Brighton Honeycomb

I like Brighton Honeycomb. It is some time since I wove some but I have a few scarves that are favourites, just the thing to wear when having a nap, admiring the view from the top of the Rockefeller Building or just off camping.

Carol Strickler (#21 & #22 - A Weavers Book of 8 Shaft Patterns) gives two treadlings, the second of which produces a rib effect (Black Scarf - Rockefeller). The left hand draft below is a copy from Strickler.

One of the nice things about Brighton Honeycomb is that if you thread your selvedge threads on shafts 3 and 6 you get a plain or basket weave selvedge. The draft on the right shows what I am weaving. It is the 8 shaft draft extended to 24 shafts with selvedges and header rows added.

I am currently working on the trial/sample area, sorting out my beat, the shuttle tension and the warp and selvedge tensions. I had one crossed warp thread which was easily fixed.  The warp is two close shades of orange and I will be using a red weft.

Weaving 8 shaft Brighton Honeycomb in a single or analogous colours is just a starting point for this structure. There is quite a lot of information on the web. I like Priyank Goyal's notes, and Posselt has some interesting things to say, particularly on the use of colour.

I am using a twill sett which seems to work fine for scarves. If I have room on this warp I shall re-sley to a looser set for a small sample - shawls perhaps?

Selvedge Rollers

In an earlier post, Back of the loom, I showed some design possibilities for Selvedge Rollers. I have now come up with my version (Mark 1)  in which I have plagiarized a little bit from each of the ideas.

I bought two spinning wheel spools and mounted them on a long wooden dowel. The dowel is attached by four metal brackets to a narrow beam that sits in the currently unused mountings of the secondary warp beam. The selvedge threads are wound onto the spools and dynamic tension is applied by nylon line wrapped over the rollers and weighted with fishing sinkers.

 The system works but already I can see plenty of scope for improvement. This will all have to wait otherwise I shall never get going with some weaving. 

Threading with the AVL Cross Maker

I set out to thread a warp today on my 24S Glimakra but ran into problems. I had the threading cross on lease sticks suspended as usual  right behind the heddles. Note the cunning use of the snitch knot to get the lease sticks at the right height!

Normally reaching through the gap between the heddles (24 shafts worth of them) to pick up the next thread from the cross is fine but because I have slightly wrenched my shoulder playing tennis I found this tricky today.

My solution to the problem has been to move the threading cross to in front of the heddles. I have used the cross maker from my AVL warping wheel to act as a little set of lease sticks and the photograph shows the rather industrial way that I am holding it in place. The selected threads are easily slid of the ends of the sticks. I thread in blocks of four, selecting and grouping the correct heddles and then taking the threads off the cross. I still have to reach through to bring the threads into the correct position for threading but it this is much easier on the shoulder (and the eyes) than trying to get hold of threads that are 2 feet away.

I have a rubber band (not shown) that I put into place on the cross maker to hold the threads firmly in place. I put this on every time I get up from my sitting position which is the danger time for knocking things out of kilter. I take it off again when I am settled back down again and ready to resume threading.

The next photo shows the total set up. The ubiquitous milk crate ( I have seen a students bedsit completely furnished with these) is just the right height for a seat. The loom controller foot pedal is sitting on the knee beam and always remember to take your watch off before starting to thread.

I have a special threading draft that lifts each shaft in a block of four in turn. This is when I select the heddle. After I have threaded them I use the draft to lift all four shafts together so I can check that all is correct.

Ray's Scarf

                                                                                                                                                                                                              

We  went camping over the weekend at Crowdy Bay National Park . We met up with our friends who are members of a bushwalking group. They all shot off on some long walks  but I stayed close to the campsite and limited my activity to wandered off into the bush a couple of times and making a short foray along the beach. I positioned myself with camera, binoculars and did a bit of fringe twisting whilst letting nature come to me.






This scarf is one of the last three that I wove from a very colourful warp that has kept me happy from months.

Whilst there I caught up with Ray who I first met when we went camping at Knorrits Flat. On his travels around Australia Ray has collected wool in different conditions and quantities and from a variety of sources including derelict weaving sheds.  A friend spun this wool for him and lent Ray a loom on which he wove this scarf; his first bit of weaving for over fifty years. 


The colours are so natural and organic and the blending is lovely. I hope that the picture of the scarf draped over a tree and contrasting with the bark shows what I mean.

It just so happens that I am starting spinning classes next Saturday and I have already researched how to dye with Australian plants. I have even bought the necessary  mordants.

I think that seeing Ray's scarf will have given me the inspirational impetus to move a project from theory to practise.

.

Warp Swap

Having got the CB loom polished, assembled, beamed, entered and gated I settled down to weave but after awhile I started to have subversive thoughts. The gist of the thoughts were that it was silly to be weaving a twill scarf on this (CB) loom when I had a perfectly good semi automated loom (Glimakra 24S with Toika loom controller) that would do the job more efficiently. I debated with myself  on this for a while but was reluctant to logically follow an argument that would render this CB loom redundant and eBay fodder.  Then I remembered my lurking project that would probably be better on a completely manual loom - Overshot. I'll go through my reasoning in another post but my first priority was to clear the CB loom.

The objective as to move the warp from the CB loom to the Glimakra.

I cut out the weaving I had done and rewound the warp back on to the warp beam. I took the warp beam off the CB loom and suspended it over the warp beam of the Glimakra.

This picture shows the warp with its lease sticks in place and tied onto the apron rod of the Glimakra.

To get a bit of tension I slung a couple of weight over the CB warp beam.

The picture below shows the situation half way through the process. The warp is being wound from the CB warp beam onto the Glimakra warp beam. The CB warp beam is suspended from the Glimakra frame directly above the Glimakra warp beam. Lease sticks are in place to maintain the cross and tension is supplied by some weights.

It was not plain sailing all the way. At some time during the initial beaming of this warp I managed to cross over some of the bouts which meant that when winding from one beam to another there were threads that crossed over each other and were reluctant to move smoothly through the lease sticks and pilled together. The next time I beam a warp I shall pay particular attention to see if I can work out where my mistake lies.

It is all done now so on to the next stages. I have had a touch of flu over the past few days and have used my lucid moments to study overshot drafts and change my mind a hundred times as to which pattern shall be the first cab of the rank.

Temples - Weaving

When I was asked if I saw any interesting temples on my trip to India I said "yes". I think that virtually every weaver I saw in India was using one. Some were very basic but they all did the job.

When I was getting ready to weave on my CB loom I found that I didn't have a temple for the width of my warp. This is what I came up with and it does very well!

Gating the Loom

Luther Hooper got it right. He didn't mention that when one is doing it for the first time and has no "ideas as to the best way of adjusting the various parts for the work" one has to do the job several times before the ideas begin to materialise. I used instructions from the web (Glimakra and LeClerc have some good stuff and I particularly liked this document;- Hand Weaving ). It was only after three attempts at tieing up this counterbalance loom that I started getting a separation of warp layers that looked like sheds.

My eureka insights were;

- Immobilise the harnesses in their correct position before attaching the lamms and treadles

- Everything must be either exactly horizontal or exactly vertical (maybe treadles excepted) and it must be balanced

- To ensure the shafts rise and fall without tilting, don’t just wrap their support cords around the rollers, but actually fix them to the rollers

The last point is a quote from Peter Collingwood that I found at the archives of the a Rugtalk List (another site that is well worth looking at).

I am now getting shed that I can work with; I need to make a few minor adjustments but weaving should start real soon now!

Offset Twills

The pattern that I have threaded is "Offset or Skip Herringbone" from  page 27 A Handweavers Pattern Book - Marguerite P. Davison. I am using two close shades of orange and the resulting scarf using a black weftshould look a bit like the picture on the left.

The draft in PixeLoom looks like this;














MPD got the pattern from Oelsner - A Handbook of Weaves where there is a section on Offset Twills the drafts of which can be found at Handweaving.net. Such a plethora of resources for the weaver and so much to explore.

ENTERING THE WARP IN HARNESS AND REED

Hand Loom Weaving Plain & Ornamental (1910) - Luther Hooper


Nowadays we refer to this process as threading the heddles and sleying the reed but on a traditional loom"entering" is exactly what happens; you have to get inside it. I love the warning.

 These pictures here from Luther Hooper show and Old English Loom and the same loom prepared for entering.





Now here is the similar thing on my loom. I took off the breast beam, the knee beam and the cloth beam. The stool was too high but I found that a plank stretched between the two sides of the loom frame was at just the right height.

So as to get the lease sticks at the right height I clamped and clipped them to the back beam.

From experience I know that in order to be able to thread the heddles happily you must be able to sit and work with a straight back and see the lease sticks and the heddle eyes without any contortions. On some of my looms I have not been able to achieve this, but the setup here was perfect. Threading was a doddle!

I borrowed some boxes of pasta to hold the reed at the correct height for sleying. I started off with it too low but my back protested so I raised the reed and and everything was fine.

RUSSIAN JOIN

When I was cutting the warp of the warping wheel I managed to snip two ends in the wrong place so that they ended up about 12" shorter than the rest of the warp. I wasn't prepared to cut the other ends to match so I tried the Russian Join and it worked a treat.

TURNING ON, OR BEAMING

Hand Loom Weaving Plain & Ornamental  (1910) - Luther Hooper



From what I have read the warp has to go on before doing the final adjustment to the shafts and tying up the treadles and lamms on a CB loom.


I wound a 9 yard warp and puzzled a bit as to how to get it on. Usually when putting a warp onto a conventional (as opposed to sectional) warp beam my wife grabs the ends, applies tension, and walks slowly towards the loom as I roll the warp onto the beam. My wife was out so what I came up with was this;


The warp was tied onto the back beam and went up to a raddle secured to the back of the loom framework.

(I am not going to get into the debate about the respective merits of traditional european style looms versus jack looms but I do like having places to put things; the light clamped to the top cross beam is very handy.)

The warp then went up and through another raddle that I secured to the top of the loom.

From here the warp went across to the top of the beater of a second loom that was conveniently situated nearby.

The animals on top of the loom controller are a frog, a penguin and a crab.

The warp ends dangled down and were weighted.

I was able to sit at the back of the loom and wind on the warp and put the sticks in. I am never quite sure how many to put in so I settled on 5 per revolution.


Every now and then I had to nip round to the front and adjust the weights It all went very smoothly.

(The computer screen in the background of this picture shows an overshot design, not mine, that I am working on, trying to get some interesting colours happening)

A happy beamer!

Counterbalance Loom

I bought this loom in March. It  has been sitting in a shed that I am just starting to repair to convert into a studio. The time has come to give my wife back her dining room.

So the CB loom had to be moved and the safest way to look after a loom and keep it safe is to have it assembled and working. By moving some stuff around an repositioning my Glimakra Standard I have made enough room for the CB loom with sufficient space to use both looms.

I wrote to the Yahoo group WeaveTech to get advice on how to clean the loom and several people gave me excellent advice; I have bought and tried every recommended product and mixture. The framework I cleaned with equal parts of mineral turps, boiled Linseed oil and vinegar. The cross beams got special treatment with natural turps and Tung oil. I also did some garden furniture for good measure. I put Carnuba wax on the moving parts. Fantastic smells!Reassembly was straightforward. The CB rollers were in a hopeless muddle with cords tangled and heddles half off the shafts. There was sufficient information on the web to enable me to sort it all out.

Weaving Hat back on again

Well, I sort of hung up my weaving hat over the last four months, but not completely.

I had too many projects on the go and was dithering between them and not getting anything finished.

I put it most of it to one side for a while and did some different things and caught up with the jobs around the house and garden that had been accumulating.  I have built up a considerable supply of brownie points and have been easing myself back into weaving.

I have done a lot of needle point, woven off the last three scarves that were on the colourful warp that I have posted about earlier. I have also done fair bit of planning for some future projects.

I am currently putting a warp onto an elderly counterbalance loom which I bought some time ago but have just cleaned  up and reassembled. This type of loom is completely new to me so it is all very interesting and great fun. I shall post some photos tomorrow.

Four scarves finished

Having completed four scarves I decide to take them off the loom and finish them. This leaves enough warb for three more scarves. I wove a  two stick heading (thank you Peggy Osterkamp) and sampled a bit of novelty yarn with glitter whilst doing it. It is probably a bit belt and braces but I put some craft glue on the heading to make sure that nothing slips.

I did a lot of the fringe twizzling whilst we were away camping at a place called Knorrit's Flat. 

The pictures below show the end results. The colder weather should be with us soon so we will be able to wear them; having said that they were originally destined to be gifts.

Progress

We have been away for a couple of days trying out camping and getting ready for a bush walk  Back to my weaving today, another scarf finished and on to the next one. I am beginning to get to the stage where I want this warp finished so that I can move onto the next project. I feel a bit guilty about this the warp  has served me so well and taught me so much! 

Double Weave Lace

In that brilliant book  Doubleweave : On Four to Eight Shafts by Ursina Arn-Grischottthere there is a picture of a beautiful double weave shawl with what seems to be two layers of airy lace held together by almost invisible stitcher threads. My next project is to work towards weaving a similar type of shawl. There are going to be several stages to this, the first being to determine a weave structure. I shall start with double weave huck and weave a sample using something nice and visible like an 8/2 cotton. This will enable me to see how the different layers sit together and where to put the stitchers - these are the places where the two layers intersect to join them together. 

As always when thinking about double weave I have to go back to first principals otherwise I get confused as to what is happening. The Complete Book of Drafting for Handweavers, Madelyn van der Hoogt explains very nicely the ins and outs of huck lace and there is loads of material on doubleweave by Paul O'Connor on http://handweaving.net. 

The pictures below show how I have derived the doubleweave draft. The first draft shows the basic 4 shaft huck lifts; this is the draft for my blue top layer. The second is exactly the same but with the threading moved to shafts 5 to 8 and a similar movement on the treadles; this is the draft for the pink bottom layer. The third draft shows the two interleaved together and the lifting of the top layer out of the way when weaving the bottom layer.

Now as the draft stands both layers will be the same; plain weave top/plain weave bottom, huck lace top/huck lace bottom and so on.  The draft shown below has been modified to allow for different structures in the layers, in this case huck lace on the top with plain weave on the bottom. 

One of the problems I have with double weave drafts is that I find  it is difficult to see the structure from the draw-down. It is possible to see the warp and weft floats in the draft below but not easy. I use PixeLoom for all my drafting but WeavePoint, which I use to drive the control unit on my loom, has a cunning feature that recognizes double weave in the View/Fabric function.  So I derive the drafts in PixeLoom and view the fabric in WeavePoint. The screen grabs from WeavePoint of the blue and pink layers (top and bottom) are shown in the picture next to the draft.

The next think to do is to work out where to put the stitchers as there is nothing joining these two layers of cloth. There will be a bit of theory needed that I shall address tomorrow (I love theory but I know that it is not everyone's cup of tea) but their ultimate position will be decided when I weave the sample.

In the meantime I am still weaving my scarves and they are looking pretty good. I have put up an inordinate number of pictures of these scarves, so no more now until they are being modeled!