Tien Chiu

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It’s all in the details

Who would have imagined a wedding would have so many loose ends?

Tally for the last few days:

  • Bought plane tickets for honeymoon
  • Started wedding registry at Amazon.com (oops, should have done that earlier!)
  • Arranged for wedding-hairdo flowers (gardenias and small orchids)
  • Sent out some late invitations
  • Finished another 22 bookmarks
  • Bought and reading two guidebooks on Vancouver/Victoria
  • Asked two people to speak at wedding
  • Started arranging details of rehearsal, rehearsal dinner, and two dinners preceding wedding

And there’s still a lot to do!  Hotel and rental car for the honeymoon, finalizing the wedding ceremony (including writing the wedding vows!), writing the wedding program, tallying RSVPs and following up with people who haven’t yet replied, reading through Vancouver guidebooks, arranging childcare for people who need it…the list goes on and on.  Unbelievable.

Fortunately, we do still have a month to the wedding, and it’s not unmanageable – being a project manager by profession, I’m naturally pretty organized.  I’m tempted to make up a schedule in Microsoft Project, but I think that would be overkill – so I’m doing a set of checklists for pre-wedding preparation instead.  I think that will help avoid drama the week before the wedding.

At any rate, despite the pre-wedding whirlwind, I have not been entirely idle fiber-wise – I finished dyeing another 44 skeins in the last few days, and will do more soon.  I’m also starting my study of tapestry on Saturday, with Christine Laffer, a tapestry artist in San Jose.  She and I had a preliminary meeting last weekend, and as I suspected, there’s a LOT more to tapestry than was covered (or even hinted at) in the book I was reading.  So I’ll be delighted to start working with tapestry.

Meanwhile, I will leave you with another nice photo of my dyed samples:

piles of dyed sample skeins
piles of color!

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Up and running with tapestry

Yesterday (before reading Amelia’s comment/suggestion) I decided to give tapestry weaving another shot.  So I cut off my first sample, and re-sleyed at 6 epi.  (I have a 10 epi reed and a 6 epi reed, so 6 epi was a natural choice.)  This worked a lot better, so I sat down and wove this:

partially complete tapestry sample
partially complete tapestry sample

The weave is a little looser than I’d like, and according to Amelia’s method I should really be weaving at 8 dents per inch, so I’m contemplating ordering an 8-dent reed.  (I don’t think an uneven sleying will “wash out”, since as far as I know tapestry isn’t wet-finished.)  I sort of hate to order  one for a single use (normally I weave much finer than that), but it would be nice to be able to try a denser sett.  I may see if one of the loom manufacturers has scraps lying about; all I need is a 9″ length.

At any rate, I have now gone through about half the lessons in Kirsten Glasbrook’s book, and am eagerly looking forward to finishing them!  Once I  complete that I may do one or two of her “practice projects” (which come complete with detailed instructions) before doing my samples for the COE.  (I definitely need more practice; my selvedges are not nearly as clean as I’d like, and some of my horizontal lines/rows are a bit wonky.)

I did a preliminary test using my new dyeing setup, with blotchy results, primarily due to my trying some shortcuts.  I’m going to do another test today, this time actually stirring the dyebath along  the way, and see if that works.

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Toying with tapestry

Yesterday I set up my table loom for tapestry weaving.  It was an interesting experience – it’s been months since I set up a loom for back-to-front warping on a plain beam (normally I use my sectional beam), and I botched the winding-on badly at the beginning, so instead of a cylinder I had a cone-shaped warp.  I had to wind it all off and re-beam, thankfully with better results this time.  Fortunately, on a 90-thread, 3-yard warp, that took only a few moments!  After weaving with 1500+ thread, 20-yard warps, it was amazingly fast.

Anyway, I didn’t have what is apparently standard tapestry warp (8/3 or 8/4 linen is what was recommended by the folks on Weavolution), nor did I have the recommended tapestry yarn.  What to do?

Well, I figured that people weave tapestry with all sorts of yarns, so it was probably just a matter of finding the right warp and the right sett.  So I took out my 10/2 linen (the heaviest cotton or linen yarn I own), did my wraps per inch, and warped up at the theoretically optimal sett of 10 epi.

Having no idea what weight of weft would be appropriate, I then tried several weights, starting with a sportweight yarn:

I promptly discovered that sportweight was waaaaay too thick!  I tried several options, and finally got good warp coverage (tapestry is a weft-faced weave) with a single strand of 30/2 silk.  This is pretty, but would take FOREVER to weave a sample, so I think I may try to open up the sett somewhat (fewer warp ends per inch) and weave a sample with slightly heavier yarn.  But first I will order somewhat larger warp yarns, so I can use heavier weft yarns in my samples!