A bonanza of progress has arrived on my doorstep!
First, I received the redrafted coat and dress patterns from my sewing mentor yesterday! I’m really excited about this, of course, and can’t wait to sew up the muslins. Which is a good thing because I am meeting with her on Sunday, so will likely spend all day Saturday sewing muslins (with a side trip out to San Francisco to see Sandra Rude at the KPFA craft show). Photos, of course, once I get those together.
Second, I have woven the first yard of my coat fabric! It is going MUCH faster than I expected, albeit more frustratingly. The problem is that the metallic yarn is springy and slippery and loves to LEAP off the pirn and tangle itself up as I’m weaving. I’ve improved my pirn-winding technique and that helps, but I’ve had to throw away nearly 1/3 of the yarn I’ve wound on. I fortunately have gobs of the yarn, but I just don’t like wasting that much of it – it’s beautiful, precious stuff and I want to KEEP having plenty of it!
Here’s a photo – I was trying to capture some of the glitter and some of the pattern. This photo is closer than the others were, but still doesn’t do the fabric justice. It’s some of the prettiest fabric I’ve ever seen, let alone woven:
Anyway, I asked for advice on the springy yarn and got some excellent suggestions. I am going to put fur in the end-feed shuttle today to hopefully tame some of the springiness, and then Carol, a very generous fellow weaver, has offered to loan me her Toika double-bobbin boat shuttle for the duration of this project. I am also going to get in touch with Bluster Bay to see if I might be able to get them to make me a custom boat shuttle, though I don’t know if they’ll be able to get me one in time for this coat. Still, it would be nice to have one for future projects – this is not the last time I’ll use this metallic yarn!
Last, but most important, registration opened for the Complex Weavers conference today. So, of course, I signed up as soon as I got up this morning, and I think I got all the seminars I wanted. Whew! I’ve never been to Complex Weavers, but the seminars sound so interesting that I can’t wait to get there. There’s also the Convergence conference, but as I only have so much money and vacation time to spare, I will probably only do the exhibit and vendor halls. The courses at Convergence are more general-appeal, whereas my interests are all focused on what you can do with computer-assisted drafting and 24 shafts, for which Complex Weavers is better.
Pretty pictures of the coat muslins coming, tomorrow or the day after…
I don’t know if this will help, but when I use metallic thread on my sewing machine, I have to have the thread coming direcly off the side of the spool because if it is pulled off the top it gets curlier and curlier, eventually forming a snarl that will either get caught on something else, or make a know that catches in the tension. I’m very new to weaving, and have heard many love the end feed shuttles, but is there a way to use a side feed shuttle and add the fur or somethig for tension so the thread could feed off the side of a bobbin, but still have a bit of tension? Sometimes I’ve used the round end of safety pins taped to a machine for extra guides, and wonder if somehow they could be used as extra guides or temporary tension for a side feed shuttle? (just some food for thought)