Hello! I hope everyone is healthy and safe as we move through the pandemic and come to terms with the results of systemic racism in our country. Remember the old Chinese curse May you live in interesting times? I certainly think that applies to 2020. Stay safe people, wear your masks and think about how your actions and assumptions affect other people. We need to come together and work this all out.

I recently launched a fine art website, LindaFarrellyArt.com. Since that site has a blog page, all further fine art blog posts will be posted on LindaFarrellyArt.com/blog. I have copied all the fine art posts to the new site and will continue to use Blogger to post about weaving, spinning, knitting, etc. So, if you are interested in fine art check out the new page. If you subscribe to my site, you well see new art before anyone else does.

8 shaft huck curtain fabric

On to weaving! The 10 weeks I was on furlough were weaving heaven! I have all four looms in almost-continuous use, warping a new project as soon as the finished warp is cut off. I finished 6 yards of 8 shaft huck lace curtain fabric. I still need to sew the curtains, but I am very happy with how the fabric turned out. There are a few errors, but not as many as I figured there might be.

4 shaft goose eye twill scarves

On the 4 shaft Dorset, I am currently weaving two scarves in goose eye twill. The warp is multicolored rayon slub and the weft is Jaegerspun Zephyr. The first scarf I used the color Curry, and the second one I am using Copper. Since the rayon is so slippery, I have worked hard no to beat in too hard. It's a bit uneven so far, but we will see how it washes up.

Rigid heddle scarf in progress

The most productive loom lately has been the rigid heddle. I am still working through my sock yarn stash weaving Series 1 scarves. The loom is so small and light it often follows me out onto the porch, so it gets more attention than the others. It is naked right now, but that will change this weekend. Here's one of the recent scarves from the rigid heddle using Sockotta (sadly discontinued) and a bit of olive green (mystery sock yarn) for the warp and a doubled strand of Silk City extra fine wool for the weft. I love how the colors shift in the Sockotta!

My goal for this blog is to post every Friday. Enjoy, and we'll see you next week!

Weaving Handspun on my Cricket

I spent a good part of the summer weaving up some handspun singles that have been lying around for a couple of years. It was lovely wool, spun from layered rovings purchased from SnokistFarmGirl
in 2009. Since I had only a few ounces of each color combination, I decided to warp my rigid heddle and weave some scarves. 

I used the 8 dent heddle that came with the loom, which gave me a nice, open cloth that fulled very well. 

 

The scarves are light and airy, soft and warm. 

I played with stripes  in the warp,

 

and stripes in the weft.

But mostly I just played with color,

 

and enjoyed the calming rhythm of plain weave.

It was delightful to not worry about structure and pattern for a while,

and just play.

Playing with a Straight Threading

In the Handweaver's Guild of Boulder, there is a Complex Weavers interest group. I decided to join when it started up even though I was a pretty new weaver. Nothing wrong with having the most to learn, especially when many of the others have been weaving for decades.

These ladies are amazing! They know their way around rules I haven't even learned yet.

Anyway, we've been working our way through Bonnie Inouye's book Exploring Multishaft Design this year. The first 6 chapters deal with what you can do design wise on a straight threading. So I put on a long warp and made mugrugs for chapter 1, twills. Some of the liftplans I made looked pretty good, so I wound a 7 yard warp pf 6/2 cotton and wove some towels. The fringe turned out to be a bad idea with that particular yarn, but overall I'm quite pleased. I got to play with pattern, and color too. I'm still figuring out how color works in weaving, mostly by imitation and my own trial and error.

I wove these in the spring but didn't get them out of the camera until last week.

Silk Noil Woven Shibori Scarves

I wound this warp a while ago and just started weaving on it last week. The silk noil was an ebay find from several years ago. I thought it might make nice scarves, so I would a 10 yard warp, sett it at 16epi and started weaving. It's threaded to 8 shaft point huck. The plan is to weave a slowly changing pattern over the whole length of the warp, dye it in one piece, then divide it into scarves at the end. I usually measure and separate scarves and towels as I go, but I thought it might be nice to skip that part and see what happens.

Handspun Handwoven Alpaca Scarves

I started spinning this luscious alpaca roving into yarn about a year ago, I think. I had bought it from someone on the Spinners and Weavers Housecleaning Pages a few years ago and finally got around to it. I originally thought I would knit it, but after an experience I had last year at TACtile Textile Arts Center, I decided to weave it into scarves.



I was working my volunteer shift for a the Holiday Gift Show when a lovely older gentleman came in looking for a scarf. For himself. There were any number of gorgeous hand knitted, hand dyed and handwoven scarves, but not one was suitable for a man (besides, perhaps, Eddie Izzard). The man had the means and desire to purchase a handwoven scarf for himself, and he understood all the work and skill that went into making one. But we had nothing to offer him. I felt awful.


So, my 15 ounces of dark chocolate handspun alpaca became 7.5 yards of warp, and the 12 ounces of fawn handspun pictured above became the weft. I used a 4 shaft Swedish Rosepath threading from Davidson's book and chose a different treadling for each of 3 scarves. A little rustic, but not bad and definitely something a man would feel comfortable wearing.

Have you woven something manly lately? Guild show season is coming up, and there are educated, fashion-forward men of all ages , shapes and sizes with ready cash shopping for themselves and their loved ones of both genders. Don't send them home empty-handed.

8 Shaft Huck Towels

This past March, I took a class on weaving towels from Susan Wilson. It was a round robin where each of us threaded a different weave structure and /or fiber that's good for towels, then wove a sample from each one. There were also several lectures peppered throughout where she talked about the design tools you would use for each type of weave structure. I was very interested in working some more with 8 shaft huck, so I wound a 15 yard warp of 6/2 unmercerized cotton, got out my graph paper and notes, and went to town. I came up with about 12 drawdowns and converted them to liftplans (I weave on a table loom, no treadles).

I had such a good time playing around with the liftplans and weaving each one several ways, by the time I made it through 15 yards of warp I had only used the first 5 designs. I have another 15 yard warp ready to go so I can weave some of the rest of them.

I used the same 6/2 cotton for the weft on about half of the towels. For the rest, I used 7/2 inmercerized cotton in a slightly darker, duller green. I love the brightness of the 1 color towels, but I also love the depth of the 2 color towels. It makes the huck spots "pop" a bit, too.

I also learned to double-check the liftplan after transcribing from the drawdown. I had a few "surprise" patterns where I had missed a shaft on a particular pattern row. I still liked the pattern I wound up with, but I did have to look at what I had done and compare it to the graph to figure out where I had gone astray. Good learning opportunity, but If I had been weaving somthing that was supposed to be a certain way it would have been frustrating. I also found that all of my designs had been symmetrical. The ones with missing shafts were not, and I both liked them and found them interesting. So, next time I'm going to try drawing patterns that are deliberately asymmetrical just to see if I can. ;)


All in all, I wound up with 21 towels each about 12x22", except for one that came out much shorter (I must have mismeasured). They are all different. I can hardly wait to see what the next warp will reveal!