A day in the Garden

Today was the Artist’s Day at the Pegg Garden, and it was really fun.

When I left home the weather looked great, but before I got to the garden, it started to sprinkle with rain. It never really came down hard, but it was off and on drizzly all day and my choice of footwear was suboptimal for the conditions. I had slip on shoes (because I was going to be spinning and I take my shoes off when I spin) that got soaked … and my bare feet were frozen in no time.

However, I found a spot to set up underneath a lovely big crabapple tree, where I could hang the woven coats for everyone to see…

and then tucked my table and wheel under the branches where I was sheltered from the rain:

After a couple of hours I was thoroughly chilled, so I took my sweater off and wore my gray coat – hey, I can model it while I work! Lots of people were interested in the coats, I gave out  lots of cards so hopefully there’ll be some orders through the Etsy shop.

I haven’t posted the new swing coat design on Etsy yet, but it’ll be going up soon … here are a few better pictures of the Creamsicle coat. (Yes, I’m taking custom orders for other colours, or this coat in wool/alpaca!)

I love the swingy centre back pleat. It’s really comfy and warm – one lady tried it on during a bit of a rainshower and stayed under the tree chatting with me until the rain passed, keeping warm in the wool coat!

I sold a few small items, and got to meet and talk to a lot of great people. It was a really fun day!

Now to finish the last minute packing arrangements and catch some sleep before the early (early!) departure for Ontario tomorrow morning!

If I tried to put all this in my daytimer…

… I’d need an extra page.

So here's what I've done so far:

I got the motorhome cleaned, scrubbed, and smudged with incense. Put bedding on the beds. Loaded some canned goods into the cupboard. Stove, water, and water heater tested. (Need to test the furnace tomorrow!) Tried to start it, no go, probably needs a boost – The Reluctant Farmer is taking care of that. Took out some of the shop stock so that at least that much will be ready when I get home from Ontario. (More on that in a bit.)

I've also been doing a bunch of laundry in our new washing machine - the old one died a long-anticipated death on Thursday morning, and we were able to pick up a new one (well, new to us – the people had listed it on Kijiji just that day, and their place was not far off my route home from counselling, so it worked out perfectly). The new machine is WONDERFUL – it’s really big, and very quiet, and doesn’t dance across the floor or complain about being unable to drain. When I arrived to pick it up, the people were there talking with a friend who’d obviously come by on his way home from work. I recognized the company name on his truck, as it’s the same place my friend with the horses works. I asked if they might know one another and sure enough, they do. “Oh yeah,” the guy said, “he was talking to me about this McGavin’s Bread wagon he’s gonna restore …” I laughed. “He was at my house yesterday with one of the spokes for that wagon, I’m taking it with me when I go to Ontario so my wheelwright friend can make copies!" Apparently that detail had been mentioned in the conversation … it was quite a coincidence! I felt all, I dunno, famous or something.

So, laundry – which dries nice and quick outside in this sunny and somewhat breezy weather, and motorhome prep, and also getting ready for the show tomorrow. It’s Artist’s Day at the Pegg Garden, and I’ll be there selling my woven items, one hand knit scarf (in really wild muppet yarn), and my books … and weaving, and spinning, and generally just being a fibre artist where everyone can watch. I also have some fabric with me so I can do the tests of ecoprinting with the plants that grow in the garden in advance of our workshop coming later this summer (the workshop is the last weekend in August, also at the Garden). I’ll need to be there a bit early so I can wander off and get plant samples rolled up into fibery cocoons for steaming and colour setting. They have to sit for a few weeks, so I need to get them wrapped and steamed before I leave so they can sit and do their marinating thing while I’m off gallivanting around.

I did get the wheel, spindles, and all my stuff out into the van tonight – and I took my gray coat, to show as a sample of what can be done for custom work (it’s also a different shape, so I want to have both the swing coat and the blanket coat there to display) … and I grabbed some yarn so I can warp up the little loom once I’m there. I’d sort of thought I might do that ahead of time, but really, I’m out of energy and I’ll have plenty of time tomorrow as the show goes from 11-4, and warping is just another part of the whole adventure so people might as well see that too.

Oh, and yesterday I did most of my packing for my trip to Ontario – I am gone all day tomorrow, and I have to be at the airport for 6:30 Monday morning (which I clearly did not process when I chose that flight time … an 8:30 am departure seems quite reasonable, until you factor in the need to be at the airport two hours early and the fact that it takes over an hour and a half to get to the airport from home). We will be adding in time to stop for coffee on the way, trust me. I’m heading to see my parents, and then my sister and brother in law will join up with us for a day, and Friday I’ll be heading to Burlington for the Ontario Handspinning Seminar where I will be helping out my friend Wheelwright with his antique spinning wheel sales and assisting during the keynote speech he’s giving. Oh, and doing the last minute assembly of the giveaway items that he was asked to make for the Saturday night banquet! (I know what they are, but I think they are a surprise so I won’t say.) It sounds like it’s gonna be a blast.

Then once the conference is over on Sunday afternoon, I’ll hop on the train and go to Oshawa to visit some of my Chosen Family, and Monday afternoon I fly back home.

Then I do a bunch of laundry, go for groceries, load up the motorhome and head to Olds for Fibre Week!

I am gonna need all of July to recover from this, but it’s gonna be an awesome ride.

Stay tuned for more of the adventure!

Artist’s Day at the Garden

I’ve been staggeringly busy getting ready for Artist’s Day at the Pegg Garden, which is this coming Sunday (won’t you please come out and see me?) in Lac Ste Anne County.

Here’s the blurb on the event:

Art in the Garden
Sunday, June 9th, 11am-4pm
George Pegg Botanic Garden
Outdoor show and sale featuring local artists, art demonstrations, live music and children's activities!
- Adults- $8, Students/Seniors- $5, Preschool Children- Free 
- Admission includes a showbook with artist biographies and entry into the door prize draw
- A wide range of artists: fine art & sculpture, pottery, photography, woodwork and fibre art
- The children's art corner will engage the youngest visitors 
- Local musician Neil Lightfoot is gathering an eclectic mix of singer-songwriters to entertain throughout the day
- Many artists will be demonstrating their crafts, providing an opportunity to not only see art but experience the artistic process!

- Refreshments & Garden Memberships will be available for sale

Now, as one of the artists, I needed to have things to sell at this lovely event … which meant I needed to spend some time at the loom!

So, I have the Ode to Joy works completed: the fabric was really interesting, in both the multicoloured cotton and the purple cottolin (cotton/linen blend). In the end, I got three tea towels, three headbands, and two placemats from the warp that I wound, and I’m quite pleased with it all.

There’s also the green tea towels I had done earlier, and the samples I wove when I was first testing out the cotton on the loom – those ended up as a drawstring bag, which would be perfect for a sock project on the go, or maybe a small shawl in progress.

Here are some pictures of everything together:

And here’s one of the headbands, in use taming my rather wild mane:

And oh, there’s also a gray wool floor mat, which I don’t have a photo of, and the Creamsicle Coat, which is now all finished: hood, cuffs, pocket, buttons, and lovely back pleat.

Everything’s been tagged and folded and is ready to go to the sale on Sunday.

Now I just need to warp up the little loom so I can do my weaving demo while I’m there, and find something to spin and choose a wheel to take along so I can demo that as well … and yeah, we’re good to go.

The coat, on a person. Me, in fact.

I wore it when I drove to get the mail and take my library books back … yep, it works. :)

Hand woven wool coat: completed

It’s done. :)

This is:

• approximately 3 pounds of yarn
• five hours of loom preparation
• around eleven hours of weaving
• about two hours of finishing work

Every single thing was done by hand. Seams all hand stitched then pounded flat with a rubber mallet while still damp from a final washing. Buttons picked out of a bin at a local antique store and carefully fixed to the wool. Button loops made of braided leftover warp threads. It’s about three of my work days, and very much worth it, I think.

Once it is fully dry, I’ll get some pictures of it on an actual person, but you can see what it looks like here.

I’m very pleased with it, pleased enough, in fact, to say that I’m ready to take requests, if anyone would like one made. The yarn comes in a wide range of colours: two or three blended together seems to give a very nice effect, but I think it’d also be lovely in a solid bright colour, like red. (I have always loved red coats.)

If you’d like one, send me a note* and we can discuss the details! For $325 you can have a custom woven knee-length coat in your preferred colours, with hood and cuffed sleeves, closed with your choice of buttons, toggles, braided ties, or metal clasps.

 

* Contact information is available on the main Apple Jack Creek website.

All the pieces

I warped the loom today for the sleeves and got them woven – yep, all in one day. I started warping midmorning and was weaving by just after lunch, finishing both sleeves by late this evening.

Here’s a sleeve on the loom: it has stripes in the warp as I was running low on the light gray used elsewhere in the coat. I really like the effect, and I think I’ll plan to do striped warps on most of the production coats.

They’ve now come out of the wash, and they fulled up nicely just like the other pieces did:

And, now I can see all the pieces together:

The long body pieces are on the back of the chair, partially covered by the hood, and the sleeves are on the arm of the chair.

The darker yarn was used on purpose at the hem and cuffs, as those are the parts most likely to get dirty, and I figured it might show less on the darker yarn. :)

Tomorrow, it all gets put together into a coat!

Coats have *two* sleeves.

Math and I, we are not best friends.

Today I got the second body panel finished, the hood woven, and one sleeve …  I didn’t put enough warp on for both sleeves. And now I’m second guessing the sleeve length calculations anyway, so that’s fine, I’ll add some more warp and do two proper sleeves next time I am weaving.

The two body pieces are presently in the washer, fulling. Anxiety provoking? Yes. :)

So let me tell you the other trick I used when warping this project. The body panels are the widest, they need almost the full width of the loom. But the hood is narrower, and the sleeves narrower still, and there’d be either a lot of wasted warp or some futzing around trying to make it all fit on the same width of warp. So, I improvised.

Because I have a sectional warp beam, I wound the widest part of the warp just long enough to do the body panels. Then the middle part was long enough to do the body panels plus the hood, and the very centre was long enough to do the body panels plus the hood plus (one, but shoulda been two) sleeves. When I finished weaving the second body panel, the outer warp sections were all used up, so I just cut them free and let the fabric hang loose. The centre threads used for the hood were all still connected and under tension, so it worked out fine. When the hood was done, same trick … cut a few more threads at the back and I was left with just enough warp to do the sleeve. A little bit of futzing and I can get the last sleeve woven off as well, then it’ll be a matter of piecing everything together properly.

The pattern called for weaving a slit into the coat body where the arms go, but I forgot to do that, and with the heavy fulling I think cutting the fabric and stabilizing the edges with stitching is going to be fine. That also allows for a bit more flexibility in how things go together, too, and it’s the way the Hudson’s Bay blanket coats are done.

The machine is spinning.

Maybe it’s almost done.

… pace … pace … pace

BEEPITY BEEP!

…

…

WHEW! It worked!

(bad lighting indoors at night, sorry)

The panels are almost *exactly* the size called for in the pattern: 25” wide instead of 25.5” (but there is a lot of ease in the pattern so that’s fine) and 51” long (pattern calls for 45”, and I could clearly have gone shorter, this’ll be nearly ground length). The fringes felted up nicely, just like they did on the horse blanket. There’s a pattern error or two, but nothing horribly noticeable and hey, it’s hand woven and it’s the first one, so … that’s fine by me.

I have the hood and the part of a sleeve / possibly a full sleeve, depending how things work out in the washer now, so that I have all the measurements I need for when I warp up the loom next.

It’s progress!

-----

Okay I got the hood and the ‘possible sleeve’ out of the washer and measured. I need to do the sleeves differently, they’ll be the same width as the hood on the loom, so that makes warping a bit simpler. I’ll warp up for just two sleeves the day after tomorrow and get those woven up, then I can sew!

On tomorrow’s to do list: buy button thread. :)

The first coat, underway

I got the loom threaded and sleyed today, and started weaving the first ‘body piece’ of the coat. It’s woven in two big pieces, left side and right side, then the hood, then the sleeves.

Here you can see the bottom edge of one of the body pieces: hemstitched to help it hold shape during fulling. The bottom is  woven in a dark gray on the medium gray warp.

About twelve inches up from the hem the weft switches to a light gray, and the rest of the body will be woven in the lighter gray. I’ve been going very slowly, as I have some knots in the warp that are giving me trouble so I’ve had to experiment with different ways to work around them. The fulling process will hide most of the spots where things have been sticky, so I’m not worried, it’s just one more skill to learn.

In about four hours I wove 3’ of fabric.

Tomorrow I should be able to finish this body piece and start on the second, at least that’s the plan so far.

It’s not as complicated as it seems

The following opinion may be blasphemous but I'll say it anyway: I don't think there is anything particularly 'mysterious' about weaving. There are a zillion ways to thread the loom and make patterns, but the basic things are all the same.

To weave, you need to know these things:

• how to get your warp ready and beamed on with even tension (and there are actually several ways to do this, so you should try them all and see what works best for you and your equipment)
• how to thread your heddles and sley the reed (which is different for various types of looms, but essentially consists of poking a thread through a hole, sometimes with the aid of a little hook device, keeping track of where you are in the sequence as you go)
• how to do tie ups (if you have treadles) (which means connecting two things together with a loop of string and/or  clips of some kind)
• how to properly toss the shuttle / manage selvedges (keep the edges snug but allow extra thread on the weft toss so your edges don’t draw in too tightly, and do it evenly)
• how to hemstitch (this keeps your fabric from unravelling, and there are several ways to do it – the one I like best is basically a loop around a group of warp threads followed by a blanket stitch into the woven fabric)
• how to wet finish your fabric (because it ain't finished till it's wet finished: this means washing and possibly steaming or otherwise abusing your finished fabric so it ‘sets’, the specific technique varies with the fibres involved)

The rest is details and practice.

The equivalent for spinning would be to say you have to know how to prepare and select fibre, how to draft, how to insert twist with whatever equipment you have, and how to ply. I mean, yes, there's a lot of fine detail that isn't covered in that short list, but if you know how to do those basic things all the rest comes with practice and looking at what you are doing and saying to yourself "how could I do this more efficiently/effectively?"

For weaving, looking at different pattern drafts and skimming books about weaving is really interesting to me - like looking at knitting patterns and seeing different ways of constructing objects with sticks and string, or watching other spinners work with spindles and wheels and picking up little tricks from how they hold their hands or whatever. You figure things out as you do them: you realize “oh, if I thread the edges in basketweave, I don’t have to worry about the twill not catching on every pass” or “this fabric will collapse a lot as soon as I take it off the loom, so I need to be gentle with the beater so I don’t squash it too much now, it’ll snug up later on in the process”. Or, a really cool thing I learned from a library book recently, “If I skip a bunch of slots in the reed then do a bunch side by side, I get fabric with vertical stripes of solid fabric interspersed with more open sections”. (I want to make curtains like that.)

But, really, it's just not as hard as it looks. The basic steps are the same, whether you are working with 2 shafts or 12 - it's not that you thread heddles and tie up treadles differently, you just have more of them. Yes, designing your own patterns gets more complicated with more options but there are so many references out there, why wouldn't you start off by following what others have worked out, see how it works, and then go off on your own? That's how I learn, anyway.

And now, I’m off to wind a bunch of bobbins. Gotta start on a coat!

Weaving with wool

The wool saddle blanket sample project is on the loom at long last: it took about two hours to wind on the warp, all 37” wide, then another 3 hours to thread the heddles and sley the reed, then another half hour to lash on to the front beam and fiddle with the tie up.

I puttered about for a few rows with a broken twill pattern, but I wasn’t getting the size of shed I wanted, not for a warp that wide: I really needed to be able to give the shuttle a toss and have it slide all the way over, but it kept snagging. So I changed the tie up and went to a plain twill: the heddles are threaded with basketweave at either edge, so it doesn’t end up having big gaps at the selvedges and I don’t need a floating selvedge thread.

So far, so good:

I put a stripe of darker yarn near each edge, just to see how the pattern looked with different colours.

Can you see the strong diagonal stripe in the fabric? That’s the identifying mark of a twill weave. Blue jeans are done in a twill weave, if you look closely, you should be able to see the diagonal lines in the weave on your pants. It makes for a strong fabric with good drape, and that’s what I’m after here, so that’s what we’re trying.

The sample is about the same size as I’ll be using for the coats – same width, within a couple of inches, and I need to see how it comes out of the washer. It’ll shrink, in both length and width, though probably different percentages in each direction, and I need to know how much so that when I set up for a coat, I can weave to the pre-shrinkage measurements and know what size it’ll end up after fulling in the machine.

So, that’s what I did today. Now, to spin and watch Star Trek TNG on Netflix. I had completely forgotten some parts of the episodes I’ve watched so far, but at the same time, I’ve found myself quoting dialogue in places! My brain stores the strangest things.

Yes, I am a geek who loves science fiction and all things fibery.

Unveiling the New Venture

I mentioned a new venture a little while back … some new equipment I acquired with an eye towards using it as a means of generating some revenue.

Curious what this equipment is? I bet some of you have guessed … it’s not much of a stretch, given my passion for all things fibre.

Allow me to introduce you to Mira, a four shaft counterbalance LeClerc loom. I found her on Kijiji: her previous owner had done some rug weaving a long time ago, but the loom was unused and needed a good scrub down, some new bolts and strings, and a new home. All of that I can provide!

A thorough washing with Murphy’s oil soap got the gunk off and a coat of lemon oil spruced up the wood the rest of the way. The strings in this picture have since been replaced with sturdier ropes (shoe laces, ribbon, and bias tape, actually) – I’ll order the proper strings from LeClerc at some point, but it’s working with what I have, and budgetary constraints are what they are.

The next step was to get it warped and threaded and do some test weaving. (Well, after moving it upstairs – I did the cleaning in the living room on New Year’s Eve, but the loom was up in the fibre loft by just after midnight.) LeClerc has excellent documentation on their website, so I was able to figure out how to get a couple of sample warps put on and some fabric woven … the fabric isn’t really useable for anything, it’s too thick to be used as a scarf or anything else I can think of … maybe a cat scratch pad?

Useable or not, it’s a great way to find out what the loom can do – different treadling patterns, different tie ups … and I am weaving with thrift store yarns so I don’t feel bad about ‘wasting fibre’. I can weave a lot of test fabric for the price of a class … this is weaving home school!

After a couple of skinny test warps, I got a wider warp put on and started weaving ‘for real’. The loom has a sectional warp beam, which means I can wind on the warp for two inches of width at a time. This is awesome, because I really hate dealing with the long chains of warp … I always get it tangled and make a mess. And I lose count when I’m winding. (If you aren’t a weaver, the translation of all this is “sectional warp beams are cool because they are much less hassle than the alternative methods”). (Also, the fact that the loom came with a sectional warp beam should have made it a lot more expensive than it was … the add-on price for the sectional beam alone is almost what I paid for the whole loom!)

There was one minor problem: I don’t have a tension box or a spool rack (translation: “the extra pieces you need to use a sectional warp beam effectively”). I also don’t have the $300 it would cost to acquire a tension box and a proper spool rack, so I looked at a lot of pictures online and pondered. Eventually, with the help of the Reluctant Farmer, we got something rigged up that works reasonably well: the finished contraption involves a picture frame filled with pegboard, some skinny boards with holes drilled in them at intervals, several knitting needles, duct tape bobbins, a very small rigid heddle and a c-clamp. Yeah, it’s pretty redneck, but hey, I can get a warp wound on with minimal hassle and pretty decent tension, and I didn’t have to buy anything!

I beamed a wider warp a few days ago using the new contraption and today I threaded and sleyed the loom (translation: “I did the first part of getting the loom ready a few days ago, and today I did all the fiddly stuff”). Once that was done, things went fast: two tea towels got woven today!

There are several treadling errors and a tie up mistake, but it’s something close to a broken twill, and the end result is, indeed, two functional pieces of fabric. Odd patterning doesn’t affect the ability of cotton cloth to dry dishes, after all.

The next test will be done in wool: probably a saddle blanket sized piece, as I know some horses who will wear a saddle blanket even if it has some mistakes in it, and I need to make a large piece of fabric in order to test how much the wool shrinks during fulling and how thick the finished fabric is. (More translation: fulling is when you take woven or knitted fabric and shrink it on purpose … if you have a wool coat, chances are it’s been fulled.)

I need to test how much the fabric shrinks during fulling because I intend to make this:

It’s a coat modeled on the Hudson’s Bay Blanket coats: fringed at the shoulders (to help shed water and add warmth), buttoned along the front overlap, with a big hood and some coloured stripes on the sleeves and hem.

In fact, I intend to make many of them. And sell them.

The prototype should be ready in a few weeks … once I get the saddle blanket done and tested, I’ll be ready to warp up the loom for the first coat. Once I have the prototype woven, I’ll be able to figure out costs and a retail price.

I’m excited about this. Weaving goes amazingly fast (compared to knitting) and it’s great to feel truly productive.

So, anybody want a coat? :)