The Dragon's Lair

Here's a peek at the first two of the "Hidden Jewels" towels on the loom.

The first was done with a black weft for the entire towel (the lighter colored band is the sewing thread section that will be folded into the hem). Here it is getting started ~

Look close - they aren't all the same twills! (I'll put a larger version of this picture over in the Gallery) I had fun playing with the threading for this design. First time using a drafting program on the computer! Woohoo!! Maybe I got a little carried away...

And here is a look at the second towel, which will soon be finished also ~

As you can see, this one has alternating bands of all three colors. I'm not quite as happy with it as I thought I would be, but I was already 7 or 8 inches into the towel before I decided that - and even though I wasn't thoroughly thrilled with it, it was alright and didn't merit a massive un-weaving effort. So this is how it shall stay. Hopefully once it's up for sale it will find someone out there that appreciates it more fully and will give it a loving home.

I think I'll go for more of a plaid type effect next time by varying the width of the stripes and maybe mixing the order together differently. Still need to figure out the details though.

So I'm curious - what do you think of the overall look of this second towel?

It's really kind of amazing how different yarns that are supposedly the "same" kind can be. Take 8/2, unmercerized cotton for example - pretty straightforward stuff, right?

Not really. This one is smoother, where that one has some slubs now and again... this one has a tighter twist, that one is softer... One could come up with a variety of variations (say that ten times fast!) - which is just what the cottons in my current towels have done. I didn't notice it while they were sitting together in a friendly little bunch of cones, but once I started working with them the differences soon became apparent.

The black is deliciously soft and smooth, and the finest of the bunch - though I expect that the reverse of these traits is that it is the comparatively weakest of the bunch as well. It had not a slub in sight when winding out yard after yard of it to make the warp. Simply one of the nicest unmercerized cottons I've seen so far.

The magenta is my "middle ground" one of the three. More what I'm accustomed to seeing in an 8/2 cotton - not particularly slubby or so smooth as to be noteworthy. Ever so slightly thicker than it's black companion, but not enough to make really noticeable differences.

The green, on the other hand, is the opposite of the black. It's notably rougher, and about as slubby as it could possibly be without becoming a cotton flake or something that is intentionally that way. It's also thicker than the other two - enough so that, when used as weft, it affects the weave! It would be great for releasing some pent up aggression since it has to be whacked good and sound with the beater a few times to make it somewhat match the black stripes. The diamonds still look ever so slightly larger, even with the extra attention to the beating, but not enough so to cause problems.

It's amazing how different each of these can be, and yet they're still considered the "same thing".
If I'd ever heard of such a thing as 7/2 cotton, I'd have my suspicions about this sneaky green yarn only masquerading as an 8/2. Hmmm...

I hope you'll pardon the picturelessness (I love making up my own words! LOL) of this little post. I'll try to make up for it soon, perhaps even later tonight, by showing you my first two towels!

The weaving bug made it's entrance a couple years ago, but it's recently taken a sudden spike in how strongly it has taken hold of me. I have more ideas rattling about in my head than I could weave in two lifetimes, let alone one, so there's no time to waste between warps with an empty loom!! I'm not by any means fast on the turn around - everyday life has a way of intruding on weaving time quite frequently. However, I've gone from one warp in a year, to one every six months or so, and now nearing one a month - so definitely an improvement, which I hope to perhaps make even a little better in the future.

There are consequences to pouring more time and focus into weaving though -
I believe my house has been declared a Dust Bunny Sanctuary. A place free of brooms poking into dark corners and venturing under the couch! Vacuum hoses snaking under the bed and wreaking havoc? Unheard of! If you are a dust bunny that has been chased from your home, you can find a safe haven here.
And I have dire suspicions that a giant sock monster has taken up residence in the laundry pile - but in a laundry pile that size, it's hard to tell for sure what's lurking in there...

But when you have cones of 8/2 cotton in jewel tone pink and green, with a black one nearby to set off the colors in an excitingly vibrant way, that have been calling your name since February and begging you to empty the loom so they can come play - how can you refuse?

I'd been contemplating various ideas for these lovely colors for quite awhile. But despite having this tantalizing wisp of an idea in my head of how beautiful these could potentially be, it was sufficiently vague as to be hardly more than a taunt... teasing me with the fact that the idea was there, but not willing to actually show it's face and tell me how to weave it.

I tried to nail it down with one structure after another... monk's belt, Fibonacci stripes, overshot - what did these colors want? Nothing seemed right. The one that kept coming back the most often though was twill... point twill diamonds, M & Ws... twill... hmm...

The loom was empty last Wednesday, and I knew I needed to decide. Playing with the twill again sounded interesting, and I knew from my "Hidden Diamond" towels that it worked great to show off contrast. So twill towels it would be. But then came the interplay of the colors. I had three this time. Warp stripes? Weft stripes? Both? Wide stripes? Skinny? Patterned? Varied? So many possibilities!! So that night I sat down with my little weaving journal, armed with three pencils - a pink, green, and black - determined to make this elusive little idea show it's face.
I'm much more of an analytical, symmetrical, repeating-pattern kinda gal, but I had this feeling that symmetry wasn't what these colors were after. They wanted variety... a little touch of chaos just for the fun of it. Let me tell you though - a symmetrical pattern is MUCH easier to plan than a random one! I sat down with those pencils though, and went to work. Drew a miniature "towel" on the page and marked off (to scale) tiny "one inch" increments. Then I just started randomly coloring in stripes. Finally, my pattern began to take shape!

(The colors of the cotton are rather over saturated in this picture. I discovered that making somewhat lightly sketched colored pencil show up in a photo is a lot harder than I realized)

So I had the stripes - Step one accomplished! This idea could no longer hide in the shadows. It was headed to the warping board!

This project had really sunk it's claws in, and I had it warped in what is for me record speed. The 480 end warp began to come into being on Friday, and the loom was fully warped by Tuesday! That's completely unheard of in my little corner of the weaving world.

While what I wanted to do today was just weave away and watch the lovely towels come into being before my eyes, I figured I had better go on a sock monster hunt instead. So if you don't hear from me again soon, send rescue! You never know with those sock monsters...

I better get on the ball and put up this post, as I've been given the blog award twice now!

My thanks to both Gaby - Magic Stix Fibers
and Kimberly - Woven ~N~ Spun for thinking of me :-)

These are the rules listed for accepting the award:

1. copy the Kreativ Blogger award to your blog
2. put a link to the person from whom you received the award
3. nominate 8 other blogs and
4. link to them
5. then leave a message on the blogs you nominated

But just like I can never seem to follow a pattern without making alterations, I'm not very good at following instructions to the letter either ;-) So I don't think I'll have a full list of 8 other blogs. Actually, part of that is due to the fact that I've already seen this award come up on a majority of the blogs I've been reading - so hopefully the ones I do link aren't duplicates, but here are a few interesting blogs that I don't think I've seen it awarded to yet:

Theresa - Camp Runamuck
Diana - Knitting in the Methow
Sue - Life Looms Large
Barbara - Fun With Fiber
Judy - Fibres of Being

I've been working on warping a new project (which I shall post about soon) and have reached the point of threading. I was able to sneak in a couple inches yesterday before Real Life called me away from the loom. I come back to it this morning and am making my way steadily through inch three when a thought suddenly smacks me in the face...

That isn't shaft one, it's shaft four!!! Oh no!

I look back over yesterday's work, and determine that yes - most of it is threaded backwards. Two thirds of the 70-something ends I'd threaded needed re-threaded. I should have simply been thankful that I noticed at 70-something instead of 300-something, but thankfulness was not high on my list of feelings at the moment. I huffed away from the loom, vented my frustration in a quick e-mail to PinkD, gave the loom a few scowls (yes, I know it's really my fault, but it's much more comfortable to direct my irritation at an inanimate object than at myself) , and then read a few interesting blogs until I stopped giving my loom dirty looks. After that I went back to start the process of un-knotting my bundles and re-threading, but got interrupted before finishing.

Fast forward to now...
I get back to the loom and continue the re-threading process. I have this niggling feeling that I should re-check (yet again) that first inch that didn't need re-threaded.
It's backwards too!!

Now how in the world did I deem that one fine and the ones right next to it backwards??? I have no idea.
This doesn't bode well for the remaining 400+ ends, if it takes this many tries just to get the first 70 right!

At this point, I think laughing at myself is probably the only thing to do. And blog about it so you can laugh with me ;-)

While the first scarf off this warp was definitely a "Pretty In Pink" sort, the next one made was the complete opposite - all boy. I present to you, "Little Boy Blue"

This was the second Summer & Winter scarf on my sampler warp for learning the weave structure. The new owner of the scarf seems as happy with his as the owner of the pink one was with hers.

The ABC/123 and the car were done by pick-up. The graphs were ones I drew, and I thought the results weren't too bad overall, especially since this was only my second attempt both at graphing and weaving a pick-up design. Here's a closer look at them ~

So what do you think - does it look like a car?? LOL That was the graph that gave me the most fits.

And concerning the on-opposites, yellow and blue bands in the scarf...
Yes, I have already been asked why I wove the Swedish flag into the scarf. It didn't even occur to me at the time that I was doing that, but, there it was!
If I had a quick enough wit I could have pretended it was on purpose and answered the teasing inquiry at my guild meeting with something like "It's to honor my Swedish great-grandmother of course!" or "Because the Swedish Chef is my very favorite Muppet." But then, if I was that quick on my feet I probably would have been observant enough to already have noticed the "flags" I'd woven without someone else having to point them out to me, eh?

Maybe I should call the scarf "Bork Bork Bork!" instead ;-)

For those of you that like all the nitty-gritty details of setts and yarn weights and the like, do not despair! A post shall follow sometime in the hopefully-not-too-distant future with all that sort of minutiae about both of the Summer & Winter scarves. But I just had to come show of the scarf asap!! :-) Bork bork bork!

The WEBS order came!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually, I'm quite remiss in my blogging duties because it actually came last Wednesday - but I was sorting yarn all the rest of that day, gone Thursday, and Friday was catch-up-from-being-gone-Thursday day (for some reason my house still doesn't clean itself, despite all my efforts to convince it that it really should... go figure!).

But now I shall show you all my wonderful, fibery goodies!

You should have seen me Wednesday afternoon, checking for the UPS man every ten minutes (two minutes? 30 seconds? It was kinda hard to tell in that state of mind...) And he had the nerve to be running later than usual that day!! I mean really - didn't he sense what an important package he was carrying? Couldn't he feel the urgency being beamed his general direction? Some people's telepathic abilities really leave a lot to be desired ;-)

But the rumble of the UPS truck was eventually heard. And a few minutes after that tell tale sound, These were sitting on the table:

These were soon opened up to receive the appropriate amount of oohs and ahhs. The two giant boxes revealed this:

Then the sorting began! After the initial dividing up into separate colors and such, I focused on the many cones of rayon. They all needed weighed and tagged, like so:

This becomes quite a process, and takes up a pretty decent chunk of evening time, when you have over 60 cones to do... but aren't they pretty??

Eventually, things were all sorted out and handed off to their respective owners. Here is my lovely pile of fibery treasures now proudly filling out my stash:

25 cones of rayon, 13 tubes of rug warp, 4 cones of pearl cotton, 2 shuttles, 10 bobbins, and a heddle/reed hook. This has at least doubled the little stash I started collecting recently. I can now stand tall and know that I have a bona fide weaving stash of my very own! I won't have to always buy project to project or mooch off of the yarn stashes of those around me. Yay!!

Can you see me grinning? It's a really big, silly looking grin. Very silly looking. Yarn makes me happy

I completed my very first try at Summer & Winter about a week ago. It's certainly not an exercise in the art of perfection (or symmetry even), but I'm quite happy with it. I learned lots, and the young recipient is thrilled with her new scarf. It's pink & purple on white, with a touch of what PinkD and I like to call "Barbie Pink" thrown in a couple places, and even includes a heart! All in all, it falls quite well into the category of "really pretty" in her world.

Sometime soon I'll write up one of my detail abundant posts with all the particulars, but haven't done that yet. For now, I just wanted to get a couple pictures posted to share my excitement of having learned another weave structure!! So here it is, in all it's pinkness

I'll share closer pictures of the different sections later, but here are shots of the front and back of the scarf all laid out ~

... But I'm not feeling very virtuous today!

We (Mom, PinkDandelion, and I) just placed a big WEBS order together - and I can't wait for it to get here!!!! *hopping up and down excitedly like I'm 5 years old again*

I'm making a sort of "business investment" and bought quite a lot. I'm hoping to make it back by selling woven items though. I bought two new shuttles - both Schacht brand boat shuttles. Another 11" slim, and one new one to try out: their 9" mini. It's a "duckbill" shuttle, and slightly smaller profile than even the slims. I'm hoping it will be a good one for my table loom.
So now I will own three shuttles!! Right now I have three shuttles attached to my Summer & Winter project, and two of the three belong to PinkD. I thought she might appreciate if I finally got some more of my own and quit stealing constantly.
Actually... the real reason is not because PinkD ever seemed to mind lending, but I'm tired of feeling like such a mooch ;-)

I also bought more bobbins - though it doesn't seem to matter how many a weaver has, there never seems to be enough! But this will be closer to that mythical "enough" than I was previously. And bought my own heddle hook/sleying hook - the Harrisville combination one. Again, so that I can quit snitching regularly from other weavers (usually PinkD or K... or L... or once in awhile someone else, but I'll quit tossing out letters of the alphabet now... I sure am blessed with a lot of weaving friends willing to lend me things!).

The big part of the order though was YARN!!!!
First off, there was lots and lots of lovely, shiny rayon. It's rather unusual, as it is 6-ply (of 18/1) - but it's gorgeous stuff. I sure hope I like weaving with it though, because I will have LOTS. If it looks even half as nice woven as it does on the cone though, it will make beautiful things.

I also stocked up on cotton rug warp, as I plan to start making more rag rugs. The first one I made was on a "guild warp" - sort of a community warp that the guild members share. I want to put on my own though. So I bought about a dozen tubes of rug warp to give me a lovely variety of colors to mix and match. It will be such fun! This is the palette I'll be able to work from soon -

I also nabbed a few cones of mercerized, space dyed 10/2 cotton in some really lovely variegated colors. They weren't as incredibly marked down as the rayon, so I only nabbed a few of my very favorites. Aren't these purdy??

This one is a 5/2 -

Now to wait for the order... and wait... and wait some more...
*two minutes later*
It's not here yet??!?!
How about now?
Now?

I feel like Cookie Monster with no cookies! *in my best Cookie Monster impression* OoooOOoohhOoOooohhhOOOhh!!! Me no have yarn yet!!