Flip Rigid Heddle Loom: Take it with you

This is the project I was working on in the car. It's honeycomb--a favorite, and a great weave structure for the rigid heddle loom.

Last week I drove a friend to Denver for chemo. I also had a project deadline. What to do? I took my weaving with me and wove while I waited. Even though I've been rigid heddle weaving for years, I'd never actually taken my Flip loom with me.

So as not to be intrusive in the waiting room, I wove outside in my car, sitting in the back seat with Flip propped up on the back of the front seat. It was a glorious Colorado fall day. I enjoyed listening to the sounds of the city, the cool fall breeze coming in through the car windows, and at peace, throwing my shuttle to and fro. An added bonus was being of assistance to a friend without feeling panicky about my deadline.

p.s. Please register to vote. If you're not registered to vote, I hope you will do so right now. There's so much at stake this election and each voice matters more than ever.

Christy's Scarf

I wanted to share with you the scarf Christy wove during my Weave-A-Scarf-in-a-Day class at my LYS, Shuttles, Spindles, and Skeins. Christy works in our accounting department at Schacht and took the class I was teaching at Shuttles. For some weaving newbies, their selvedges and beat are even from the start. Christy is just this kind of new weaver. She’s getting her first rigid heddle loom (the Schacht Flip Folding Loom) and I’m looking forward to where she goes from here. Her enthusiasm reminds me of the excitement I felt when I first started weaving. Can you still remember the thrill of it all?
You’ll find the instructions for this woven and felted scarf in the Schacht Winter 2008 on-line newsletter. Just go to www.schachtspindle.com and click on “Recent Issue”. It’s easy to subscribe.

New York Travel Report, Part 1

I’ve been traveling, and how good it is to be home. It was a fabulous trip with many parts (more later), but the best part was getting away from my own environment and seeing what else was going on in weaving and spinning, as well as textile art in general.

EGLFC (aka Eastern Great Lakes Fiber Conference)
· A small biannual regional conference hosted in turn by area guilds. A primary goal of the conference is to bring in teachers from across the country who individual guilds cannot otherwise afford.
· This was a small, well-run conference. The all-volunteer committee, chaired by Peg Houseman, should congratulate themselves for a superb job.
· I taught a 2-day workshop called Textural Treats—leno, Brooks bouquet, soumak, as well as rigid heddle pick-up with similar textury weaves adapted for the harness loom. In attendance were both veteran and novice weavers who got really excited about the freedom that finger techniques afford the weaver. (Try’em, you’ll like ‘em.)
· I also taught my Weave-a-Scarf-in-a-Day class. Six new weavers left that day with a scarf and excitement about learning a new craft. (Hint, hint: teaching is key to weaving’s future.)


Photo caption: This sampler illustrates some weft-faced finger techniques, from top to bottom: picked up loops, individual rya knots on a plain weave ground, and pink soumak stripes—all woven in dibby dabs of my very own handspun yarn.

Note and apology. Re: the Mighty Wolf’s debute on the CBS sitcom Big Bang Theory. It actually appeared on October 15th (not the 8th as previously noted). You can still watch this episode on-line by visiting:
http://alpha.cbs.com/primetime/big_bang_theory/recaps/ep104/

Wedding Shawl Report

Saturday, as I was warping my loom for the wedding shawl, I was talking to myself, “This is not where I want to be. A week away from THE WEDDING and STILL weaving; no, not even weaving, warping the loom for the shawl!” Then I let the thought go…most everything is ready for arriving guests, wedding plans, bridal details, etc. This is time I actually have to weave. It’s not like I’m starting from scratch! I’ve done my sampling. I know what I have to do. Now I just need to do it. Once I went to my own personal AA (“attitude adjustment”) meeting, I began to relish the quiet before the “storm”. I measured, threaded, beamed, and tied on.

Tip-O-the-Week:
Measuring the warp, I wanted to use two spools of fine wool, but I didn’t have my spool rack handy. I definitely did not want to wind 108 ends with two spools jumping all over the floor. Then I spied my lazy Kate across the room and put the spools on it. Worked great.

I had planned to weave the shawl on my rigid heddle loom and had done my initial sampling on this loom. But realizing that time was of the essence, I knew I could weave faster on my Baby Wolf.

In anticipation, I had woven my final shawl sample on my Baby Wolf and was reminded that the weft packs in more on a floor loom than on a rigid heddle loom. My floor loom sample was quite a bit stiffer than my first sample on the rigid heddle loom. I also knew that beat differs over a wider width, in this case about 23”, than on a narrower 6” wide sample. Therefore, I put on a little extra warp length so that I could weave a few inches to test my beat. I wove about 6”, backing off on my beating a bit, and then I washed the sample. I was pleased with the hand of this piece. This was time well spent. Now I could weave with the confidence of knowing that the end result is what I hope it will be. At this point, I do not need any surprises!

Here are my warping and weaving tunes:
Bob Dylan’s 2006 Modern Times (especially cut 2, “Spirit on the Water”)
The Dixie Chick’s Taking the Long Road (2006)
Bonnie Raitt’s Souls Alike (2005) (personal favorite—“I will Not Be Broken”)

TNNA Travel Report

I just returned from TNNA (The National Needlework Association), held in Columbus, Ohio. TNNA is a trade organization primarily for the needlearts: embroidery, counted cross stitch, knitting and crochet.

Debbie Becker weaves her scarf.

The gathering in Columbus offered shop owners, designers and teachers classes and a trade show. I went to teach two weaving classes: "Weave a Scarf in a Day” on the rigid heddle loom and “Knit One, Weave Too”, a class designed to help yarn shops introduce weaving to their customers.

A proud Amy Swenson shows off her scarf. Amy is a partner in Make 1
Yarn Store located in Calgary,
Alberta Canada. She is also author
of two recently published books
“Not Your Mama’s Crochet” and
“Not your Mama’s Felting”.

Schacht also had a booth where we showed our smaller looms and spinning wheels, including our new Ladybug Spinning Wheel. Terribly exciting for me was the high interest we found in weaving and especially spinning. People seemed to want to learn to weave and spin. Also interesting was how many people had woven in the past and wanted to take it up again. The main catch for shop owners was finding someone who could teach weaving. My pitch of the day is if you are a weaving teacher, offer to teach a class for a yarn store, guild, school, city rec center. It is only through teaching that we can invigorate our craft.

Here’s some news from my days in Columbus:

• Stora Vavboken,a wonderful comprehensive Swedish weaving book, is going to be distributed in the US in English. Favorite Rag Rugs, another Swedish book, will be available in English. Look for both within the year.
  


A rare quiet moment in the Schacht booth.
• Preliminary results from the TNNA survey indicates that spinning is at the top of needleworkers’ lists of what they’d like to learn.
  
• The offerings of natural fibers—soy silk, bamboo, hemp and organic cotton—are developing and promising to be exciting.

Columbus Restaurant review:
Trying out local eateries is one of my great traveling pleasures. Barry and I had a delicious meal with warm hospitality at Barcelona, on the edge of German Town district in Columbus.

THE Wedding Shawl

My daughter Nora is getting married this summer and I’m thrilled that she has asked me to weave a shawl for the occasion. (I’m honored that she wants me to make something for her special day and completely relieved that it is NOT THE DRESS she wants me to weave—that would be way, way too stressful.)

Since I’m exploring the rigid heddle loom in depth these days, I have taken up the challenge to create THE WEDDING SHAWL on my 25” Flip loom. I’m using two 12-dent heddles together for a 24 e.p.i. sett. I want the fabric to have some weight to it, as her dress is a smooth, heavy satin. I’m using tencel in the warp along with a 24/2 wool. For easy textural vertical stripes, I’ve threaded stripes of tencel then skipped about an inch of dents and then threaded the next stripe of tencel. Sampling told me that I wanted to control the yarns at the edge of the tencel stripes somewhat, so I’m bordering each stripe with 2 ends of a 24/2 wool. This felts up a bit in the washing, allowing the threaded stripes to move into the open space somewhat but also containing them a bit.

For the weft, I’ve decided on Glacé, a rayon ribbon yarn, as well as tencel. I like what I’m going to do in the weft: weave a variety of variations along the length. I’ll have no set pattern for these, but rather just watch what is happening in the cloth and respond—a real advantage of handweaving over commercial cloth! A reason to weave! And no two fabrics alike.

Some of the combinations you see in the sample at left are alternating Glacé and tencel, weaving two ends of Glacé and two ends of tencel, 2-3” long stripes of tencel, and broad stripes of Glacé. I’ve also taken advantage of the two-heddle options and woven with just heddle 1 to create a basket weave variation (1 end vs 3 ends), as well as alternating heddle 1 up and heddle 2 up with a plain weave tabby background (both heddles up and down alternately).

The samples shown here are blue and green because that’s what I had on hand. The green is tencel, the dark blue is 2-ply wool, and the aqua weft stripes are Glacé. For the fabric on the left, I used tencel only for the weft. While this fabric has a lovely drape, it is too lightweight for what I intend for the shawl. For the fabric on the right, I tried wool in the weft and then I vigorously washed the sample in the washing machine and then threw it into the dryer with other laundry. Although there are elements of this sample I like, I determined that it shrank too much for this use. For the shawl, I’ll work from the results of the ideas I sampled in the center swatch. My next sample will be with the white yarns I’ll use for the shawl, as well as experiments with a beaded edge finish. I’ll keep you posted on the sampling process…

Shuttle Talk

My current explorations are weaving on the rigid heddle loom. This swatch is one I made on a leftover warp for a project I designed for the May-June issue of Handwoven. The project features fine weaving on the rigid heddle loom using 2 heddles. I really like how the pillows turned out—and I love how two heddles extend your weaving options. The warp threading for this swatch is the same as my project in the May-June 2007 issue of Handwoven, page 64.

Swatch - Left side of the image is the front of the sample, at right is the back.

Pick-up: With a pick-up stick, pick up every brown warp thread.

Weaving:

1. Up (Beige)
2. Pattern stick (turned on edge, heddle in neutral, Brown)
3. Up (Beige)
4. Pattern stick (turned on edge, heddle in neutral, Brown)
5. Up (Beige)
6. Down (Beige)
7. Up and pattern stick (used flat, slid up against back of heddle, Beige)
8. Down (Beige)
9. Up and pattern stick (use flat, slid up against back of heddle, Beige)

Repeat