Woolfest for Weavers

YarnMaker, spinners, and spinning supplies were my reasons for being at Woolfest in Cockermouth in June. However, I took a little time here and there to look at weaving supplies.

One of my friends ordered a new Saori loom at the show. She's been doing Saori weaving for sometime now on rigid heddle looms so knows that the two-shaft Saori loom with the benefit of foot treadles is ideal for the weaving she does. We now have a Saori agent in the UK and The Saori Shed had a large stand where I happily sat and wove a few inches of cloth.

I was very interested to see a beautiful range of Estonian wool yarns spun for weaving now offered by Jane Flanagan Textiles alongside her dyed wool batts for feltmakers. Jane is a weaver herself although spends much of her time running textile workshops for schools.

I enjoyed meeting one of my weaving blog friends, Dorothy Stewart, who was helping out on the Ripples Crafts stand. Dorothy has been weaving beautiful silk scarves and I was delighted to see them for real and talk with her about weaving. Helen of Ripples Crafts custom dyes silk yarns for Dorothy so she can work with whatever colours she chooses.

The yarns I fell for however were from the range stocked by Helen Brotherton My Fine Weaving Yarn. She seems to be constantly extending the yarns offered and it is wonderful to visit one of her stands and have a choice of modern yarns all spun for handweavers in a range of colours like I have never seen before in the UK. I know other people do stock a large range but selection is normally from shade cards or samples that arrive in the post. It is rather different to be surrounded by yarns of different fibres that you can see and touch! And pick up and buy... here are the yarns I brought home, all silk. I made two colour selections of four cones for scarf weaving, each including one varigated yarn. However, having got them home I think that the green I chose could belong to either group.

Weaving beautiful cloth

I want to share with other weavers this awsomely beautiful film from the Scottish weavers

Morton Young and Borland Ltd 

Learn more about their product range here on their website. Beautiful stuff!

I came across this while checking references for an article going into the next edition of YarnMaker, my work is generally more about spinning yarns than weaving, but my aim with YarnMaker is to cover the whole textile story from where fibres come from, how yarns can be designed and spun through to the ways we use them, taking in past, present and future. I am always learning new things and enjoying the contributions people make and the connections and conversations that preceed and follow on. (Those of you who read YarnMaker can have fun guessing where this might be found in the magazine!)

I love the way this film shows the relationship between machinery, the punch card programs, the oily hands of workers maintaining the machines, and the fine, beautiful white cloth. We see yarn on bobbins and being woven into cloth. We meet the people involved, face to face. There is so much in one short film.

Even warp tension

I'm going to have lunch in 15 mins, it occurred to me I can use that 15 mins for one of my quick blog posts.  I took these photos a couple of weeks ago when setting up my little Greg Meyer Oonagh loom to take along to a Cheshire Guild meeting for people to try multi-shaft weaving.

How to wind a good warp and get it on the loom without tension problems is something every new weaver needs to learn.

I use weights, as they are always around whereas I don't always have a friend handy to hold the warp for me. In some respects weights can work better, as a person has two hands and can hold up to two bundles of warp separately, but you can tie weights on every few inches of warp threads.

Here are my weights, attached to the chained warp.  They are tied to hang slightly above floor level at the start.

I have tied them on with a medium weight linen warp yarn tied in a simple slip knot (or half hitch, depending how you look at it).

When I have wound on enough warp to raise the weights to table height, I stop and re-tie them.

Something I forgot to photograph is the warp winding on the beam with sheets of strong paper, wider than the weaving width, going under the warp threads as they wind on. On my larger looms I have wooden slats for the same purpose. These (paper, sticks, or some people use card) are very important to make sure the warp winds on evenly.

The path of the warp as I wind it on to this loom is over the top of the beater and though the shafts (not at this stage through the reed and heddles, I thread heddles and sley the reed last). On the left hand side you can see a green tie around the warp that I put on when it was on the warping board to keep the threads together, I'm just about to remove this tie.

At the back of the loom the threads are separated alternately over and under the lease sticks (they were prepared for this by making a "cross" on the warping board" and then they are spread out to the width of cloth I am going to weave by the raddle, which on this loom is a permanent feature of the back beam.

That's all for today, 15 mins are up and I will go over time now as I post this to the blog. I hope some new weavers will find this helpful.

EDIT 1st August 2012

...to add a link to Charlotte's blog Atellier Stellaria so you can see the ingenious 'Weaver's Friend' (besten Freund) invented by Andreas Moeller (see Charlotte's comment on this post).

Mystery of twisted fabric solved?

I came to put a new warp on my little Greg Meyer loom, and discovered this:

The bar I'm tying my warp to is sitting crooked. It was the same both front and back of the loom, how careless of me! This may have been a factor that helped create curved cloth.

I replaced the string ties with texsolv so it is easy to get them exactly the same length.

It's also easy to do up / undo the texsolv by removing the little anchor peg.

Weaving with 100% British Wool - handspun

With the latest YarnMaker at the printers (due to be published next week) I had time for some weaving last weekend.

I have a huge stash of handspun yarns. Most of these were spun in 2006.  The wools that went into the blanket include Black Welsh Mountain, Grey Welsh Mountain, Manx Loaghtan, Shetland, Jacob. Some were spun fairly thick like an aran weight yarn, others like a fine sock wool.  There was a good mix of colour, yarn weights and texture.

This photo shows the warp yarns ready to wind onto the cloth beam of my Ashford Knitters Loom, with a 10 dpi reed.

I found that I like using the Glimakra rug shuttle as it passes through the shed without friction.

Here is the new blanket when cut off the loom, before washing in hot and cold water to full the fabric, after which the loose ends and the tassels were trimmed.

Curved cloth

It would be an interesting challenge to get this effect on purpose, a curve down the length of the cloth.

The secret of this error lies in the winding of the linen warp. I wound half one evening, half the next. It might have just been that one day I was pulling the yarn tighter on the warp board. It could be that there was a second  factor - humidity. Linen is stiffer when drier, more flexible when damp.

I knew that there was a difference in tension when I was winding the warp on the loom, it was showing where the warp pulled through the lease sticks

(Super little lease sticks by the way, they came with the loom and you see them here joined together with a treasury tag and tied to the castle)

The warp in front of the lease sticks on the left is distinctly slack, whilst on the right the tension is fairly even. When the warp was wound on the ends on this side were a few inches longer. I trimmed them off before tying the warp on, assuming that the tension problem was resolved.

It looked fine when weaving, and fine when I first removed the cloth from the loom, only showing up when laid out flat to measure the piece before washing.

Something else I discovered very late, only when trying a few inches of wool weft near the end of the warp.  A threading error, that showed more with the wool and more on the reverse of the fabric.

Somewhere I have a mirror for inspecting the reverse of the fabric while it is on the loom - next time I should use it! This error hardly showed from the front with the cotton weft (left) although I would have seen it on the reverse (right).

Stick Shuttles

I want to explain why I prefer a short length stick shuttle (this is a 26cm shuttle made by Ashford) and why I wind my shuttles like this:

The yarn is wound in a figure of eight pattern which I learnt some while back from this post on Laura Fry's blog.

This is how it works as I weave, I don't have to twist or turn my shuttle to unwind the thread, it's all a natural and easy part of the weaving action.

Weaving on my Greg Meyer "Oonagh" loom

I don't have the spare time I once did to enjoy crafts and blogging, but I am getting my work/life balance organised so I have "a life" again after 2 years of all work, and re-organising aspects of the work to spend less time on business administration and more on editorial work.

The Oonagh loom I bought from Greg Meyer at Wonderwool Wales is part of finding craft time. It only takes up a third of my table and is small enough to pick up and carry around, so I can weave but still have the table available when I need it for paperwork.

It's warped, and I'm weaving again and what is more I've worked out I can blog as well, so long as I keep it short. So, this is a 15 minute post.

Pictures next:

I'm using these cotton yarns together as weft on a bright green linen warp.

All 12 shafts are in use with 3-1 and 1-3 twill taking 8 and plain weave borders on 4. I know I could have set this up on less shafts, but I wanted to use all of them - I haven't had a 12 shaft loom to play with before.

J C Rennie & Co, wool spinners

I have just enjoyed a blog post by knit designer Kate Davies about visiting the Scottish wool spinners J C Rennie and would encourage you to read too and enjoy the lovely photos.

J C Rennie's own website is here. The business was set up by two brothers in 1798, spinning locally grown wool for weavers working in their homes.

I have shade cards from J C Rennie as their wools are suitable for weavers, although I haven't used them yet due to the rather large stash of weaving yarns I acquired within the first few months of loom ownership which I have yet to work my way through!

Things for weavers from Wonderwool Wales 2012

Last weekend I was at the Royal Welsh Showground in Builth Wells for the two days of Wonderwool Wales. I was there to meet people, talk about YarnMaker, and come away with material to write about the show for the handspinners who read YarnMaker.

So, this post is for weavers. I came home with two superb weaving things, firstly a new loom. A 12-shaft Oonagh table loom from new British loom maker Greg Meyer.  It is 12" wide and folds with the warp on.  This is a really practical loom as I am short of space for weaving!  When I started working on YarnMaker in December 2009 I had to find office space, and in doing this I gave up part of my craft room. I have been shuffling things around trying to get them to fit ever since.

This is how things look today:

I can get to the table (where my new loom sits), to my spinning wheels, to the desk where I was sitting to take this photo, but the floor loom is difficult to access.

How to make space has been troubling me for some time. Just shifting stuff into another room while I weave and back again is not a good answer. One of the biggest problems is behind the floor loom, near the bench, where my Leclerc Table Loom is stored. I have nowhere else to move it to where it is not in the way. It is going to have to go. After all, it actually duplicates much of what I can do on the floor loom.  The Toika floor loom is not going, so the Leclerc loom must. I am consoling myself with the fact the Oonagh has more shafts. Because it folds flat, the Oonagh can fit under the table when I'm not weaving.

I also brought this back from the show:

A shade card for the Venne yarns sold by a new supplier, My Fine Weaving Yarn. They also import bamboo and soy silk yarns. The colours were hard to resist, so I've promised myself that if I use up some weaving yarns in the next 12 months I could buy some more next year.

Exhibition celebrating the work of weavers in Wales

I have just learnt about a current exhibition at the National Wool Museum of Wales, on until 8th January: Warp and Weft 2 - from handloom to production. This coincides with another superb event at the Oriel Myrddin Gallery in Carmarthen,Warp + weft, contemporary woven textiles, which features work by the following weavers - Peter Collingwood, Sue Hiley Harris, Ainsley Hillard, Makeba Lewis, Lucy McMullen, Ptolemy Mann, Ann Richards, Ismini Samanidou in collaboration with Gary Allson, Kathy Schicker, Reiko Sudo, Ann Sutton, Hiroko Takeda, Laura Thomas, Priti Veja.

Time to plan a trip to Wales?

Weaving and spinning

My sister pointed out that I haven't blogged for a while, days have slipped past here and I hadn't realised how they were turning to weeks, so here's a bit of an update on a couple of projects.

I finished the scarf that I was weaving with a handspun madder warp and have enjoyed wearing it the past couple of weeks. Here it is pictured with one of the scarves I wove last year. They both had similar Noro Sock Yarn warps, both 2.5m long on the loom and 8 inches wide, however, the scarf with the handspun warp is narrower because there are less interactions between warp and weft in the weave pattern and because the weft yarn shrank.

Both are lovely to wear, the wider scarf I wear folded, the narrow one wraps around like a stiff, warm collar. Longer tassels looked right on the narrower scarf, and I have been interested to notice that they swing about gracefully when I wear the scarf (unless it is tightly tucked in my button coat for extra warmth - still very wintery here!).

The Ashford Traveller wheel has been in use most evenings as I spin my natural dyed wool into yarns, pictured here in one of those useful baskets I wove last month.


The Traveller got to misbehaving again, lots of creaks and groans. I have removed the cardboard shim I used to fix a loose leg and replaced it with a slip of plastic cut from a milk carton, which should not compress so easily. Having done that, I realised all the legs were now loose so have done the same to them all! It is spinning beautifully again now. I hope to get some good tips on wheel care at an event organised by Wingham Wool Work at the start of next month when Richard Ashford will be visiting along with David Herring from the UK importers for talks, demos, art yarn lessons and wheel care. Richard Ashford is due to be at an event hosted by Wingham Wool on 1st and 2nd April, with The Threshing Barn on 3rd April, and possibly also Twist Fibre Craft studio on 30th March if enough people are interested, so if you do want to go along phone the appropriate shop now and book.

Getting back now to the weaving of my scarf, it occured to me that maybe not everyone knows about this handy little gadget which I bought from Handweavers Studio.


It is a balloon spring and fits on the shaft of my bobbin winder enabling me to wind my plastic Leclerc shuttle bobbins easily. The bobbin winder shaft is narrow and fits the cheap cardboard bobbins perfectly, but everything else needs wedging on somehow.


The Leclerc shuttles are lovely to hold and use.


I have got to know more new weavers recently, and more people taking up weaving for the first time, so thought it might be handy to include the odd weaving technique tip nowadays. This is what I do with the yarn end when I empty a shuttle bobbin. It slips into the same shed as the last pick, I take it across 1-2" and leave an end poling out of the cloth. The new yarn is started in reverse fashion, I lay a short end into the next shed, wrap it around the selvedge, then weave as normal. On the floor loom when working on wide warps with a heavy shuttle I find it necessary to hold the little end of the new thread while throwing the shuttle to stop it from pulling out.

When the new and old ends are several inches into the cloth I snip them off close to the fabric so that it is hard to see where they were.

Editing this post 09/03/09 to bring in this helpful comment from Alison:
Your tip is excellent, but can I suggest that you don't snip until the
fabric is fulled/washed/finished. I was taught to mend, finish, then
snip and trim fringes, in that order. If you don't overlap sufficiently
and snip first the over lap can be compromised. There's a better chance
of all being well if you finish first then snip. Thanks Alison!

While taking these photos I also thought you might like to see the swinging beater I have now fitted to my table loom. Very useful, as I can beat with the reed parallel to the cloth over a wider range.


For those of you who've missed this - The 2010 Challenge for weavers is started via Meg's blog and Kaz has already posted about it. I'm not participating due to other pressures on my time but am working on a blog post reviewing books on design.

Another blog post I'd like to call to the attention of all weavers is this wonderful post demonstrating how to tie a Weaver's Knot. Many thanks to Alison for mentioning it a few weeks back, it is a revelation as I have struggled to follow diagrams in books and been much puzzled as to how it became so well used in spite of being difficult to tie. Now I know there's a simple trick to getting it right.

A handspun, madder-dyed weft.

I could ask you to guess what is pictured below:
For most people this is an unsual sight and unexpected, probably not a fair question.

This is the underside of my Ashford Traveller spinning wheel.

Ever since I got this wheel I was trying to track down and eliminate odd creaks and groans from the wheel. I tightened and replace many screws. In spite of my efforts it was getting more creaky, and becoming very hard to treadle, especially I discovered on un-carpeted floors - a clue here. With a bit of investigation I discovered that every time I pressed the treadle one of the legs moved sideways. I found the leg is fitted in with a screw, and unlike the other three legs it was loose. When I undid the screw I could easily take it out, but I could not get it to fit back in without wobbling as the hole it fitted into was oversized. What you see in the photo is a shim of old Christmas card taking up the spare space. It does the job, no more wobbly leg.

However, there was still a groaning from the treadle. I found that every single screw in the treadle needed an extra half turn. Having sorted this out, I oiled everything and went back to spinning - wow! it's like a different wheel. Tip for anyone with a grumbling & groaning wheel: check all the joints, tighten all the screws, oil all the moving parts.


So, what have I been up to with this spinning wheel? Spinning a weft yarn to weave another scarf on my table loom. After I finished the handspun, handwoven scarf at Christmas I was filled with the joy of weaving and thought "another!". I pulled a pretty multicoloured Noro yarn out of a stash box for weft, prepared the warp, warped the loom, but then I was stuck. I just couldn't find a weft to match it. I tried cotton, I tried wools in different colours, I tried bright colour and I tried neutrals.

It dawned on me that the weeks I spent thinking about colours and weave pattern for the handspun & handwoven scarf I'd just finished were not just idle thinking but very important creative planning and design time.

I stopped to think.

One thought I had was that I have many different fibres to spin and I have dyes and I can create the yarn I want. I looked at some different colours and found I had Shetland wool fibre dyed that I had dyed with madder last summer and the orange-red colour was just what I needed for this warp.

So, weaving had to wait while I spun a new weft yarn.



I had spun all the madder-dyed wool I had, but didn't even have one full bobbin. I know a bobbin holds about 100g of yarn which is the amount I have used in the past for weft in a scarf like this.


Spinning had to wait while I dyed more wool.


I managed a reasonably close match, one ball is slightly more red, the other slightly more orange so I'm weaving alternately with the two yarns in two shuttles.


The pattern I've chosen is my favourite 4-shaft undulating twill, as you can see in the header row bellow. I wove the header in high-contast thick white yarn so I can see what is happening in the warp easily. As the straight edge shows, I needed to adjust the tension on some of the warp. Towards the right of the photo you'll see the white weft yarn doesn't quite reach the straight edge, although it does on either side. Looking at this I know that means I have some tighter weft threads in that area. The weft yarn packs up closer in tight sections so the edge of the weaving dips towards the weaver, whilst in a loose section the warp threads would bulge away.


It's good to be fussy and slow when you start a piece of weaving and correct little errors like this, I have learnt that leaving anything I'm not entirely happy with at this stage is likely to mean that later on the problem has become magnified and I am unhappy with the cloth. When I was a new weaver I rushed the loom set up, but after various different disappointments I learnt that being relaxed about preparing the loom and fussing over little things would save heartache later.

I'm delighted with the colour of my madder weft. Maybe I've spun it a little thick, but we'll have to see how it is when it comes off the loom.

Just to finish up, these are some of the wefts I tried that didn't work! The first was a green knitting cotton, as I like green and orange and though the shiny cotton yarn might be a good contrast with the Noro wool. It was not good.

I also tried neutrals, a grey and a soft brown.

I much prefer the madder-dyed yarn!

Additional information about weaving a handspun scarf.

Deborahbee left a comment on my post Handwoven Scarf, from the wool to the finish that I think deserves a detailed response:

I want to use some 2 ply handspun but am nervous of holding the tension.I have 6 ends on the warping mill and then lost confidence. I am going to re read your posts seeking tips.

I think you are probably finding, just as I did, that handspun wool yarn feels different to the commercial yarns I am used to. My yarn was spun semi-worstead style, but still had significant bounce in it (although less than if I had used rolags and spun woollen style).

I found winding the warp interesting, because my yarn was springy I started off winding tight, stretching the yarn, then realised this might not be a good idea. Maybe this is the stage you are at, Deborahbee?

The consequence of this was that the first few bouts of warp were wound a bit tighter and ended up shorter than the the last couple.

The difference evened out as I wound the warp onto the loom, a light weight on the warp ends (two one pint milk cartons, one-third full, tied on with a piece of linen yarn and a simple slip knot) and lease sticks made sure of even tension on the beam and the slack collected in from of the lease sticks. (I had a similar experience of seeing the tension even out at the lease sticks when I wove with linen!).

For weaving, the tension on the loom was probably the loosest I've ever woven with, and I was interested to find that the edges did not draw in and for the first time I wove an even width without a temple.

There were slight variations in the width along the length of the finished scarf, I put this down to irregularities in the handspun wool.

So thoughts on winding a handspun wool warp:

• concentrate carefully on just wrapping the wool around your warp board or warping mill without stretching it,
• a gentle weight on the yarn as you wind on and using lease sticks should even out any differences,
• the yarn is very forgiving, it is less important than with linen or cotton to have exactly even tension on all warp ends, as good as you can get it is going to be good enough, so don't fuss indefinitely,
  
• give it a go!

Comments from other people's experiences of preparing a handspun warp will be most welcome!

Handwoven scarf, from the wool to finish

(Click on the photo to view at a larger size.)

Having decided red is a good colour for a scarf for my Mother, I went to Wingham wools and bought a collection of dyed merino tops. The rich shade they call "cherry red" became my starting point and reference for selecting the other shades.

I picked out a couple of reds darker than the cherry, then a pink, to balance the pink I chose pale and deep purples, and then the vibrant shocking pink seemed to add a highlight tone to set the others off, and having a touch of bluish tone it seemed to bridge the gap between reds and purples.

I didn't plan this carefully beforehand, I just had fun in the colour shed at Winghams, picking things up, comparing with the other colours and assembling a collection that seemed right.

I took 60g of cherry red, and then smaller amounts of the other colours, splitting each colour in half so each singles yarns would have the same proportions of the colours. For spinning, I pre-drafted two colours at a time, usually but not always cherry red plus one other.

Here's the start of the first bobbin (on a Timbertops spinning wheel).

... and this is what the full bobbin looked like -

Bobbin two went on a different lazy kate for plying, and I used my Ashford Traveller with a new jumbo bobbin and jumbo sliding hook flyer, which took the full length (nearly 200g) of plied yarn.

Looking at the picture above, on the left side of the lazy kate, you can see an odd dangling black thread, untidily tied in s bow. This is fine black elastic which I am using as a brake to prevent bobbin over-run (the situation where the bobbin spins freely unwinding yarn faster than it can be plied). It works. Any lazy kate can have a brake with this simple method. If you look again at the bobbin on the Timbertops built-in lazy kate, you will see I used the same there too.

Part way through plying -

I got the yarn spun, skeined, washed and hung up to dry. This is when I discovered that large skeins off jumbo bobbins take longer to dry! Whilst waiting (it took about 24 hours) I started to think about what to use for weft, and a weave pattern.

Originally I was going to use a different weft, I thought maybe a touch of orange with the cherry, or a deep red and cherry colour. I spun short samples and held them up against the skein, none were quite right. Then I looked at the great 200g skein and thought, well, there's enough yarn there already, and I know that the colours match.

After tea one evening, I sat down with my wool sample blanket and looked at the different patterns it offered. I wanted to be a little more adventurous this time, the scarves I wove early in 2009 used diagonal 2-2 twill and a simple wavy twill, but there are so many possibilities in weaving, what else might work? How about... square E20, 4 by 4 Broken Twill threading and a 2-2 twill and plain weave shaft lift pattern. This would enable the warp to be dominate in stripes, but the colours in the weft to show in between.

To determine the sett, I used this wooden square, wrapped threads around one way then thread a weft through with a needle, trying out plain weave and 2-2 twill.

The sett for the twill was working out at 12 epi, but tight. I decided to weave at 10 epi to get a looser structure that had enough flexibility that it could shrink when wet-finishing and still have a good handle and drape. I must say, I thought this would be o.k., but as I didn't have time to weave and wash a sample I wash a little nervous until the finished scarf came out of the washing water and looked right when it was hung-up to dry.

Just before we get to the scarf, here's the rich colour of the warp as I was setting up the loom.

...and the tiny amount of warp waste after I'd tied tassels both ends of the scarf, no more than 20cm total...

and the scarf!