Don't Do What I Did!

Way before my hip replacement, I planned a project to put on the loom for my recovery. I'd totally forgotten that it would be weeks before I'd be cleared to weave again, so it was kind of a useless idea.  In the end though, it meant I had the warp almost ready to go when I needed it months later.

  It was 2/8 cotton and I did stripes, navy with painted warp stripes in between.   The painting of the warp was very successful.  It was a beautiful warp.  I started winding the navy stripes but only got halfway done before climbing up and down to the basement to my warping board  became difficult.   The project was left, semi-forgotten in a bag on the back of my desk chair.   Eventually though, time passed and I realized that I had 3 1/2 weeks left before the guild sale.    Discussion at the last meeting suggested that our stock of tea towels was low, so I decided to get this project on the loom.   It's an easy to weave project, the ubiquitous "friendship towels", from Schacht.  It's a delightful project, fun and fast, and also easy to change up the colour for each towel.  They've also provided the draft free, which was really nice of them.

See the twisting!  The navy was so much worse!

So step one -  When I dye warps I put tight figure 8 ties in the cross and also one at each end, to keep the yarns from slipping.   However all the rest of the figure 8 ties are tied loosely in a bow, so that a) it will be easy to dye the whole length without those white marks from a tight choke tie and b) using a bow so that when the warp is dry, I can tighten up the figure 8 ties to keep the warp contained and straight.  

  First mistake was not retying the figure 8 ties to make firm choke ties.   This allowed the painted warp to twist around itself, making for not so fun warping.   Secondly, I know that I painted the warp in a particular order.  I neither marked each of the painted warp chains with the order number, nor did I take proper notes.  I have a basic explanation of the project, a quick diagram with numbers etc, but absolutely none of the details which tell me what I was truly planning at the time.  My third mistake when starting this project, is that while I wound each stripe in the painted warp separately, I didn't do that for the navy stripes.  I wound about half of it in one bunch, and then because I neglected to note how many warp threads I'd wound, when I went to finish winding the warp 3 weeks ago, I figured it was easier to wind the second half of the navy stripes in one bunch too.   I'd counted my navy warp 3 times, and had 3 different numbers, so took the average and wound the rest of the stripes together as one warp.  This wouldn't have been such an issue if the navy cotton yarn hadn't been really over twisted, so it wound around itself something fierce and was so difficult to work with.   

painted warp and navy stripes, black weft.

After much fussing, winding, a few crossed threads and some broken threads from the over spun yarns twisting in the heddles, the warp was on the loom.  This was not a fun process and if I didn't absolutely love that warp, if it wasn't maybe 7 feet long, so 6 tea towels, so a lot of thread to waste, I might have cut it off.  Once it was on the loom though, it was very pretty.  I wove off two in a teal colour, one in a lighter green which was nice but not spectacular, two in purple which were awesome and one in black which is stunning.   I hadn't realized that I had any 2/8 black cotton in my stash or their would have been more of them.  I used all the purple I had.  My initial thoughts were to use the navy for the weft, thinking the navy on navy would give a sold stripe against the painted stripes.  However to my eye, because the navy is a broken twill, it just looked a bit messy to me.

1- take lots of notes, even if you don't think you'll need them.   If you put that project aside for a bit, you'll really want to know those details that don't jump out at you, including warp length, that the yarn is over twisted or delicate or just fine etc.

2- document numbers - how many are in each stripe, how long, did you add extra threads for use in breakage etc.

3 - don't wait until last minute and have to rush.  Give yourself time to enjoy the process. 

4- sometimes it's best to wind your stripes in the right number of threads to facilitate that enjoying the process bit :)

The towels have been washed and dried.  They are waiting for me to hem them.    I'm happy with the outcome.

Historical Kitchen Fun

I can't believe how busy it's been or at least seems to have been.   I thought after the fair demos things would settle down.   However it took a bit longer than that.   My car was acting odd on my last trip to Westfield and we took it in to get looked at and boy, were we lucky.   The hose to the transmission had worn and was leaking transmission fluid.   But it seems like we may have caught it in time and it was only $650 instead of $3000.   Hubby says this could be normal wear and tear.  I think though it's the excessive bouncing over the train tracks on the route I normally take to town.  The asphalt is always pitted and cracked around the tracks and you have to slow down to a crawl to go over them unless you are a huge farm vehicle with giant flat, seemingly solid tires!

Besides that, I've been dressing the floor loom and that is fodder for another post.   Just... next time.  I've made some socks.  I've planned a new Birka style bag on which I've planned some Bayeux stitch embroidery - also for another post.

A gorgeous and functional stove

However, last Sunday I took a cooking workshop at Dundurn castle.  It was much less a cooking workshop than a tasting class.   It was still fun though.   I got to cook on the stove which is a pretty awesome beast.   (Well, I stirred onions in a pan, but it's still cooking!)  It was about soups and it was quite informative.    I like the booklet we got, which has some new cookery sources in for me.   I also realized that the people running the  course are simply people like me, and while I didn't butt in or anything, I did know the answers to the information that they forgot.  There is another workshop coming up in December, on puddings, which could be fun, but it's a tad more expensive and I spent the rest of my discretionary, non- yarn budget inviting my daughter along with me.   I sure would like some other insight into steamed pudding though, considering the several recent failures I've had.

Some of the transferware in the kitchen

The soups were all easy to make and most were quite tasty.  Even though I'm not a huge fan of tomato soup, the fresh tomato soup was quite nice.  The pumpkin soup was good although I'd make it with broth instead of milk as the milk sort of overwhelmed the pumpkin flavour if that is possible.  The onion soup which I helped caramelize the onions for, was delicious but it was really just a lot of fried onions in broth.

There was a huge display of transfer ware.  I didn't get enough time to check out all the patterns, but gosh, it was beautiful.  I do love transfer ware and really wish I had a bit of time to check them out.

This is a picture of a cupboard in the kitchen which I really liked.   I could see this as a yarn cupboard - or yarn-oire which I've been asking for.   It was a decent size and would hold a lot of stuff, as well as keeping it out of sight.

The amount of period equipment in the kitchen was quite amazing.   It gave me a lot of ideas and inspiration.  In all, it was a good morning.   It did begin with the person escorting us into the kitchen telling us that the scaffolding on the outside was period in that in October of 1850something, they were planning for one of the daughter's weddings.  To make the house more grand looking, the front pillars were installed.   It was a fun bit of information to start the day.

Proof I got to use the stove!