knitted blanks

October 15, 2011 by Tien Chiu

On a (paper) roll!

I finished unraveling the blank for the first dark panel today, and just love the resulting pirns:

wound pirns for Autumn Splendor dark panel

And, after an hour and a half of frustration, I succeeded in getting my $15, designed-t0-work-with-Win-98 printer to print with Windows 7, and moreover to print on a roll of paper as its specs advertised. Here is the pattern piece for the collar:

I’m thrilled to find that it works great with any length (not just the 44″ advertised) of paper, and moreover with any width of paper – you just set the dimensions to “user defined” and then print at whatever width you like. The more modern printers I’ve looked at don’t do that. So I can use 12″ butcher paper rather than the 13″ photo paper it was meant to take, bringing the price down from $1.60/foot to $0.02! Now that’s a savings I like! The print quality obviously isn’t as good as on paper intended for printing, but since I’m printing line diagrams, I really don’t care.

Plans for today: shop at farmer’s market, weave one dark panel, and work on the Autumn Splendor sewing pattern. Tomorrow I hope to weave one more dark panel, finish drafting the sewing pattern in Illustrator, and cut out the muslin. That leaves me the rest of the week to weave the final dark panel, overdye the light and dark panels, and sew up the muslin, before I see Sharon next Saturday.

Ambitious, but do-able, I think!

October 8, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Celebrating nine years of blogging!

Yes, on October 8, 2002, I embarked upon this blogging adventure. The first six months or so was actually a mailing list that I established for the 100-odd people who wanted to follow my travels through Southeast Asia…then I moved to Blogger, and then again to WordPress. It’s been nine years now and loving every minute of it!

Meanwhile, I have not been idle…all three blanks for the dark panels are now knitted and dyed. (One still needs to be rinsed out; the other two are dry and ready to unravel.) Here’s a pic of the first two blanks for the dark panels:

I’ve spread out part of one blank so you can see the knitted nature of it.

What’s next? Tomorrow I’m going to knit up the final two blanks (for the facings/collar), and start weaving up the final bright panel. Next week I will focus on getting the dark panels and the facings/collar panels woven. I’m hoping to have all the fabric woven by end of next weekend, following which they will need to be overdyed using fiber-reactive dyes. With luck I should have all the fabric ready by the next time I see Sharon!

October 7, 2011 by Tien Chiu

New colors

After two mind-numbing days, I’ve knitted two of the three blanks I need for the dark panels. As soon as I finish knitting the third (hopefully tomorrow!), I’ll take them out and dye them in the darker colors.

Which I have selected, starting from this puddle of samples:

and reducing to these nine colors:

I’m still considering the bluish purple that is in the middle of the bottom row. It’s really too blue for autumn purple, but overdyed with a warm wine red, I think it’ll work out nicely. I’m also debating the red at top left; it may be too assertive, fighting with the brighter panel for attention. On the other hand, since the collar will be purple, I don’t want to start in the purples, so red may work out just fine.

As a reminder, these colors are going into the darker panel:

Autumn Splendor, design sketch - asymmetric front and back

Off to bed! I need a break from all that boring knitting. Tomorrow I’ll be fresh again, and can finish knitting up the last blank. And then, it’s off to dye!

October 5, 2011 by Tien Chiu

Hey, wow! Math works!

I finished the second brightly-colored panel today. I had calculated (based on my samples) that a 70-needle row was almost exactly equal to a single 23.5″ pick of weft, and that at 64.5 picks per inch, 290 rows should yield 4.5 inches of woven fabric. And, thus, 11 sections of 290 rows apiece = 11*4.5 = 49.5 inches.

And then I knitted the blank, dyed it, unraveled it, and wove it up. Finished a few minutes ago.

And behold!

woven panel, 49.5 inches long, exactly as predicted!

(In case you’re wondering, the yellow “measuring tape” is actually a ribbon with measuring-tape markings printed onto it, courtesy of Joann Fabrics, which sells it in three-yard rolls. Handy for weavers!)

I’m also pleased to say that I benchmarked my weaving speed again, and it has actually increased from last time – 1.7 seconds/pick (hand thrown shuttle across a 24″ warp) as opposed to 1.8 seconds/pick previously (and 2.5 seconds/pick when I first measured!). This may not sound like a huge deal, but you may recall that my CompuDobby IV was originally too slow to keep up with me, and I had worried that even the sped-up version was going to slow me down. This is proof positive that it doesn’t. Even if I speed up by another 10% (which is the absolute best I think I could do), I’m certain the CD IV will be able to keep up. So I am very happy.

(For me, it’s not so much about the absolute speed, as it is about smoothing out the movements and making them more “elegant”, in the mathematical sense – which is to say, smooth, with exactly the amount of movement needed – nothing more, nothing less, and no wasted effort. But speed is a goal as well – since I weave yardage in fine threads, cutting the time for each pick lets me weave more, faster.)

At any rate, I am now done with weaving the second panel. I unraveled the blank for the third panel last night, so tomorrow morning I will start weaving the third panel and also start knitting the blanks for the next set of panels. At this rate, I may be done weaving by the time I see Sharon again, which will be in late October, and done with the project by the New Year!

October 4, 2011 by Tien Chiu

…but don’t you ever get bored?

I was explaining the Autumn Splendor project to a coworker today, and mentioned that I’d been working on it since April. He said, “Six months and it isn’t done yet? Don’t you get bored, working on the same thing for months at a time?”

The short answer is that no, I don’t. In fact, quite the reverse: I find long projects fascinating precisely because they are long; they give me time and space to explore different ideas. A weekend project, by way of contrast, is far more boring because there is rarely any meaty content to a weekend project. If I can get it on and off the loom that quickly, it’s because I already know exactly what to do…either because I’m following a recipe or because I’ve done that kind of project a bazillion times before. In short, I can only do a quick project if I’m not exploring, and because it’s the exploration that interests me, the quicker it is, the more boring it becomes.

That is not to say that a longer project couldn’t bore me. When I used to knit, sweaters were a real challenge because they involved doing the same thing over and over again, without learning much. Socks were easier because they were shorter projects and I could try out new ideas faster. I tried a crocheted tablecloth once, and that was a total disaster. The key, to me, is to keep myself learning and experimenting through the entire project. This typically involves doing a variety of things – with Autumn Splendor, I’ve been through devore, cross-dyeing, drafting my own sewing patterns, etc. – all new (or relatively new) to me and always changing. I rarely do the same thing more than two days in a row.

Sometimes the learning can be subtle. I don’t mind weaving long lengths of yardage in fine threads, even though it’s “the same thing over and over again”, because I use the time to fine-tune my weaving technique – how I hold the shuttle, the rhythm of my hands as they move from throwing the shuttle to beating to catching the shuttle on the other side. I have not got this perfected yet, and I doubt that anyone who does not weave lots of yardage can get enough practice to achieve a really smooth “beat”. It usually takes me at least half an hour to “settle in” and another half-hour to achieve a perfect rhythm, and even then it’s not consistent. It takes sustained weaving time over several days to really feel like I “get it” – time that I wouldn’t get if I weren’t weaving yardage with fine threads. So I enjoy it very much. It’s like doing T’ai Chi – aiming for that internal body awareness and unified motion of the whole body, fine-tuning slowly as I go.

And, in case you’re wondering where I am in my dyeing/weaving, I finished unraveling the blank yesterday morning (my, that went fast!) and am about 18″ into the weaving:

I like it so far! There is color variation, but it is subtle, and the color transitions are coming out nicely. There were some ominous lighter patches towards the bottom of the blank, which may not look so good, but I’m hoping I can adjust it somewhat in the second dyeing. We’ll see what it looks like, first.