
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Ashland Bay sample spinning

Knitting & Felting

Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Wool Bamboo Devore
Monday, January 25, 2010
Grazing Sheep Bag

On the weaving front today. I did do another devore sample on the wool/bamboo scarf sample, it's drying now. I warped up the loom for a silk/tencel scarf that I will also do devore on, will weave a sample on the end of the warp to test it before working on the scarf. Half the scarf is woven, not sure if there's time for weaving tomorrow as I'll be out much of the day.
Saturday, January 23, 2010
Devore Sample

The process is to burn out any cellulose fibers using Fiber Etch (Dharma Trading Co). There are recipes to make your own burnout solution, it's easier for me to buy it already made. Animal/protein fibers will not burn out. This sample is woven in merino wool and rayon.
Sett is determined by what is needed for a nice hand without being too sleazy after the burnout in the merino area (natural color). I was concerned about drape in the body of the scarf where the merino is joined by the rayon so I sett it just a tiny bit looser and it turned out just fine. So my total is 24 epi, in the burnout areas the wool is 12 epi.
Using plain weave is best, floats from other weave structures such as twill wouldn't work as well in the edge areas of the burnout. I wound the wool & rayon together on the warping board, then when it came to threading the heddles I put wool in harnesses 1 & 2, rayon in harnesses 3 & 4 - it was woven in plain weave, raising 1 & 3 together, then 2 & 4 together. The weft was the wool & rayon wound together on the bobbin (hint later) with ppi at 12.
After weaving I washed and let dry the sample to remove any spinning oils or dirt.
I made a quick stencil from freezer paper which works great because you can iron it onto fabric, shiney side down, and it will temporarily stick to the fabric.
I applied Fiber Etch with a stiff paint/craft brush working from the edges of the stencil in as to not let any seep under the stencil/freezer paper. It must be saturated very well. I turned the fabric over to touch up any areas on the backside that hadn't gotten saturated.
The fabric needs to dry completely, overnight is ok but best not to leave the Fiber Etch on any longer than necessary so I helped it along with a blow dryer.
Once dry, I laid the fabric down on a few pages of newspaper covered with a paper towel. Put a piece of aluminum foil on top of the fabric and iron, moving the iron constantly, using a setting appropriate for the fiber but NO steam. The burnout area will start to turn brown. When it starts to flake off if you rub it with your finger it's done. The Fiber Etch is nasty stuff - I worked in the garage with the door open wearing a mask and gloves, am thinking I need to find a respirator. All those little flakes & fumes are very nasty, you don't want to inhale them.
After all the burnout is done, wash the fabric out and let dry. The burnout areas are transparent.
I'm not sure what design will end up on the scarf, will think about that later. In the meantime I'm putting on another warp of wool with bamboo. I'm a little concerned about this wool, it's very thin and fragile, hopefully I won't have any problems with breakage in the weaving process. I'll try as many fiber combinations as I can for the guild program although I probably won't have nearly the amount of samples/finished pieces as usual just because I want to limit my exposure to the Fiber Etch.
Hint: when winding 2 or more yarns together on a bobbin sometimes one strand will be a bit looser than the other leading to problems on the edges while weaving. You can use a doubling stand, if you have one, or just use whatever you have, what I did. For an example: place one cone on the floor, put a chair with a slotted seat over it, put the other cone on the chair seat, pull the bottom yarn up through the center of the top cone and then wind them together on to the bobbin - the slight amount of twist keeps the two at the same length. I was hoping my kumihimo stand would work for this but the legs are too close together to get a cone on the bottom under the hole so I just used a little wooden box I have.
Phew........long post.................
Friday, January 22, 2010
Trying something new..........

Monday, January 18, 2010
New things.......


I have another fun gift item I gave for the holidays but need to open one of the leftovers up to take a picture - will come in the near future.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Been sewing.......


Friday, January 15, 2010
I've been very lax with posting to my blog. I guess I just haven't been up to anything much worth posting. There's been all the end of the year bookkeeping and counting inventory which is very slow since I'm looking at every color of Ashland Bay roving and every colorway of my hand-dyed rovings thinking about how much I'd love to spin them all! But I do have to get back to work - I've got a guild program to start working on, it will be on woven devore, I've got 2 guild challenges, fingertip towels to weave for this year's exchange and then the rest of the things on my very long to-do list. But this week I've been doing some sewing - will get to a post on those things once I finish up....which will hopefully be today so I can get back to weaving.
This is my handspun from the garden party fiber from a recent post. This is a huge skein of 782 yards that came off my Majacraft plying bobbin. So, I pushed it, at the end I was having trouble getting the yarn to pull onto the bobbin I had it so loaded, finally I had to give up and leave a yard or two on the bobbins, it just wouldn't fit on. Lesson learned, don't try to get quite this many yards on one plying bobbin. I'm not sure yet what this yarn will become - another item on my to-do list is to either knit or weave with it before we put up the fair display in August.
Theresa knit a pair of socks using Zauberball, once I saw them I knew I needed some of this sock yarn. Never mind that I have two shelves filled with sock yarn, I couldn't resist. And it wasn't just this colorway I couldn't resist - I bought several others!


I'm anxious to start a knitted/felted project - perhaps I can get that going in the evenings and put aside the sample spinning (Ashland Bay fibers) for a bit. But first it's off to the sewing machine for the rest of the day............
On another note: Last night at the community concert we listened to a very fun trio - Casey MacGill's Blue 4 Trio. We love these community concerts that we started getting season tickets for a few years ago, we get to see all sorts of performances that we may not have ordinarily gone to see. These guys were very entertaining. Check out their site if you want to listen to some fun 30's-40's tunes, I just checked it out and listened to 3 tunes while posting on the blog, not sure how many play.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
New Spinning Blog
Check out the new blog of my spinning group, Warped, Twisted & Plyed; Ply Me To The Moon. We had a fun time on Tuesday talking about keeping track of our yardage this year to see how many yards we could spin. It's not a contest, just our usual spinning but keeping track of it. Having a goal of reaching the moon seemed like a grand idea until one spinner checked online for how many miles it was - yikes! It's even overwhelming just to think about how much we'd have to spin to make it across the country. So, we decided to reach high and keep the name and go for our goal of the moon..........so it takes a few years, decades, centuries..........we'll have fun!
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Garden Party Spinning........




Saturday, January 2, 2010
Beautiful Fabrics
Theresa made a comment in my last post about lack of 'true' fabric stores in our area. Here is one that used to be open here in Grants Pass, OR but has since closed. BUT Textile Connection is online and owns the building the fabric store was/is in so fabric is still there and she will open up by appointment so fabric can be fondled before buying. She's got an incredible selection of fabric from all over the world and the prices are very reasonable. http://textileconnection.net
Friday, January 1, 2010
Bailey and New Year's

On the fiber front - I really haven't been doing anything - I've been frittering and totally enjoying it (well other than lots of pesky bookkeeping I was behind on). I have done a bit of knitting and felting, but not much. And just today I broke out the wheel to spin more Ashland Bay roving samples. While spinning I'm dreaming of getting a Woolee Winder for one of my wheels. As soon as I'm positive it will be for the Majacraft Little Gem I'll get it ordered. May take a while to get it since Woolee Winder had a fire 3 days before Christmas but that's ok, I'm not in a rush. Am thinking about a sewing project, maybe hit the fabric store tomorrow for some cording.
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