The other day the Kingdom University team sent out the form for classes at Kingdom University. I am going this year and it's been a while since I taught, so I figured I should come up with something.
I asked on my fb what I could talk about, and offered a Weaver's Meet & Greet, or a Maths of Weaving class. I had some people express an interest in the second so I sent in a proposal. I only applied for 30 minutes. I don't know if I could fill a full hour just talking about the maths of weaving. It is fairly simple maths in the end.  

Tonight I started writing on a possible outline as well as a handout collecting all the terms. In my head I thought I could structure it from an actual example - go from being inspired by an extant textile to working out all the maths. The only danger here is that I can see myself going off on all sorts of tangents.

I am also not so sure how much detail to go into. Do I need to explain the importance of water to sea-faring, or is it safe to assume some level of knowledge. I think it will depend on who shows up on the day. But if you have woven fabric before, I'm not sure this class would be terribly interesting, so I'm aiming for less knowledge and more terms explained than not, I think.

 Turns out, after counting a bit more carefully, that my Victoria loom has 120 - 140 - 140 - 120 heddles on each shaft, not just 100 per shaft. This is most excellent. It seems to me it's set up for herringbone twill, which I love.

I might also be able to get some more heddles that fits this little beauty from a weaver friend. She was going to check her stash for what she might have. I should also measure the bag of tied heddles I picked up at the car boot sale along with the wool.

Next weekend, not this Saturday, but the week after, there's an event in Holmrike (our neighbouring shire) and the options I am considering is 1) bring the loom and dress it there or 2) bring the cape and work on that.

I think, possibly, I'll do the easier thing and bring the cape. Because there are plenty of tables I can set up to do some full-scale layout at a decent working height. Currently that project is stalled because I have the new loom on the table, and the table is at any rate a little too small to fit the entire cape laid flat.

Madder makes a nice red, but more often than red I see it produce an orange, which I'm not a super fan of for myself.

That's to say, the dye weekend went well. We got the grey tabby to a madder orange, as well as the white cloth. However, since I am not a fan of that orange I asked if we could get a proper red for the white raw weave, so the second day we overdyed that piece with madder and cochenil to get a beautiful strong red cloth. Exactly what I had envisioned.

Some factors that could have affected the colour: we only soaked the madder root for a couple of hours, not over night. The cloth may have had some aperture left from the spinning as I did not wash it after weaving. The temperature could have been a little low.

In any case, the overdyeing worked a treat.

After we got home I machine washed the two cuts in 40 degrees. The white cloth was mostly plain weave, but there were 2.6 m of twill, which after the washing felted quite dramatically. The plain weave turned out great. It tightened up nicely and will turn into my new red kirtle.

The grey, now orange, is a beautifully soft cloth, and the variegation in the colour is still evident through the orange hue. I might designate that for my husband- or figure out a new project for this.



All the images on flickr: Dye stuff

I've started the second dye stuff project on the loom.

I had a sheep grey wool which has already been woven up into mostly 2/2 twill (9 meters), and some tabby (5 meters). Now I've warped up 12 meters of sheep white to weave into mostly tabby (I'm thinking 8 meters) and the rest 2/2 twill.

Using my warping mill for the second time I am learning that I need to pick a lane - when winding on I start at the top, go around the mill in a downward spiral, turn around the peg where I create a cross to keep track of my ends, to go back up again.

So far I have wound the warp with the downward spiral laid above the guide string, and the upward spiral beneath the guide string. This means that when I chain the warp up after measuring all ends out I will always have maximum distance between two ends that on the loom should be running side-by-side.

I suppose there might be some way to cleverly fold the warp in half when taking it off the mill to fold them into a more proper alignment again, but I would need someone to teach me such arcane movements. 

In the alternative I could just pick one side of the guide string and follow that every time. So aiming for above the guide string on the way down, and also on the way up. 

In a third option I might make smaller sections of warp chain, which would make this problem much smaller. This would also mean that I would have to weight many smaller sections individually when beaming the warp.

This warp is only 664 ends - speaking of, dammit why didn't I just go once more around for a fun number - which I warped up in two chains of 332 ends each. 16 bouts of 20 ends and one bout of 12. This works out to spread out evenly over 4 harnesses. If I had added two ends I would have two shafts with one more heddle than the other two.

I chose to thread my heddles to minimise friction on adjoining ends for the plain weave. So I threaded 1 - 3 - 2 - 4, lifting shafts 1 and 2 for the first shed, and shafts 3 and 4 for the second shed of a tabby. This puts a little more distance between the fixed points, which gives less friction.

I could have used all six harnesses for even more spread, but, this yarn is still fairly stable and it would make threading heddles more difficult and annoying, because counting to 4 is easier than counting to 6, and the working distance for threading 6 shafts becomes a little longer, thus more annoying, than over 4 shafts.

I beam it with the help of weights on the back of the chains and roll on with paper between the layers. I threaded the heddles and sleyed the reed over midsummer and on Sunday the 22:nd I could start filling bobbins and throwing shuttles. 

The warp used up just over 7 skeins of yarn, and the remaining yarn from the 8th skein got me to 69 cm woven on the loom. By that time it was late enough in the day that I stopped there.

I didn't realize I had stopped at exactly 69 cm until I took a picture of the measuring tape on my loom.

Nice.

I tried to be funny on fb and posted that fact, but my friends are all too classy, or think I am too classy to make that reference.

Anyway, I'm trucking along, and hopefully will be finished with this warp well in time for the dyeing weekend at my apprentice, Cristina's place this summer.

It will be fun to compare how the white cloth takes the dye as opposed to the grey cloth. I have high hopes to make a good deep madder red to make myself a new 16th century kirtle or petticoat.

... and it glows in the sunlight. 
I posted a reel on IG Lia de Thornegge (@lia.me.fecit) • Foton och videor på Instagram
And it is definitely a softer hand than when under tension on the loom, but still not as buttery as I might have hoped. The ends did start to fray like mad the moment I cut the cloth off the loom. I tied it off by hand to stop it unravelling any more.

I'm not sure if I want to wet finish this sample - it would end up being used in garments not meant to be washed anyway. But wet finishing does things to a raw weave to finish it off and even things out.

I even feel a little inspiration to sew - so I'll pull out my printed cottons and bring them to sewing circle tomorrow, and cut out some Ottoman stuff.