Urban Wildlife and Inkles

I've been noticing new and regular visitor to my back garden. He's very wary and startles even if someone moves too quickly at an upstairs window. I have suspected he has been visiting for several years but this is the first year I've seen him. It's nice to see urban wildlife, even if it is a garden eating bunny. Here he is as seen from the 2nd story window, through the window screen.

The floor loom is in the process of being dressed. I'm working on threading the heddles right now. At the rate at which I'm allotting time for this chore, it could take several years or at least a week. It's plain white wool which I hope to dye after it's off the loom. Since my big pot is packed, this seemed like the best way to actually get this project started.

The inkle loom has been busy. The blue and white pick up pattern took days to weave off, despite regular attention to the loom. While I was wanting to do a brocade pattern, I did a few simple, narrow bands just to bump up the production. I'm actually trying to find a pattern that makes me smile enough to use for trim on a green linen gown. I'm getting close but haven't found the right one yet. However, I have used up a bunch more small bits of handspun and have almost 8 more yards of trim to show for it. I really wanted a bit of green yarn in the trim, but didn't have any suitable. This was a tad frustrating until I looked at my roving stash near my spinning chair. There, on top, was a naturally dyed green batt, waiting to be spun. So soon, there will be green yarn to weave with. The top one is natural tan, dyer's knotweed blue and dyer's greenweed yellow. The bottom is natural tan, natural black and a rusty madder red.

The Orangeville Alpaca show was lots of fun. We had loads of spinners come out to play so spinning was fun and relaxing. The shawl produced was very pretty; a herringbone twill in two shades of brown alpaca.

Spring Gardens and projects

Look what I found in the garden while I was digging yesterday! The miniature tulips are early, blooming even before the daffodils. As well, the lone Siberian Iris came up. I should really plant more. Before I put in raised beds, there were many of these but I think the squirrels found the bulbs in the garden beds. It looks forlorn and lonely :) I've got one bed of woad seeds planted directly into the garden. I'll be started some seeds in a few days to plant into a second bed as seedlings to see which ones grow the best and produce the most woad leaves.

Yesterday I finished weaving another inkle band. Interestingly enough, I looked at that pattern and said, UGH - at least I can hide it as a belt or something. My DH looked at it and said, Wow! Nice, finally one with some colour! I am constantly amazed at the differences in perception. I also warped up the inkle loom with a tablet weaving project, which required making some make shift cardboard weaving cards. The whole project was a disaster and is now off the loom. The cardboard was too soft and bent too easily, while the threads just tangled everytime the tension was released. So I cut off the double weave tablet weaving project and I put on a new inkle pickup weave project this morning. I was up and at it really early. The blue and white is the pick up pattern while the grey, white and red is the one that is "colourful" :) This is a very fast and fun way to use up my small amounts of handspun, naturally dyed yarn.

I'm also giving the Ashford Traveller a tune up today. Saturday is the Alpaca Ontario Show where the Guelph Handweavers and Spinners will be doing an Alpaca fleece to shawl demo all day. It's lots of fun and the Alpaca are just the sweetest and somewhat goofy looking animals. This is a rather relaxed fleece to shawl as it isn't a competition and we have lots of time to answer questions and talk with the public.

Finally, if I'm not exhausted and needing a nap, I've been winding off some leftover cotolin thread into small skeins. I'm going to do a quick wash with them in soda ash and then mordant them with alum. Then I'll see what colours they might take up. I've got some dried weld, woad and madder left from last year. If it works there will be enough for a few inkle or tablet woven bands but nothing big, but at least the thread will get used up.

A Long week..

Last weekend was Forward Into The Past. It's a fun and informative event, open to the public and reenactors alike. I was feeling somewhat burnt out and stressed, so only went to a couple of classes this year and spent the rest of the time chatting and relaxing. On the way home, my transmission started squealing and I felt very lucky that the van made it into my driveway! So $3111 later, I can drive again. This is the 2nd transmission in 2 1/2 years. If it goes again then too bad! While I like my van, I don't like it that much!

The project on the floor loom is coming off. After trying to force myself to spend time each day on it, and avoiding it like the plague - I came up with some dandy excuses, I'm chopping it off. Of course, I did have to prep for a class I was teaching and I did a program at the Burlington Weaver's Guild as well, which required a bit of work. Wow, do they have a great meeting place and an amazingly friendly group of people there.

I also had to make a spring cake. The men folk around here will eat pie until it's coming out their ears and then some. However, I went for a change and made a fancy cake. Darned thing took over 5 hours to make, including a ton of little royal icing flowers, that I ended up not using!

So back to the loom.... The project on it was to be my show and tell piece for the Guelph Handweavers and Spinners yearly challenge. This year was based on the 100 mile Dye-it, meaning choose locally raised and processed fibres, yarns and or natural dyes. I had the local fibres, shetland wool from Earendel Farm, I had process and spun them myself and dyed them with plants that I'd grown or harvested locally. I was going to weave them into a wall hanging but turns out that I wasn't enjoying the technique.
Worried that I wouldn't have anything to show for my challenge and the fact that the yarn that I had designated for this project was really small amounts compared to what I normally do, I had to find another project that would use only yards of yarn instead of hundreds of yards. What did I come up with?

Inkles... warp faced plain weave bands. I'd only done inkle weaving in crochet cotton which is a very forgiving yarn. Working in handspun wool has been enough of a challenge to keep my interest. So I have a guild project that I can then use for costuming! Of course the inkle loom as we modernly know it, isn't remotely medieval but inkles are. They were probably woven on box looms, 2 beam looms of various designs or a simple technique - like tying your project to a tree and your waist for tension. There are references to inkles, illuminations of women withtape and box looms with rigid heddles or no heddles (string possibly?) as well as weaving tablets. There are bits of ribbons found and top selvedge headers for warp weighted looms which were probably woven with rigid heddles or something similar as they are repp weaves, rather than tabby weaves. The string heddles are a simple method of making a hand operated 2 shed heddle device, so I put rigid heddles in the same category. There are at least a couple of very early period rigid heddles found, in the size for making tapes. Now to figure out a way to make one of these early looms that is much more period than the one I currently have!

Spring Green Fibre

The green fibre is dry! I carded it with a drum carder to blend the colour a bit and loosen up the rovings. This is from the Golden Margeurite vat that I did the other day. I thought I had used a Dyer's Knotweed blue which was a chemical reduction and an some sort of urine vat reduction of either woad or indigo. However, the smell of the blue I'd thought was Dyer's Knotweed suggests strongly that it was a urine vat reduction of woad. Not sure how I packed the two types of rovings together, but I did. The urine vat reduced indigotin has a distinct odor, albeit faint. At anyrate, one green is lighter, with a yellowish undertone and the other is darker with a bluish undertone. Both are very pretty.

This is Little Dog, another Shetland sheep fleece from Tammy. Now, looking at the size of this fleece, I'd say that LITTLE Dog is a bit of an understatement. It is a pretty big fleece. I had to divide it into 3 pieces in order to shake it out to get rid of the second cuts and large bits of hay. It is long and fairly soft. Little Dog is black. The tips are sun bleached brown and he has a really nice mix of grey in the black. It is a really lovely colour over all. It seems to have a staple length of 5-6 inches which I find a really good length to spin. I've got part of the fleece soaking right now, just to see how it cleans up.

First flowers, Dyes and a New Project!

Spring is in the air. The ground is thawing and a few days ago I found these pretty little snowdrops heralding Spring's arrival. It is always a good sign to see them. This year, at least they aren't fighting their way through snow, which I've seen in the past. Today, I noticed that in the sheltered area near the front garden, there are crocuses growing! That is early for them, but I'm not going to complain as the cheery purple is a wonderful sight.

The house smells of chamomile - or golden margeurite to be specific - dyer's chamomile. Last summer I dutifully harvested all the flowers as soon as they were barely mature. I stuck them in my freezer, in zip lock bags so I could add flowers as long as I could. I am working on a project and thought that I might need some green, so I dumped the flowers in a pot and cooked them for several hours today. I did an dye pot alum mordant, which I don't normally do, finding pre-mordanting generally gives me much better results. However I'm still down to one dyepot, and I'd already gotten the flowers cooking before I realized that the wool wasn't mordanted. I put in 2 shades of blue from last summer. One was a urine vat reduced indigotin - couldn't tell you if it was woad or indigo as it was just a small bit that I hadn't labeled for some reason and some of the Dyer's Knotweed from last summer. They are cooling in the pot right now, so I'm not sure what shades of green I have right now.

The greens will add to this colour palette for the new project on the loom. I used some wool singles and have a 20cm wide band warped up. The warp is leftover from the Dublin cap project. The weft will be linen singles, left over from the previous linen project I did. The colour bits for the inlays - supplementary weft brocade - will be handspun, naturally dyed shetland. It's a totally new technique and I've been able to find little information about it for some reason. I've only gotten as far as tiny samples to see if what I was planning would actually work.

Nothing on the loom!

Currently there is nothing on the loom...oh no... however there are several projects planned. After the shawls however, I felt like doing something else. So I picked up a set of Addi stainless steel needles that were a gift - and started knitting. Let me tell you, those needles had the project, albeit small and simple, simply fly off the needles because they were so nice to knit with. I used some leftover wool from the shawls to knit a pair of half mitts. My hand tend to get cold in between seasons and these allow me to still do things and keep warm. Especially useful I thought for the Ontario Alpaca show in April, where several of us are doing a fleece to shawl demo.

I've been spinning as well. The black shetland that I was considering using as singles has been plied. It's a nicer wool plied, so I'm considering using it for a cloak project, once I get enough spun. It's soft but it has been really hard to spin completely evenly as the little vm bits keep breaking my spinning rhythm. Even when I pick them all out of the rovings before I spin, they seem to jump back into the wool. Plying made it just a nice yarn, so all is good. I may spin it a tad thicker though so it spins up faster and makes the cloak a bit warmer. Mainly so it spins up faster. This last skein took an awfully long time to spin, but it's really, really fine.

Tomorrow a friend is coming over and we're going to play with the pot of madder roots which have been overwintering in the garage. They are still happy but I think they should be used soon and my friend wanted to learn how to dye. It should be a fun day.

Project updates

The checky shawl is done. It is hanging to dry in this photo. It was 95 in x 24 in off the loom. I'd made it extra long, knowing that there was a lot of stretch in the yarn and it would shrink back once I was done. Well, after twisting the fringes, I let it sit overnight and tossed it in the washer on the handwash cycle this morning. It is now 84 in x 21 in. This is a good size for a shawl. I'm still not fond of twisting fringes, but it does make the ends look nice and finished. I've gotten 5 shawls when I expected 4 from this project and I'm happy about that. A blue one is already spoken for and one of the red ones will be a gift. I think I may actually keep one for myself as well.

I've also got the first bobbin of the black shetland off the wheel. I put it into a centre pull ball as I was going to ply it. However, there wasn't one break while winding it off and I wasn't horribly gentle with it. I'm thinking that this might be strong enough to weave with. I do have a small project in mind which the black shetland would work well for, but I'm not certain. Instead, I'm going to just spin it into singles and store in centre pull balls for a few weeks until I decide. The light coloured flecks are the bits of VM left in the roving that I wasn't able to get out when picking before I spun or during spinning.

Now, I'd like to introduce you to Star, a moorit shetland lamb fleece. I've started picking and washing it. It is a nice fleece, greasy but not overly so, although alot of it is a tad on the short side. It is part of the project I'm working on to make a shawl for Tammy of Kalwa Taure Shetlands. The moorit coloured sheep I've seen tend to be a lovely chocolate brown. This one is no exception, though I couldn't get the colour accurate in the photo, even with some playing around in GIMP. The difference is that this fleece has lovely sun faded tips. Some people don't like that and I've heard that people even cut them off. In this fleece though, it adds some lovely character to the fibre.

I checked the forgotten madder vat. It is lovely and dark red in colour. Leaving it in the garage for most of the winter seems to not have harmed it at all. Nothing sciencey project growing in ti either! Yay!