I finished Kathy’s scarves on Monday night! Here they are:

I love them! In fact, I love them so much that I was tempted to tell Kathy that a wild Heffalump had eaten the package en route to the post office. But a deal is a deal, so they went winging off on Tuesday morning, and they should arrive on the 24th – just in time for Christmas.

And, because people have been asking about our delightful Fritz and playful Tigress, here’s a shot of the photography “studio” – complete with some very helpful feline assistants. (Thanks to Lieven for all the photos!)

I’ve finally started weaving Kathy’s scarves! They are coming out beautifully. Here’s a peek at the first section:

And the second section, just after the phoenixes:

I am weaving these scarves with the weft-dominant side up, mostly because it’s easier to spot errors that way. If I’m lifting 4 of every 5 warp threads, it’s hard to see whether a thread is misbehaving, because so many threads are lifted. If I’m lifting only 1 of 5 warp threads, on the other hand, they’re widely spaced, so a mistake is pretty obvious. (For the weavers, this scarf is woven in 5-end satin, 1-4 vs. 4-1.)

Unfortunately, that means that they are being woven with the prettier side down. Here is a photo of the top side of last week’s samples, to remind you of what the front face looks like:

I think the front face is going to be just beautiful, so I can’t wait to finish the scarves and turn them over!

And, to keep you entertained until the Big Reveal of the finished scarves…here’s Fritz, enjoying a seasonal treat: candy cups.

(If you’re reading via email, click this link to view the video.)

Chocolates are done, packed, and shipped. Which means it’s time to WEAVE!

I started with three days of loom repair: diagnosing and fixing some heddles that were not lifting properly. On a TC-2 loom, that is quite an exercise, especially if you are as short as I am. Fixing a nonfunctional heddle means means lifting off the loom cover, disconnecting vacuum hoses and electrical jumpers, and then pulling some fairly heavy widgetry straight up to get it out of the frame. If you are six feet tall, this is mildly annoying but quite do-able. If you are five feet tall, you will spend a lot of time awkwardly teetering on chairs and ladders and praying you don’t fall off or drop anything.

Fortunately for me, I live with a Tall Person. So after Mike found me kneeling precariously on the very top of a stepladder, leaning way into the center of the loom while trying to vacuum out some heddles with a handheld vacuum cleaner, he volunteered to do the Tall People Stuff. With Mike’s help, I got everything finished quickly and started weaving samples for Kathy’s dragon-and-phoenix scarves.

Here are the samples as I was weaving them:

I’m weaving all three scarves side by side, which looks like a brilliant idea but is actually a time-consuming pain in the butt. It is much much faster to weave three scarves in sequence, one after another, than to weave three scarves at once, as I’m doing now. However, I don’t want to waste warp (those gorgeous multicolored warps were incredibly time-intensive to wind, dye, and put onto the loom), so I’m weaving the three scarves side by side instead of sequentially.

In theory, since the warp is set up for triple weave, I could weave nine scarves simultaneously – three scarves across the width, three layers deep. Whee! That would definitely qualify as Extreme Weaving. Someday I will try it, but not today.

Kathy’s scarf samples actually took quite a bit of doing before I figured out the process correctly. I tried weaving the samples with three different kinds of shuttles. I felt rather like Goldilocks and the Three Shuttles: my Bluster Bay Swedish shuttles were a little too long, and their Super Slim boat shuttles were a little too low-profile. But my Bluster Bay Honex-tensioned end-feed shuttles were Just Right.

Here’s a pic of the shuttle herd grazing placidly on the cloth:

I also had to get a bit inventive about temples. Weaving temples are used to prevent problems at the edges of the cloth. Specifically, they are used to hold the edges of the fabric out at the full breadth of the warp, to prevent the edge from drawing in towards the body of the cloth – and thus becoming denser and potentially problematic. There are several ingenious designs for temples, but most of them don’t work well if you’re weaving three narrow warps side by side. So I was going to have to improvise something.

Fortunately, many cultures have had to solve this problem, usually in very low-tech ways. Deb McClintock documented the Southeast Asian weaving temples on her website, and I was able to use this design to make some bamboo temples of my own. Here’s one in action:

And here it is by itself:

As you can see, it’s pretty simple – a length of bamboo with two sharp points (in this case, sewing needles bound to the bamboo using artificial sinew/glue/tape). The wood should be a little longer than the desired width of the fabric. One bends the bamboo, then slips the sharp points into either side of the fabric. The wood straightens a little when you release it, holding the fabric edges apart from each other.

This kind of temple is too delicate to work for rugs, but for my scarves, they’re doing very nicely. For the wood, I bought some extra-thick, 36-inch bamboo skewers meant for making S’mores. They’re available on Amazon quite cheaply (search for “Jungle Stix”), and I imagine this set of 100 will make me all the bamboo temples I can ever use. Of course, any other kind of flexible wood will work, too.

After all that fiddling, I wound up with these lovely samples:

And here’s the back side (please ignore the messed-up sections):

For weavers – the bottom part of the sample is an 8-end satin at 30 epi, the top part is a 5-end satin at 30 epi. I would really have preferred a closer sett, but 30 ends per inch is unfortunately all I’ve got. So the scarf is very weft-dominant. However, it still has nice drape, so all should be well.

I have now finished all the fiddling and adjusting and am ready to weave the Actual Thing. That will likely take a couple of days, so I will probably finish early next week.

And what does Tigress think? Well, weaving means Mommy’s off in the garage, so she can’t play fetch or hand out cat treats. Bo-ring!!

I’ve been working on my scarf commission the last few days. I started by cleaning up the image – a tedious process requiring several hours of work, getting rid of extraneous pixels and tweaking things until I had the image pixel perfect. Then I converted the image to Arahweave. I didn’t much like the results, though:

The phoenix’s edges were disappearing into the background, as I feared they would. Back to Photoshop, where I resized the design and redrew the phoenix as a black-and-white design, with no shades of gray. The next simulation looked great!

Weaving up samples came next. For these samples, I was testing out colors and yarns. Kathy already knew she wanted to use golden yellow for the red warp, but wasn’t sure what colors would work well against the blue. So I wove these samples for her:

Sadly, the photos are not really 100% true to color – the turquoise is much brighter than it appears in the photo, though the other colors are closer in shade. The prettiest ones against the blue, in my opinion, are the darker red-purple and the turquoise – and Kathy agreed with me. So I will be weaving three scarves – one red/yellow, one turquoise/blue, and one red-purple/blue.

At least, that’s the current plan. I mailed the samples to Kathy so she could see the colors in real life, since digital photos can be tricky – we’ll see what she thinks once the samples arrive.

And next steps? Once Kathy decides on a color and sees whether she likes the drape in a small sample, I’ll weave up another set of samples, this time checking the drape of the yarn and making sure the motifs come out correctly – they are quite squished in the sample, so I’ll need to adjust the aspect ratio to make them the correct length. And then I’ll weave the actual scarf.

If all this sounds like a lot of work for a scarf – you are right! But weaving – good weaving – is a complicated business. You have to decide on colors, drape, fiber content (silk, cotton, alpaca, ??), weave structure. Then you have to draw up the design you plan to weave. After that, there’s the technical design of the fabric – what size yarn to use, what sett, how hard to beat, and lots of other factors. And then, you weave the samples. If the samples look good, then you can finally weave the real thing.

It is not always this complicated. The more experience you have, the more you will know about the variables involved. But if you are doing something new, then you do have to consider all these factors, and it takes longer. This is why I told Kathy that the first scarf would be the most expensive – because most of the work is in designing the fabric, not the actual weaving of the finished product. I would estimate that about 80% of my time is spent designing, and only about 20% on weaving. It’s a lot more complicated than it looks.

And what now? Well, I’m flying off later this morning to Maryland, where I will spend four days packing up my mom’s apartment (so we can sell or rent the condo). Then I’m going up to New York to join the rest of my family as we inter her ashes at Ferncliff Cemetery, where her parents are also interred. We had a custom urn made for her, blown glass emblazoned with a phoenix – we think she would have liked it. (It is a little difficult to make out the phoenix in the photo, as the colors are quite similar, but the yellow part is the tail, the wings are outstretched, and the head curves back towards the viewer – I’ll try to take better photos when I get to Maryland.)

From there, I’ll spend a few days visiting with my good friend Edouard on Long Island. Then I’ll move onwards to the American Craft Council’s “Present Tense” conference, October 13-15, before finally flying back home. It will be a long trip – almost two weeks – but Mike will be home to make sure Tigress gets her cat treats and Fritz his belly rubs, so I’m pretty sure all will be well. 🙂

I’m pleased to say that I have a new project! This one is my first commissioned piece – a dragon and phoenix scarf!

After I finished Ode to Joy, I got an email from Kathy, who mentioned how much she loved the dragon in Ode to Joy, and would I consider weaving a scarf for her? We bounced design ideas around for awhile, and finally I sketched this:

The knotwork is a Celtic “E” that Kathy provided. The dragon is a smaller version of the dragon in Ode to Joy, and the phoenix is a smaller, monochrome version of the phoenix in Goodbye, Ma.

Kathy liked this overall design, but asked that the “E” motifs all open the same direction, so that (when worn) they would open consistently to the outside of the scarf. Because neither of us is very good at spatial visualization, I did a couple of sketches that showed what the scarf would look like when worn. I did a series of sketches showing the front and back of the scarf, and Kathy finally settled on these:

These are actually not quite reverses of each other (the phoenix and dragon should both be flipped horizontally) – but they’re close enough to get the general idea.

Kathy likes this design, so my next step will be cleaning up the Photoshop file and converting it to a loom-ready file. Simultaneously, I’ll also be preparing to weave samples. I need to test out several things – weave structure, yarn choice, and color. Because the warp is a mix of 20/2 silk, 10/2 unmercerized cotton, and 16/2 mercerized cotton, it may be a bit heavy for a scarf. So I’m going to start with a relatively thin and supple weft – 30/2 silk, I think. I plan to weave the scarf with one warp and one weft, in a 5-end satin. That is a dense weave, but it drapes well, and will give good color contrast between front and back.

Because I actually have a warp meant for triple weave on the loom, and the scarf will only be 8″ wide, I can potentially weave three scarves simultaneously across the 29″ width of the warp, each on a different warp layer. (Actually I could weave NINE scarves simultaneously – three independent layers of cloth from top to bottom, and three scarves side by side across the width. And I could make every one of them a different design, with the magic of jacquard weaving. Isn’t that mind-blowing? But I am not quite crazy enough to try weaving with nine shuttles….yet. 🙂 )

Since I can easily weave multiple scarves on the same section of warp, I offered to weave a second and possibly third scarf of the exact same design but in a different colorway. Since no additional design time would be involved, and very little material, I could offer the second and third scarves at a substantial discount. Kathy decided to order two scarves, one using a red/orange warp and another using the blue/purple warp. The red/orange warp will be paired with golden yellow; the blue/purple we’re not sure about, so I’m weaving samples. I plan to test out turquoise, fuchsia, and (just for fun) orange-red. It will be interesting to see what happens!

The other thing I need to do is some loom maintenance and tweaks. I was having difficulties with several threads that would not lift for some reason, so I need to figure out what’s wrong with those heddles and fix them. I’m guessing the module just needs a good vacuuming, but I may have to replace a few valves. That is probably a half-day’s worth of troubleshooting.

Fortunately, I have new (and beautiful!) toys to keep me company while I engage in loom maintenance/repair. My Bluster Bay 11″ end feed shuttles, which I otherwise adore, are a bit too tall to pass easily through my very dense shed. So I ordered some Bluster Bay Swedish shuttles to work with. Here they are: tiger maple, curly red oak, and red marblewood.

May I say once again how much I love Bluster Bay shuttles? Not only are they marvelously functional tools, but they are flat-out beautiful. And, at only 3/4″ tall, they will work very nicely with this very dense warp.