My workshop last weekend went well! It was a two-day workshop on the design process. It included quite a bit of information – processes and tools from getting from idea to finished product, guidelines for good design (both functional and visual), and an opportunity for instructor critique of designs and finished pieces. It also included a juror’s tour through the Fiber Celebration 2014 exhibit, looking at the strong and weak points of each design. I added quite a bit of material to my previous rendition of the workshop, and I think they improved the workshop a lot. The only thing I really should have done is charge a materials fee! With over 20 pages of double-sided handouts per student, photocopying got quite expensive. Something to keep in mind for next time!

Anyway, here is a photo of me with some of the workshop participants:

I flew home on Monday, and immediately got to work on the color study. Work was pretty busy, but I put in a few hours on Tuesday and Wednesday, threading it up:

And this morning I got up at 5am and put in a three-hour marathon, during which I finished threading, sleying, and tying on:

I have a guild meeting tonight but am home for lunch and hope to do a bit more debugging before going back to work. It was a relatively simple threading – straight draw on eight shafts for each of three colors, plus another eight shafts for the white dividers between sections, plus another eight shafts for the selvedges. Eight shafts for the dividers and eight for selvages is overkill, but since I had plenty of shafts to spare, I decided to use them. (It’s amazing how difficult it is to use up a full forty shafts!) So I am hoping that not too much debugging will be needed.

I haven’t decided what liftplan to use yet. The advantage of threading each color on a different set of shafts is that I can control them independently, probably in eight-shaft satin to maximize possibilities for shading. The downside is that it gives me one more knob to keep track of (actually three more knobs, one for each color) in an already complicated study. I wish I could just settle on one possibility, and weave that on all sixteen color combinations. Unfortunately, I don’t know what I want to explore yet, so I need to keep my options open, even if it does complicate matters.

And the soap I made before leaving for Colorado was ready to unmold and cut! Here are photos of the unmolded soap and the cut bars:

It will need to cure for a few weeks before we can use it, but I’m thrilled nonetheless. It’s made from a mix of 50% palm oil and 50% coconut oil, and I find I prefer it to purchased soap. Usually Mike makes it, but he showed me how to do it this time, so either of us can make it in the future.

Amidst all this frenzied weaving and soaping activity, I still have some time to play games. Here, for example, is a game Tigress likes to play with me: Who Can Get Into Bed First?

As soon as I turn down the sheets to get into bed, she comes rocketing into the room to try to beat me to the bed. Of course she is much faster than me (it helps that she’s 40+ years younger 🙂 ), so she always wins. But I get my way in the end: I simply toss a cat toy off the side of the bed, whereupon she rockets off to grab the toy, and I can get into bed. A win for all involved!

I spent eight hours yesterday getting the color-study warp onto the loom. That is, of course, an excruciatingly long time to spend beaming on a single warp, but this was an extraordinarily complex warp, with four separate colorways that needed to be interspersed in the raddle and then beamed on together.

I started by putting the bouts into the raddle, one bout at a time. That meant leaving gaps for the other colors, which in turn meant a lot of counting. Now, I was a math major and am therefore incapable of doing simple things like counting and addition (“A solution exists and is unique. Don’t bother me with the details!”), so this took considerably longer than you might expect, checking and double-checking and correcting mistakes. But I eventually got all four colorways into the raddle:

Then it was time to tie onto the warp beam. Because my warping wheel doesn’t create end loops, I needed to gather the ends for each section, align them so the color changes matched, and tie them in a knot so they could be attached to the warp beam. Then I had to even out the tension across the entire warp.

Here’s what it looked at the beginning:

Looks like a tangled rat’s-nest, doesn’t it?

After an hour or two of fiddly adjustments, though, it looked a lot better:

It looks like the color changes are misaligned near the viewer, but that’s an optical illusion: they lined up nearly straight when viewed from the front.

I wound up using a triple trapeze to keep the warps from fouling on each other. My trapeze is a rod hung from the ceiling, so I just added two more rods:

Each of the colorways is on a separate rod, except for the white one which shares a rod with another colorway. As there were only 40 threads in the white colorway, that wasn’t much of an issue.

I was pretty smug about how the color changes lined up. Here is the warp beam near the end of the beaming process:

There is only about three inches of variation across the entire warp – not bad after 12 yards of winding-on!

I made a technological advance on this warp. A weaver named Ulrike Beck had written me an email after seeing my fine-threads article in a recent issue of Handwoven. Ulrike mentioned using acrylic tubes rather than wooden lease sticks, so I had to give that a try:

They are a dream! Unlike wooden lease sticks, they are perfectly smooth and perfectly round, so they just glide through the warp. And they are flexible enough to bend instead of breaking. I love them. So thank you, Ulrike!

(My new lease sticks are 1/2″ round tubes of clear acrylic – they have no holes, but as I tape together my lease sticks rather than fussing with strings through holes, that doesn’t bother me a bit.  I suppose you could drill holes if you wanted to, but tape is so much faster than string!)

The next step will be to thread the warp, but that may have to wait a week or so. I’m flying out to Colorado on Wednesday for Fiber Celebration 2014, where I will be jurying the show and teaching a workshop on the design process in craft. I’ve made a ton of changes to the workshop, and still need to write one handout and two presentations. So that will take priority, at least for today.

Meanwhile, here is Tigress, demonstrating on the blinds how she would “help” me beam the warp onto the loom. Somehow, this has not convinced me to let her into the weaving studio…