Weaving with Singles - a Viking apron dress

 I was going to update the blog background to a wintery photo, but instead am leaving it in it's autumnal glory.  We've had so much rain, fog and overcast skies that the bright flowers make me happy.  We had a couple of hours of sunshine today, which was glorious.  I'm not sure where Kevin was hiding, but Dion found a spot which was near enough the woodstove but was also a sun spot. That kitty surely lucked out on his timing for that nap!

I've been working on a simple viking apron dress panel for a friend.  She's getting an award and doesn't want a cloak which is one of the normal gifts.   It's one of the older, no longer thought to be historically correct apron designs.  However, since she is always working with metal and flame etc, this is a well thought out costuming piece on her part.   She asked me to weave it.  I decided that I will also spin the yarn for it because I didn't have a lighter weight wool yarn on hand, and this fabric really does need to be lighter than the commercial wool yarn that I have available.

I had a pound of merino roving in my stash, so pulled it out and started spinning.   This is going to be the requested diamond twill.   I'm spinning it to weave at about a sett of 15.  Because it's merino, it will full up nicely.  This is important because I'm passing the woven piece on to another friend who will embellish it with crazy beautiful embroidery.   

The yarn is spun, with adequate extra, hopefully for any possible
miscalculations.   I know someone who insisted that you only need to spin 10% extra yardage.  As nice as that sounds, I've found that if I do 30% more yardage, I have bases covered for any breakage or math errors.   ( or you know, naughty kitties)

As much as I wanted to dye the wool with indigo, I don't have the chemicals needed on hand and ordering it in would take too much time away from weaving.  Since I really didn't want to rush the weaving on this project, I used commercial weak acid dyes.   The warp is blue.  I added a bunch of black and thought it would grey out the colour a bit.  It did, but not as much as I expected.  Still it's a really attractive blue.  The photo isn't quite accurate.  The funny thing is is that I've some indigo sampling from past dye vats which are a very similar colour, so there is that.

The weft is spun but still needs to be dyed.   I've been waffling with what colour to dye it or if I should leave it white.  A pale blue would show up the weave structure less boldly than the white.  With the embroidery, I don't want the weave structure to compete with the pretty designs.   I do want the pattern to show up a bit more than doing it the same colour would.  Grey is another option.   

The warp needs to be sized.  I use a double strength gelatin for sizing  and it works very well.  This sizing adds some strength to the singles and helps protect against some of the abrasion from the beater.   I really means that weaving with singles is so much easier.   I usually size the yarn before I wind the warp.  This means I'll also have to wind the yarn into cakes before I wind the warp, just to make sure I don't tangle things up.

   In between all of this, I need to dye the weft.  The weft doesn't or at least shouldn't need to be sized.  I may weight it when I'm drying it to make the yarn a bit easier to work with.   Now I need to decide whether to put it on the table loom or the floor loom.  I think it will take a little bit longer to dress the floor loom, but will be a little bit faster to weave off.   I find that the table loom is faster to dress, but takes a tad longer to weave.   Because the process on each loom equals out, it is no help at all as to what loom I should use.   Oh the joy of 1st world problems :)