve been devouring books. Last week I read The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles that was a bleak, psychological book that I would love to read again in a year or so and see how I feel about it then. I wish I was a better writer so I could really express how the book made me feel, the reviews at Amazon are pretty good. After a book that heady, I wanted something light and fluffy that I could plow through in a couple hours. I figured what’s lighter and fluffier than a Dan Brown novel, so I read The Lost Symbol. I know it’s cool to criticize Dan Brown because his writing is technically crap (and it is, but so is mine) but his books are fun little page turners, even if most of the plot twists are easy to figure out and his supposedly super hard to solve puzzles aren’t, but The Lost Symbol accomplished what I wanted it to, it gave me something entertaining to do for about six hours. There is one thing about his stories, they’re fun. And they’re supposed to be. And after I was done reading it I spent some time reading about the US Capitol and all the things in his book about the buildings and the architecture. I wanted something fun to do and that did it. And still on the light and fluffy kick, today I read the new Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse book, A Touch of Dead. The book is a collection of her Sookie Stackhouse short stories, it only took about two hours to read and I’m pretty sure I had read one of the stories before. It was pretty good but I would have liked for there to be more of it, it seemed awfully short.
I’ve been checking out craft books from the library, too. I just returned Time to Weave which has small projects that require either no loom at all or a simple peg loom. The book had some good ideas, like a braided rope trivet and some coasters made out of sticks woven with string, but it’s not a book I would rush out and buy. Right now I have Dyeing to Knit and Mastering Weave Structures: Transforming Ideas into Great Cloth but I’ve only just skimmed them. Dyeing to Knit looks pretty good, though. It is another book about color theory and the process of dyeing but it goes more in to playing around with using different techniques to get different effects on yarn. I have a cone of undyed sock yarn that I think I’ll play with in the next couple weeks. I’ve barely opened the weaving book, I read online somewhere that it had good information for weaving on any type of loom so I thought I’d check it out. I might just do that right now.
