Tien Chiu

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Sewing with handwoven fabric

Since I can’t go cycling, and I can’t weave with my ankle the way it is, I spent most of today sewing.  I finished the muslin for the jacket, liked it, and began laying out the pieces on the fabric.  Cut them out, trying to keep the stripes matched, and overcast the edges (whew, that was a lot of sewing!).  Then I ironed the interfacing onto the front and cuffs, to give them a little more body.

I have now sewn up the body of the jacket and oh, it is wonderful!  The feel of the fabric (cashmere and silk) is just divine, and the drape is fantastic.  Medium weight, good body.  I’ve managed to cut around the more egregious skips (and turn the more obvious ones to the inside) so not too many flaws are showing.  The only complaint is that I didn’t quite manage to match up the stripes in front – I think I will try “fudging” it a little and if that doesn’t work, I’ll cut out a new side front.  I have about four feet of fabric left over and while I was initially frustrated at the “waste”, now I’m thinking of it as “peace of mind”.  I’m glad I wove it; I’ll find a use for it eventually if I don’t need it now.

I have also dyed the silk charmeuse for the lining, which I will sew up tomorrow.  I hope to complete it by tomorrow night and have photos to post on the blog.

Whee!  Who would have thought being injured could be so much fun.

Oh yeah, and I finished reading The Golden Compass.  Good book.  Looking forward to the next one.

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Ouch.

Looks like I twisted my ankle worse than I thought: it’s swelling up and it hurts when I put weight on it.  I’m not at all certain I can go for a thirty-mile ride tomorrow; it depends on how it feels when I get up in the morning, I guess.  I’m taking ibuprofen, staying off it, and keeping it elevated (yes, I know all about RICE!) in hopes that it will feel better in the morning.  I’ll probably bandage it up (the compression part of RICE) should I go riding in the morning, even if it feels better.

Meanwhile, all this of course means (faugh!) no more weaving tonight.  Which is a pity, because I was on a roll.  I’m almost halfway through the goldenrod shawl, and it’s progressing very nicely – still having a few skips and loose threads, but the lease sticks have helped A LOT.  I’m already considering plans for a trapeze.

Anyway, as I sit in bed with my ankle elevated, I’m alternately working my way through Chapter 3 of Bonnie’s book for my study group, and reading The Golden Compass.  Rare for me to be reading fiction nowadays – I usually find my various craft pursuits to be much more interesting – but since my various fiber arts are out for the moment, I figured I might as well catch up on my reading.  It’s a good book, and I’m finding myself being drawn into it.  I have the entire three-volume set, so perhaps I’ll read those after I finish this one.

Hopefully the ankle will heal up tonight, though, and I’ll be back to weaving and cycling in the morning.  (I sort of doubt it, given how it feels now, but hope springs eternal…)

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Weaving again, finally

I got into a minor accident this morning (a truck took off Esmeralda’s left side-view mirror), so between going to the car dealer and picking her up again, I don’t have enough time go riding.  (I also twisted my ankle as I got out of Esmeralda to inspect the damage, and it’s a little sore, so I don’t think I want to try riding 30 miles today.)  So I invested some of the time in weaving.  Here’s a photo of the brown-and-tan warp woven with the goldenrod weft in an orange peel pattern:

goldenrod-pattern.jpg

Even after Photoshopping it a bit it still doesn’t do justice to the richness of the gold weft, but it gives a decent idea of the pattern.  I’m not satisfied with this particular rendition of it – the orange peel patterning doesn’t show up well enough due to the low contrast between the gold weft and the tan-gold warp – but I still think it’s pretty.  I think I will probably weave the same pattern with the garnet weft afterwards, though, as it will be even nicer (I think) with a clear definition of the pattern.

Curiously enough, while the pattern isn’t obvious when seen head-on (as in the photo), it is quite visible when seen from an angle.  The magic of moire, I guess.

On the slate for today: weaving as much as possible of the goldenrod shawl, getting Esmeralda repaired, studying a bit more about user interface design, and getting into drafts with curves for my study group.

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Displeased

I got a close view of the jacket yardage as I was hard-pressing it (to bring up the shine of the silk warp).  I am not amused.  There are a LOT of skips in it, which are very visible (to me anyway) and they are through most of the length of the fabric.  I still plan to sew the jacket – I’m not about to throw all that work away – but I will definitely NOT be submitting it for jurying when I join the San Francisco weaving guild at the October jurying session.  I am quite distinctly displeased, the more so since I don’t know what exactly is causing it.  I don’t mind making mistakes if I learn from them, but I don’t understand what’s causing this, and thus, there’s no learning, merely frustration.

I have problems with skips on this loom.  I can’t weave more than a pick or two (literally) of plainweave without having one or more threads skip – so I don’t dare weave plainweave patterns.  I have no idea what’s causing it.  Lady Di doesn’t have a very large shed to begin with (just about enough to get a shuttle through), which doesn’t help, but something is causing skips in random places.  Sometimes a single thread will start skipping, sometimes it’s just short skips.

It seems reasonable that it might be a tension issue, but back when I was weaving on the Baby Wolf with the exact same warp yarns I had no trouble at all with plainweave.  So I think it’s something with the loom.  Darned if I can figure out what, though.  I thought it might have been the cable stretching (the one that broke), but now that the cable is fixed, it’s still doing it.  So I’m frustrated.  I think once I am done with this warp I will thread up with a long cotton warp and see if I can troubleshoot it.

It is also just about time for me to start weaving samples for the study group on Bonnie’s book, so I think I will try to weave off the shawls fairly quickly (after re-sleying to get rid of the gap in the reed) and rethread with a painted warp in blues and greens, sett for twill, and woven with a cream colored weft. Bonnie posted a photo to the study group of a painted-warp jacket made out of the samples woven for her class, and it looks really good!  I’m thinking I may try something similar.

Haven’t settled on fibers yet – the options seem to be silk, cotton, linen, tencel, and (weft only) cashmere-silk blend.  I’m leaning towards cotton and linen, for a light jacket.

The next few days are going to be sewing and dyeing, though.  Not only do I need to choose and dye a color for the next shawls on the brown/tan warp, but I need to dye about two pounds of mohair yarn for a couple friends who recently moved to the Arctic rural India and are living in a largely unheated stone house halfway up a mountain in the middle of winter.  And the local shops don’t stock warm yarns, only acrylic.  I offered to send them some extra stuff out of my stash, and since I only stock natural colors, I’m going to dye it in dark red and maroon for them (the colors they requested when I asked).  That plus dyeing the jacket lining fabric (china silk, I think, but I’ll have to check my remnant colection) should keep me busy for a day or two.

I also want to finish sewing up the muslin for the jacket before sewing up the final version – as displeased as I am with the fabric, I don’t want to waste it either!

So I have my work *ahem* cut out for me.

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Weaving, minor electronics, weaving database

I finally gave in and bought an electric cone winder to spare my shoulder the endless circular movements of ball-winding with very fine yarns (it took almost two hours for the fire shawl!). I promptly discovered that the ballwinder starts up too fast for fine cashmere yarns – the yarn breaks as the swift starts moving. So Mike went out and bought some parts at the hardware store, and showed me how to build a multi-speed switch using a fan control switch. It was simple, and rather neat – I thought it was really interesting! I’ve never done any electronics/electrical work so despite being very simple I learned something from it.

Unfortunately the multi-speed switch didn’t work to reduce the speed of the conewinder, so we’re going to try building something slightly more complex once the parts arrive. I’m looking forward to it – I have been vaguely interested in electronics for quite some time but have never had enough motivation to get over the initial (steep) learning curve. Perhaps this will help me get over it, or at least get a little closer.

Meanwhile, I am looking at other alternatives, like reducing the inertia of the swift. It’s been recommended that I try turning the swift sideways, which I plan to do, and/or build another swift out of an old bicycle wheel. I’d like to save that for a last resort since it would be another thing taking up VERY limited space, but I’m keeping it in mind.

I’ve also decided to build a weaving database to keep track of my drafts, as it’s difficult to describe the more complex ones in words. Ideally I would want something that allows me to enter a draft, a .jpg of that draft (WeaveIt Pro automatically generates .jpgs when a draft is saved), and one or more identifying tags (to make searching easier). Three page templates: the homepage, an individual draft page, and a search results page. The drafts themselves would continue to reside in labeled folders in the file system (this is what saves you when something goes wrong with your database) – the database would be for organizational purposes only.

This is undoubtedly overkill since I only have a few drafts, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking that, if successful, I could conceivably scale it up and provide a similar service to handweavers in general (organize your drafts via the Web). I don’t know if there would be much interest in it, but I think it might be useful for the handweaving community.

More to the point, though, I think it would provide great motivation to teach myself mySQL and PHP, which in turn would give me greater technical mastery of Web technologies I’d need to know as a Web product manager. It would also allow me to create a website that I could use as a demo for my Web design skills. So there are a lot of things that might be interesting in this project. I’ve ordered three books: one on mySQL, one on PHP, and one on web design using both. Once they arrive I plan to spend some time teaching myself to use them and then building out the site. What fun!

Finally, I have been weaving the brown and tan network drafted jacket, and have woven about 8″ so far. I may have to cut off the first 6″, though, as I had an error in my draft – I was one thread short in the repeat, resulting in a highly visible flaw in the network pattern. (This is what I get for not checking the draft before weaving. I thought I had checked it earlier, but apparently not.) So I had to insert the threads, and then I started weaving in not quite the right place, so there’s a break in the pattern. I may wind up using that section for cuffs or something where the break won’t be quite so obvious.

Anyway, it’s well started, and I hope to enjoy weaving it over the holiday weekend. Balsam Hill (the place where I’m contracting) shuts down Dec 31 and Jan 1, so I have a four-day weekend. This can mean only one thing: more weaving! (and database design, and electronics, and cycling, and…)