Garment – Page 4 – Fiber Musings

Isn't that hand carved beater bar a thing of beauty?

10 yard warp with Jaggerspun Zephyr and handspun. 900 ends + 4 floating selvedge ends at 30 epi using a 15 dent reed. 60 of those ends were handspun. “Were” because 3 of them broke (drifted apart) while warping. I replaced them with Zephyr because I didn’t want the singles to dangle, unspin, and drift apart. Okay. I was lazy. I had wound extra Zephyr just in case, so they were handy. There was only 1 threading mistake that I found so far (the pin in the photo). Hooray!

It only took 25 hours to dress this loom. 25 hours to go from bare loom to this point. Sigh. I sure hope it gets faster as I gain more experience with this loom!

Many firsts with this one:

First time weaving yardage
First time using floating selvedge
First time weaving with the Fireside Loom

I’m still getting a feel of this loom. It’s so much larger than my Gilmore Gem II. I’m finding that I need to work on putting a bit more oomph when I throw the shuttle to make it all the way through (30″ width at the reed). The Bluster Bay shuttles are a bit too tall to get under my floating selvedge so I switched to my pretty Schacht one. The outside treadles are just a wee bit further than my normal seated leg span so a bit more scootching is required. I might swap out the weaving bench for my task chair that I use with the Gilmore. We’ll see.

I’m still trying to find the sweet spot on the tensioned brake so that I can advance the warp easily. Too much tension, I can’t advance it without manually loosening up the back beam. Too little tension, the warp advances by itself with every beat. I feel a bit like Goldilocks right now, except I haven’t found “just right” yet.

I will never ever warp Zephyr front to back again, especially not at this epi. The yarn is soft and fuzzed up and quickly adhered itself to its neighbors. Beaming on took a lot of patience.

The handspun single is working. I need to weave a bit more before I call it a success. The color runs are longer than I wanted them to be, but it works. You can’t see the spots of color from the handspun in the picture because I’m weaving with the wrong side of the fabric facing up. This allows me to just raise one harness instead of 4. Much easier to treadle this way, but difficult to see what you are doing. I have a hand mirror that I stick under the fabric every once in a while. That doesn’t work very well because it’s dark. And if I put the light on it, it glares and I still can’t see.

Remember my fabric samples from Sharon Alderman’s class in March? My vision was to have flashes of color running along the warp. For the sake of expediency, I samples with the colors I wanted running the full length of the warp instead of creating the yarn of my vision. The intention was to dye and spin my own yarn with just blips of color popping in and out of the length.

This past weekend, I got down to the business of dyeing the fiber. For the most part, I used Ashford Wool DyesÂ from Amazing Yarns. Andrea had just finished a dye day with the study group. I looked at some of her results and realized that they were exactly the colors, or at least in the right range, that I had selected in my samples. She sent me off with the leftover dyes and another small jar of hot pink, and off I went.

On the right shows the dyed merino/silk next to the original color cards I wrapped using Zephyr. Pretty close, wouldn’t you say? I am replacing the turquoise with the teal and the green.

For the red, I am using the red merino/silk from The Artful Ewe (far left in the picture) Â that I’ve been spinning. Good thing I haven’t finished spinning it because it’s almost an exact match.

I had settled on using the ebony warp and indigo weft. So the base of my accent yarn needs to be black. I dug in my dye stash and found my Mother MacKenzie’s Miracle Dye kit that I purchased years ago (so old that she sold them in little zip lock bags instead of the pretty tins). I used the Prime Black for the base.

I started spinning last night. (Please excuse the fuzzy bobbin. I had to pick either the color card or the bobbin for my focal point.) I’m very pleased with the results. The color stretches are a bit longer than my vision, but that’s the way it is, since the staple length is 2-4″ for the merino/silk. I can’t get it much shorter and still spin worsted.

I chose to leave the violet out of my spun yarn. The violet disappeared into my fabric sample. In fact, it’s hard to pick it out of the sample card too. I also left out the hot pink. It wasn’t necessary.

In order to not dilute the blips of color even more (from the weft), I will leave the yarn as a single. I’m making extra sure that I have good joins that will hold up to warping. Of course, this is for the full length too, since I don’t plan on finishing the yarn before putting it on the loom. I want the yarn to bloom along with the rest of the fabric.

Random thoughts of a fiber enthusiast - mostly fiber related, sometimes coherent

Tag: Garment

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Spinning with Intent