Cloth

I wish you could reach through your computer screen and feel my cloth. It is by far my favorite thing I've woven just because of the sumptuous texture. It drapes beautifully and feels like a textured silk. All 3 1/2 yards of it!

Washing it was different than I usually treat handwoven items. I have sewed with machine made tencel fabric before and so I knew that if you let it drip dry it feels like cardboard. But if you put it in the dryer--voila!--it turns into the loveliest softness.

I tried to capture the iridescence in this picture. I can tell the fabric is a little warp-faced (meaning more of the warp is showing than the weft) since the brown is definitely in the "background" and the blue is dominant. I still would have liked a darker coffee brown better, but it's too late to fix that so... stop thinking about it, right?

Now, on to the sewing!

Fabric!

Winter has been busy! I've begun a new weaving project which will end up being yardage for a garment to be entered in this garment contest at Handwoven magazine. Whew... I'm worn out just writing about it. Considering I started working on this before Thanksgiving, it's taking longer than usual, although Christmas kind of got in the way of working on it.

I wanted to share some of the things I'm doing differently with this project to help it go more smoothly than the tartan did. First of all I got myself a lamp to clip on the loom, as you can see in the picture. Don't underestimate the importance of lighting!

This is a shot of the main cloth, it's one of the treadling patterns from a German Bird's Eye (in Marguerite Davison's book). The warp is this bold royal blue (the closest thing I could find to what I wanted--still not happy) in 8/2 tencel. The weft is a medium cardboard brown--the only brown tencel I could find anywhere! My original color ideas were completely different and I'm still not completely satisfied with this combination... but I didn't want to bore you with my 3 month thought process on colors. Do you ever have difficulty picking color combinations? Do you have trouble finding the color, that elusive perfect shade that does not exist? I do.

One thing that I learned from weaving the tartan cloth was making sturdy selvedges to prevent warp threads from breaking. Here you can see this green 5/2 perle cotton on my selvedge. I put a good 1/2 inch of it doubled up so there is no chance of the tencel being rubbed and snapped. With a 30 inch wide warp, this is essential since it will be drawing in to around 27 inches.

The other plan for this project is that I will be able to tie on to the warp threads again after I cut off the fabric. Basically that means I won't have to take each thread and put it through the reed and the heddles again, I'll just have to tie a new thread on to the old ones. Another reason why I chose the German Bird's Eye pattern--it has 5 different treadling patterns. In the picture above you can see what you get when you do the plain weave treadling. It's sort of a plain weave with a group of 3 every 1/2 inch or so.

More on this soon!

Kilt

It's finally done. Woven and sewn by hand. I have to say I'm actually pretty excited that it came out so well. I really was not expecting it to. I wore it to the Weavers Guild meeting last week and they snapped these pictures for me. (Yes, matching those stripes was pretty tedious.)




I would never have been able to sew it correctly if I hadn't been able to borrow a book from a fellow guild member--thanks Wendy! The Art of Kiltmaking by Barbara Tewksbury was wonderfully written and easy to follow. I have to say two things about using the book: 1) I think she is a little basting-happy. Pins work just as well for about half of the times she has you baste. 2) I am very glad I was working with my fluffy handwoven cloth and not some finer machine woven cloth--none of my stitches show because they just kind of get covered up by the yarn. I am a horribly messy and inconsistent hand-stitcher and it would look pretty awful if you could see all my stitches.

I also got to wear it to our annual dance performance at the Renaissance Festival. Let me just say, this skirt is absolutely amazing to dance in. It swishes really high and twirls wonderfully--every girl's dream right? I took the baby with me and she had her own "wee-kilt" and bonnet to wear. She was the star of the show of course. Her kilt was made as a gift by Wendy, it's in the Campbell tartan in case you're wondering.

I am so glad I spent all that time to make this kilt (2 months!), but would I ever do it again? Probably not. If you're interested in making your own kilt, it's very straightforward to sew. I would definitely sew one again, but I would buy the cloth instead of weaving it. The book estimates that a first-time kiltmaker will spend 40 hours sewing one. I think I did it in around 20 hours. (Maybe it's because I skipped all that basting!)

Do you have any projects that took forever, but were worth it in the end? Or not worth it?

Tartan Cloth

Yes, I am finally done weaving my tartan cloth. All 6 1/2 yards of it. Every night for the past week I've said to myself, I'll get it done tonight. Well, I finished it this morning. I just had to take a crazy lady picture because I really was going a little crazy thinking it would never be done. Between color changes every inch or so, warp threads snapping constantly, and a teething baby... let's just say it was not progressing very quickly.

Here it is before I cut it off of the loom. I think this is the first thing I've woven that I am completely satisfied with. The picture doesn't do the colors justice.

Now the loom looks sad and empty, but I'm only half way through. Now I have to tackle the daunting task of tailoring a kilt out of the cloth. You might not hear from me for a few more weeks, but definitely check back because I have to have it sewn before October.

Tartan... the beginning

I have just jumped off the diving board into the deep end of a huge project that I've wanted to weave for at least three years.... tartan cloth! I designed my own tartan based off of my triangle shawl, since I like the color combination so much. My family name doesn't have a tartan, so I figured making one up was even more fun. It wasn't until after I'd designed it that I realized most tartans are symmetrical. Oh well!

At this point I have all of my warp threads measured, chained, and they are threaded through my reed on the loom. All 900 of them! I'm only half way through the set up process. Next I'll be threading them through the heddles to set up the twill pattern.

My goal is to have it woven before my group dances at our Renaissance Festival the first weekend in October. Ideally, this will be a kilt. But I don't have high hopes since the fabric might be too thick to pleat and wear without sweating to death. We'll see how it turns out I guess. I'm so excited!

Pouches

I have been a busy bee working on all kinds of projects, which is why I haven't had time to post recently. These are going to be Christmas presents for some friends of mine this year. They are from a wonderful and super easy tutorial I found on noodlehead. She did an excellent job with the instructions. The only trouble I had was with the zipper end-covers getting sewn down. But by the fourth one, I was a pro!

The fabric strips on the front of these was a handwoven sampler that I cut up. I originally used the sampler as a practice weaving in my kids fiber art class last year. I wasn't sure what it would become, but I thought it was the perfect accent on these pouches.

This golden twill pattern is the same project as the green diamonds, only woven in a different order. Lots of weaving patterns will give different results depending on the order you raise the threads in.

If you're a sewer, this project is perfect for fabric scraps. You can create all kinds of different effects by mixing and matching. Mine are very subdued, but you could definitely do some bright and spunky ones.

Coverlet

Remember last year about this time... I had just put a project on the loom at Missouri Town (a historical site I volunteer at). Well, it's finally finished. I stitched the two halves down the middle to make one big blanket and hemmed the two ends.

If you've ever read the Kirsten series of American Girl books, it's about Swedish immigrants in 1855, and one of them talks about her mother weaving the coverlets for their beds and thinking that the idea of quilts is strange. So that's what this coverlet would be, a scandinavian type of bed covering.

It's just the right size for a child's trundle bed. Now it's on display in the downstairs bedroom at the tavern. The best part is that it looks like it belongs in the room. It looks just as old as the actual artifacts. It feels good to have completed a project.