Braids 2012

My commitment to YarnMaker meant I was unable to partcipate in the workshops at Braids 2012, the Braid society conference held in Manchester a couple of weeks ago, but the organiser kindly took a booking from me for the conference dinner and so I was able to pop down to Manchester (less than an hour's drive) and meet old friends - some of whom I have known for years over the internet but not met before in person. It was a super evening and gave me an insight to how much I was missing out on! The workshops sounded fantastic and the opportunities to talk and exchange skills and make friends were greatly enjoyed by everyone.

The next Braids conference will be in 2016 in Seatle, so popping in for dinner won't be an option for me.
Link to Braid Society website, link to Laverne Waddington's blog post about the conference.

One person I met at the dinner was the person I sold my first Marudai on to, when up-grading from this acrylic stand to a wooden replacement, and I recalled that I hadn't got around to posting up photos of the acrylic stand. Although not so nice to work with as wood, it was lovely for photos and good for a beginner as you can see exactly what is happening.

These can be bought in the UK from The Carey Company, Jacqui Carey who runs this business with her husband is also author of the most useful beginners book I have found - Japanese Braiding: The Craft of Kumihimo, I couldn't see this on her website, so here is a link to Amazon UK. 

 My new Marudai was second hand, found on eBay with 16x 100g weights. The maker was Leanda, no longer trading, but Carey Company also sell wooden Marudai, and so does Michael Williams.

Here are a few simple braids -

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.