Back to my roots...Tapestry weaving.

March 10, 2012

As most of you know I have been in something of a creative funk.  My mojo has been broken for just about everything except the Pine basket weaving.  I do love making baskets, but to be honest it gets redundant at times just going around and around and around.  Especially since I am now in the process of making the second commission basket...which is in the same colors as 4 others.  Five baskets in the same colors and stitch are getting the better of me.  I was craving some fiber arts.

So in that vein I tried to work on my backstrap.  I have a white and charcoal double weft double weave piece going...just couldn't get into it.  I tried lashing to the frame, hooking up to the table, etc...nothing was satisfying me at all.  Not to mention it crowds up my room and further more makes my injured shoulder ache.

Sooooooo I went to Home Depot, bought some wood and threaded rods and made myself a smaller version of my (waaaaayyyyyyy to large for my room) larger tapestry loom.  Now I have warped it up and put it right onto the little table Carol bought me for $5 at a thrift store in Georgia.  (Best little weaving table ever, home made out of scrap so you can't "hurt" it, and it folds up when not in use.)

I haven't been particularly inspired to do something specific so I just went with what yarns I had here available...lots of cotton of course.  lol  Wash cloth bright white cotton for warp and then I needed to decide on a technique...i.e. a pictorial (not my best thing), cartoon, graph, stripes, well you get the picture.

Then I had an AHA moment.  I remembered that I had read about 'Wedge weaving' on ravelry in the Saori group forum.  Having done alot of weaving similar I thought I would give the formal instructions a try.  The technique is associated with the Navajo Indians and it is supposed to give a scalloped edge to the finished product once it is off of the loom.  So not alot of worries about the edges being perfectly straight.  Remembering of course that straight edges are most difficult in tapestry weaving.  

So far so good, I have pictures of the first part of the weave.  I am using directions from the Rachel Brown book "Weaving, Spinning and Dyeing Book".  I even like the colors, the pin and the green are Acrylic and wool, I have no idea what made me think they were cotton....But anyway, the colors go well together and I am excited to get to the next section where the diagonals will go in the other direction.

I have no particular plans for this piece when it is complete.  It is 7 1/2 in. wide and the warp is 38 in. long.  I can't wait to see if the sides scallop like they are supposed to!  

Stay tuned, and I will keep you posted.

Update:

So far when I loosen the tension there is no scalloping.

 

New 'Weaving basket'!

Now that I have my and KraftyMax's looms here at my leisure...I found myself, or more accurately my tool basket, over flowing on a regular basis.  So before I started the camera tote for Max I needed to reorganize.

I love the original basket, it has a beautiful vine handle on it that is so cool.  Carol found it for me years ago at a garage sale.  I immediately put it to good use as my knitting basket while I was on my hand knit sock binge.  It has been a knitting basket ever since.  However, since I don't knit any more, I started using it for my tools when I got my Mini Wave loom.  Unfortunately, it just wasn't large enough.

So today I made a new kit.  Carol had also found me, quite recently in fact, a set of 5 rectangular baskets that get smaller and smaller.  The largest one holds my #10 cotton cones and so I made use of the next one down in size.  I placed the very smallest one inside, and then I used plastic cottage cheese containers that we had saved over time, and wedged them around the small basket.  These are for things like the mini blind slats, pencils, knitting needles for pick up and other things as well.

It may not be exactly beautiful...but is extremely functional.  Especially in my already tight space.  

Check it out!

What I've been up to!

I guess the one thing I haven't been up to is posting on my blog, and for that my friends I do apologize.  

I went into something of an uninspired state of mine after all of the weaving before the holidays.  This is not the first time this has happened to me either.  I often start next years holiday presents in January.  This past year I did not.  So as a result I had alot left to do before Christmas.  Plus, as you know, I was learning new techniques on my little Mini Wave loom.  I made spectacular leaps and bounds with it even if I do say so myself.  But after Christmas I fizzled out.

I did recently start some new projects though and so I thought I needed to give yo an update of sorts.  I really wanted to have the choice of whether or not I had to have horizontal stripes in the background of my weaving's.  This lead me to alot of research, the result of which would be to learn to do double weave pick up.  Definitely not a beginner technique.  I don't consider myself a beginner at this point, but certainly not an expert.  But I dove right in.

You have seen pictures of the first couple small pieces, and then came the black/red and white piece.  After the 4 practices in plain double weave I decided to try for a design element.  No problem right...wrong.  I chose my colors, if you have been following along you know I went with the brown/gold/copper mist and silver.  I figured I would figure out the design as I usually do, make it up as I go along.  Wrong again.

I made an 11 foot warp and the thing was beautimous!  However, it was also done with those tiny little #10 threads.  What a disaster, these old lady eyes just couldn't cut it.  The warp was sixty threads or so wide.  That means that since there were 2 colors in each heddle one side of one shed had 120 threads.  This soon became beyond tedious.  I ended up with twisted threads and I don't even want to think about how many times I tried to do a design and had to un weave.  

This technique is kind of like basket weave the way the rows line up.  Every other row they move to one side.  When you do simple warp floats they go from being picked up in row one, floated over row two and then back into the weave on row three.  As a result these line up perfectly one above the other.  But that is because it is every other row.  On Double weave this is not so.  I had an extremely hard time wrapping my head around this.  Eventually I gave in and decided to use one of Laverne Waddington's charts from her blog.  It worked!  YEAH!  wrong...It was so tiny that on an 11 ft. warp I would have been weaving for the next year.  

So I rolled past that part and started again.  Self, I said, Just do plain double weave and let this beautiful thread speak for it self.  I need a new belt anyway.  Wrong yet AGAIN!  As Laverne warns you have to be very careful of spiraling of the threads one around the other.  So when I rolled up the woven part I flipped it over to see the back side and make sure I was on the right track. I discovered THREE dark brown flecks on the copper mist side.  They were all  spaced through out the piece.  Basically to fix them I would have to un-weave the entire piece...AGAIN!  NOOOOOOOO....I cut that sucker off and threw all 9 feet that were left in the garbage.

Then I did the happy dance.  

You have to understand that since I have no full time job, wasting yarn is not something I take lightly.  I despise waste.  Especially when I had to send to FL to get the yarn in the first place.  This little town has nothing to offer in the way of art supplies of any kind.

But still, I DID THE HAPPY DANCE.  LOL  I felt like I was let out of jail and I don't care even today about the waste.  

On to bigger and better things.  

Wait till you see what I did today!