The New Loom - Finally

I know, I promised to post this two months ago, but things have been busy!

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I finally put the new loom together.  Here's what it looked like in pieces:

And here's the assembled loom with a warp threaded and sleyed, but not tied on:

There are several accessories that are in the first picture that aren't in the second - a raddle, two warping boards - one of which has a stand (yay!), an additional reed and a multi-cone stand for holding cones of yarn.

The warp is a combination of blue cotton and green wool for a scarf that's an exercise in differential shrinkage.  In a couple of months Elaine and I are teaching a novice weekend on this technique for the Chattahoochee Handweavers Guild and I'm weaving this as a sample and to try out some yarns from a new source.  Here's what the weaving looks like:

 
The idea is that after the scarf is done, it is washed in hot water in the washing machine.  This shrinks and felts the wool.  It also shrinks the cotton, but not as much - hence the term "differential shrinkage".  In this particular pattern the blue cotton will become somewhat "poofy" - kind of like bubble wrap - as the wool around it shrinks in all directions

Right now I have about 2 feet woven after weaving about a foot of sampling so I have a piece that I won't wash so that it can be compared with the final washed scarf.  (Total - a little over 3 feet.)

The actual weaving is pretty quick as it is just plain weave.  However, I'm having problems with the cotton warp yarn breaking.  I haven't been able to figure out whether the problem lies in the heddles that the yarn is threaded through - they're old and may be a little rough so I plan on replacing all of them this summer, the yarn itself - the cotton is about the size of a single strand of embroidery floss, something I'm doing wrong, or some combination of the above.  It's getting a little frustrating, so I haven't woven the last couple of weekends that I've been home.  I'll get it worked out, though!

Synchronicity

Last month I spent one weekend in NJ instead of coming home.  My friend Jean came to visit for a "girls' weekend".  One of the things that we did was a trip to MOMA on Friday evening courtesy of Target's "Free Friday" tickets.  This trip was one of the items on my bucket list, because they have Van Gogh's Starry Night.  We had a marvelous time and saw lots of really cool stuff.  I hadn't realized that Monet's Water Lilly paintings were a big as they are and Starry Night was amazing.

The next weekend when I was home, I was doing some work on the written portion of the HGA Certificate of Excellence that I'm working on.  There are a number of design terms that I have to define, so I was poking around online to find definitions of "Rhythm" as it pertains to art.  I was scrolling through the entry for Rhythm on the Artlex site (http://www.artlex.com/) and found that many of the images that are used as examples were the same paintings that I had seen the week before at MOMA!  It was an interesting moment of synchronicity that once again shows how the different things I do are all interconnected.

New Loom!

Tomorrow afternoon I will be picking up the loom I have been wanting for years. It's a 48" Macomber with 4 harnesses and the option to add 4 more. I'm not sure what all it will come with in terms of accessories at this point - I'll see it all tomorrow. I can weave most of the samples for the COE study on it or my Ashford table loom.

Macombers are my favorite looms to weave on. Because the front beam folds down, I can scoot a chair right up to the harnesses, which makes it easier and more comfortable to thread. It's a tall loom, and the treadles push down in front instead of in back - this setup makes it so that my knees don't hit the front beam like they do on a Baby Wolf or some of the other looms I've woven on.

Here's a pic of a Macomber in the studio at the Chattahoochee Handweavers Guild. The fabric on it is a surface weave with 10/2 black cotton from Lunatic Fringe and a multi-color wool singles yarn that I spun from fiber I purchased at Convergence in Orlando in 2008.



Since my daughter isn't moving like she had expected to, I won't be able to set up the basement as a weaving studio like I expected to when I first contacted the person who is selling this loom - my bedroom will still be down there. But I'm rearranging things so that I have room for it and I'm thinking about selling my Baby Wolf to make more room down there. I'm going to have to take it apart, too, in order to get it down the stairs - I don't think it would fit through the back door and it's probably too heavy to carry around to the back. It will take up a good deal of space, but it's worth it!

Last weekend and the weekend before I team-taught two weaving classes - the first weekend was a Novice intensive class in Overshot (think colonial coverlets) and the second was an intro weekend for beginners. I really enjoy teaching these types of classes, the people who take them are generally very interesting and and we usually have a lot of fun. I teach them with Elaine, the woman who taught me how to weave 6 years ago.

I frequently find myself saying that I want to be Elaine when I grow up. She retired after 20+ years with the same company and now teaches weaving classes at the Chattahoochee Handweavers Guild in the Atlanta area, the John C Campbell Folk School in Asheville, NC, and other places. This is how she supports herself in her retirement.

So anyways, as a result of our conversations over the last two weekends, I have decided to work on the Certificate of Excellence in Weaving, which is a program that is sponsored by the Handweavers Guild of America. There are two levels of certificates. Level 1 shows mastery of a set of pre-defined weaving skills. It includes 3 sections, two of which are written and the third is a set of 40 woven samples a minimum of 7 inches by 15 inches. The instructions specify exactly what the samples are supposed to be. The samples show mastery of a number of different weaving techniques, some of which, like tapestry, I'm not really interested in. But all of the samples have to be done in order to get the certificate. And you have to complete level 1 before working on level 2, which is what I'm really interested in.

Level 2 is an in-depth study of a topic in weaving. It includes a research paper that is similar to a Master's thesis along with woven samples and a "major" woven work. I know what I want to do and I'm really excited about it. But I have to get through the level 1 requirements first.

The certificate evaluations occur every two years. The next one is in the fall of 2012. I don't know whether that's enough time for me to learn the techniques that I don't know and finish all of the weaving samples. The registration deadline is 2/1/2012, so I have a few months to get started and figure out whether I'm going to have it all ready for next year or whether I'll take my time with it and have it ready for fall 2014. Then I can put together the outline that has to be approved to start the Level 2 work.

I'm going to try to get my act together and blog about about this experience over the course of the next couple of years. I figure it will be a good way to document this journey.

Chattahoochee Handweavers Guild Video

My friend and classmate Cindy Fox recently put together a video slide show for Spinning and Weaving Week, which is Oct 4 - 10 this year. There are three sections - spinning, weaving, and dyeing. The section on dying was photographed at our "dye day" last March. It's here.

The yarn in the blue bowls of dye were part of my experiment in dying multiple shades of the same color. I have an idea for a monk's belt project where the warp will be hand dyed and go from dark to light to dark in shades of the same color. I need to tweak the dying process because the two lightest shades came out to be about the same color, but this was a good experiment.

The long light-green yarn that's being hand painted is also mine. I painted it with bright blue and yellow. I expect it will end up being warp for a scarf, but I haven't decided yet. I also painted several other warps that I haven't done anything with yet.