Sunday, July 01, 2007

"Thou Shalt Not Covet Thy Neighbor's Shed"

I promise to post several times in the next few days. Really I do. I have been bogged down with finals and black sheep gathering for the past few weeks.
First on the list of updates, however, is my finished weaving project. I made 4 1/2 yards of fabric at 58" wide for weaving this past term in a double plain weave. It was quite a chore.
  • 1. I had to dye the yarn. I had two yarns I wanted to combine for the warp, a camel coloured wool/poly (70/30) blend (12 wpi), and Emerald Fantasy (Nature Spun Fingering, 12 wpi) with 16 brown threads and 4 coloured threads to make up the pattern. But the camel was the wrong colour, so I dyed it brown. That was fun, I needed to dye 1.5 lbs of wool. I ended up using one packed of cocoa brown and one of dark brown in rit dye, and it seems to have worked fairly well.
  • 2. Warping. God, I couldn't seem to do math for this project. I had to warp in sections (big surprise) and I kept getting the wrong number of colour repeats in my bundles. For one, I decided that 14.5 x 2 = 35. I promise you that it does not. Gah. So I kept have to go and warp more and more thread. And then I ended up warping still more when I realized that I had 31 inches of space in my read, and I had only made my warp 30" wide. So I warped another bundle.
  • 3. I hated my loom. It hated me. Let's just say that it was too big for my 4'11.5" frame. And it had a sectional warping thing so I couldn't lean on it, and was continually skewering myself upon said spikes. Again, Gah.
  • 4. I had the worst shed in history because of the double weave and the wool yarn. The top shed was fine, but the bottom shed hated me. With a passion. I kept getting the two layers stuck together. We came up with a commandment for weavers the world over: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's shed."
  • 5. 4.5 yards is a bloody lot of fabric to weave. In actuality, it is like weaving 9 yards of fabric because it is double weave.
In the end I am quite happy with the result:

Next time I get around to posting: "The Trials and Tribulations of Black Sheep" and "My New Swap Package of Coolness."


6 comments:

Carol said...

That is the most fabulous thing I ever saw!!! Brava! It's just gorgeous and bet it feels wonderful. People here would pay alot of moolah for something like that!

Carol said...

It looks like a wonderful weave. Way to go!

Sara M said...

Isn't that, like, the 12th Commandment? ;D Beautiful work, despite all the difficulties you had! I can't wait to see it as a cotehardie ^_^

Unknown said...

Wow, awesome! Are you really gonna make a cotehardie out of it? That is so cool I might have to kill you. And some delicious colors too! Hooray for Mirm!

Jodie said...

Did you do this since Black Sheep and on the same loom? Or was this before?

Unknown said...

No, this was on a loom at school, not at home. Though, if the loom gets up and working, this is something I could do on my home loom.