robknits

When stash and creativity meet

I always feel that I have to struggle to avoid standardized answers to problems.  That is, I worry that I have to remind myself, for example, that the answer to a household design issue is not necessarily found in the standard stores.  My living room windows have sheer curtains in a sort of burnt orange or dark copper color.  I like them a lot, but they are sheer, and after my house was broken into again a couple of weeks ago, I decided I needed something that created more privacy.  Not that anything that could be seen from those windows was stolen, but still...

I want to keep those curtains on those windows, but add something on the lower half of the windows, leaving trees and sky visible through the top half of the windows.  Interior shutters would prevent cats from sitting on those window sills.  Can't have that.  In addition to pushing the cats off the sills, wood carvings or metal work or shoji screens would make it difficult to open those windows, which I like to do when the temperature drops all the way down to the 80s and like to think I could do if that were my only exit from the house in an emergency.  I thought of bamboo curtains but could only find bamboo shades, difficult to hang halfway down the window. 

Then I thought of weaving something, but figured I wanted a solution that would take fewer than 3 or 4 years to develop.  I played around with an idea from the book Time to Weave, modifying the runner on the cover (the project on the upper left on the cover).  There is a variation on that inside the book that uses stalks of plants instead of sticks that got me thinking. 

   Then I found the Loop Door Curtain crochet pattern here.  Hmmm.  Wandered into the yarn closet.  And I came out with the generic recycled silk yarn that has been hanging around the house for years.  Knitting with the stuff is a nightmare.  I did weave with it as weft, and that was OK, though I never took the piece I wove and made it into the bag I had planned.  So I began playing.  I tried the crochet instructions.  Ok.  Then I began to play with other  ways of producing the strands.  Long rows of just knit-on cast on stitches.     Long rows of knit-on cast on with the next row done as a bind off row.  I began thinking perhaps I could also intersperse just strands of the recycled silk, not knit or crochets. It has actually been kind of entertaining.  But then I decided it actually looked kind of scraggly.  What to do, what to do....

It required another trip to the yarn closet, staring at its residents.  Then I found this stuff (pic on the right).   I bought it at Knitters Connections, which I attended with Terry a few years ago.  I was going to make the Evening in Eden shawl with it, but that never happened.   And I half to admit that while I like what shawls look like, I think that when I wear one I look like an old photograph of an Eastern European immigrant from the turn of the 20th century, sitting on my suitcase at Ellis Island.  I have been thinking of seeing if I have enough for a cropped lacy jacket (it's rayon, good for this climate) but now I think it might dress the windows, not me.  A very satisfying idea, feels very creative, and is produced with materials already in the house. 

Meanwhile, I have finally gotten back to the weaving studio, and have reached the design part of my little wall hanging. I will take a picture tonight.  I am loving weaving with Lamb's Pride.  It doesn't allow for the sort of weft color blending that other yarns allow for in tapestry.  That's when you blend multiple strands of a yarn and use it as a single weft, to create lovely gradations of color.  On the other hand, the fact that I cannot blend colors is leading me toward other types of design.

Blistering heat

It will be 100 degrees F here today, 101 tomorrow, and 103 on Wednesday.  There will be no rain, and there hasn't been enough rain for the past year and a half or two years.  We are on Stage 2 water restrictions here, which means that everything I have planted since I got here is dying.  San Antonio is not a desert climate, though everything you plant has to be drought resistant, but our levels of rain for the past two years certainly have put us in a desert climate at least temporarily.  You don't see the rock-and-cactus sort of yards you see in Arizona, for example, and you do see folks who are trying to grow grass.  I have plans to put in a xeriscaping sort of garden -- one designed for low water use -- but at this point I am not going to try to plant anything.  For one thing, it is just too hot to garden!  7 am can be nice, if it is not too humid, because the evil joke San Antonio plays on us is that while it will not rain, it is very humid.  Is that fair?

I haven't been knitting.  I flew to New York to visit family, and took some knitting with me.  Never took it out of the bag.  When I got home though, I acknowledged that I miss it, and I picked up the Sausalito jacket again.  I have the back and one side of the front finished, and am working on one of the sleeves.  Fortunately the Vermont O Wool Balance yarn feels like cotton, though it is 50% wool, so it is comfortable to work on in the air conditioned house.  I think the wool socks will be finished during the winter, when I can conceive of the idea of wearing wool on my feet.  What I would like are some lacy, non-wool cardies or jackets to wear over tank tops.  I haven't seen patterns I love, so I think I may have to design this one myself.  One possibility is to use the mesh stitch I just saw on this little scarf or capelet by Ilga Leja, called Cafe Capelet.  A simple open jacket with elbow-length sleeves, in cotton or silk or a mix.  It could even have a little wool, I guess.  I am also looking again for a pattern for the Tahki Cotton Classic I have in the stash, in the gorgeous Aegean color.  I bought it even though I have doubts about worsted-weight cotton, particularly how heavy the resulting piece will be and if it will stretch.  So I am still on the hunt for a pattern for that.

In the meantime, I am focusing on weaving.  Still working on the tapestry at home, and tonight I will get back to the weaving studio at the Southwest School of Art and Craft, to make some progress on the project there.  As I said, it is in fact very nice to be weaving with Lamb's Pride, since I miss knitting with it.  I will make sure to take a picture tonight.

In progress

There is a lot in progress at chez Rob.  After a very difficult day at work yesterday, I got to go downtown to the weaving studio and put in two very quiet, calming, enriching hours at the loom.  Tying knots for the first hour.  Who would have thought I would have found that calming and enriching!!!  The warp for the Navajo-technique wall hanging is now on the loom, and weaving has commenced.  I have the hem woven and a row of soumak knots tied (for a turning row).  On Monday night I will start on the design part, and also, maybe, remember to take a picture. 

I have also made progress on the tapestry on my tabletop loom.  Tropical City Nights, in progress.  I am a bit surprised at how it is coming out, but there is a lot more to weave.  The next warp I put on to weave with the Paternayan yarn as weft will be set at 7 epi, rather than 6 like this one.  One problem I am having with the design is that since the warp is a bit too widely spaced for the size of the weft, the design beats down and gets distorted.  Now that I understand that I am correcting for it (by weaving more rows).  It is definitely coming along. 

My camera, though, is driving me nuts.  I will have to spend some time with the camera and the manual, taking pictures, figuring it out, modifying the settings.  I am having trouble with the lighting, and most of my pictures are coming out blurry, as well.  I am going to experiment to see if pictures taken at a lower resolution show less blur.

Weaving and Computers

Another studio night last night, spent threading heddles.  It has been quite a surprise to discover that someone with my history of extremely low frustration levels and difficulty with precision can like putting a warp on a loom.  One of the best pieces of advice I got about weaving was to understand that process not as the preliminary preparation for weaving but rather as the major process of weaving.  Perhaps the most significant part, and certainly one of the primary sites of design.  For this wall hanging done with Navajo techniques, the warp is as simple as it gets -- natural color carpet warp threaded 1-2-3-4 across the loom.  But at no point did I get frustrated (even as I resleyed parts of the read, retied knots, etc) or bored or antsy for the next step.  I just was happily busy for almost 3 hours in the studio.   While I am officially registered for the Thursday night studio, I can also go work during the Monday night studio, which I will try to do next week.  I am reading to get the warp onto the back, and then the front, beams, and then I will be ready to start weaving.

Technique shapes design, at least in part.  Navajo weaving techniques lend themselves to geometric shapes, as any Navajo rug demonstrates.  I didn't chose a traditional Navajo design, but instead played with geometric shapes and the angle this style of weaving creates.  So I actually have a very modern design, which I will post once I am sure that is what I am going to use and have it colored in.  While being more careful with money in other daily ways, in addition to books I am still spending money on weaving -- this time I bought Grid N' WeaveIt, a weaving computer program designed for tapestry, Navajo weaving, rug weaving, etc.  I was working on my design using graph paper and pastel pencils, which is fine and portable, but I find it a bit frustrating, since what I like to do is try a design, save it, modify it a bit, go back to the original, rinse, repeat.  Doing that on graph paper has meant drawing the same shapes over and over again with minor variations, or to color in differently.  This program is also supposed to help produce cartoons, put drawings or photos on a warp-based grid, etc.  I started playing with it last night, figuring it out.  To my horror, at one point my screen went black.  The power light was still on, but no one was home, so to speak.  Oh. My. God.  I turned off the computer, turned it back on again, and everything was OK, but that was a scary moment.  If it happens again, I will contact Sally Breckendridge, the weaver/weaving software and web page designer who developed the program.  Meanwhile I have lots of plans to create tapestry cartoons useing Grid N' WeaveIt as well.

Back in the studio

I love working in studios.  Something about working with equipment and with other people working in the same space, I think.  My studio weaving class started last Thursday, so I got to go down to the Ursuline campus of the Southwest School of Art and Craft and be assigned a loom.  The instructor of the Thursday night class is the head of the Fibers department.  I had brought my notes and reviewed how to prepare the warp, put it on the loom, etc., but he was incredibly helpful and before I knew it we had dimensions for my project (an 18" by 30" hanging), my name taped to a loom, and I had measured the warp on a warping mill.  Using a warping mill, by the way, is way faster than using a warping board.  By the time I had turned around after winding the second set of warp threads, he had the first one chained and tied to the loom.  So by the time I left Thursday night, I had the reed sleyed.  For the weavers out there, I am using carpet warp at 8 epi, and to my surprise and delight, he has suggested I use Lamb's Pride worsted weight for the weft.  I love Lamb's Pride, love knitting with it, but don't have a whole heck of a lot of use for it now that I live in South Texas.  It comes in an enormous number of gorgeous colors, so it will be great to use for weaving.

Robert also presented some of the basic differences between upright tapestry weaving techniques and using Navajo techniques on a horizontal floor loom.  First obvious difference: you can't build up areas of the image unevenly -- in weave-speak, everything happens at the fell line, that is, the even horizontal line where what you have already woven meets the beater.  Second difference he explained to me had to do with the type of angle you can create that way.  So I came home and searched for graph paper and played with geometrics and the angle that he showed me.  I need a protractor!  I have already come up with two abstract geometric patterns and am really enjoying the play.  I think I have a Lamb's Pride color card somewhere, and of course I have a stash of Lamb's Pride in the yarn closet.  Next Thursday I will thread the heddles, which should be easy enough, since I will just be doing a plain weave threading and hopefully start weaving the hem.  I love the idea that I will be going down there at least once a week until the middle of August.  Plus, I can come and work any time they have a weaving class, which means I can also go down there on Monday nights.  And if I win the Megamillions lottery, I could spend 30 hours a week down there.  Though I suppose if that's my plan I need to start buying lottery tickets.

Three-day weekends are wonderful.  I spent all day yesterday lying around and reading, using my latest extravagant toy -- a Kindle!  Instant gratification for compulsive book buyers.  I just read my way through all four books in the fantasy Study Series by Maria Snyder, and am several chapters into The Hemingses of Monticello, an interesting and well-written history of that Afro-Virginian family and their relationships with Thomas Jefferson.  I also have a subscription to The New Yorker on my Kindle -- it is definitely odd to read the New Yorker without its signature graphic design, but it certainly focuses me on the writing.  I am still shocked at my extravagance, even though friends have pointed out that it was my birthday present to myself, but I certainly love using it.

That was the first day of the three-day weekend.  Today is going to be focusing on the house, cleaning it and making it nice for myself.  Tomorrow... who knows :>

Rain!

The sky went black about a half hour ago and I held my breath, hoping hoping this storm would not just blow right over us.  We are in a very severe drought here, though I think it is really unfair to have very humid weather and drought at the same time.  About 20 minutes ago it started pouring, and I hear thunder though I don't see any lightening.  A little bit of small hail mixed in, but a wonderful downpour of rain.  It is already much less dramatic -- here's hoping it continues to rain at this current pace for a while, even though I have plans to drive to Austin.

When it first hit, two young teenaged girls across the street were holding on to each other, screaming, and running into the middle of the street to dance in the rain.  So cute.  It is odd how exciting it is to me now when it rains.  Water is so scarce and so valuable and then, suddenly, it simply ... Falls.It just falls from the sky.  I run to the windows to watch.

Mindless knitting on sock toes has continued.  So actually it is no longer a sock toe and is actually a sock foot -- not as cute but closer to being a sock. The colors in the Apple Laine Apple Pie sock yarn colorway Best Friend are actually deeper than in this photo.  Take a look at the link for the company's image of this colorway.  The orange-y color is really somewhere between what it looks like in my picture and what it looks like in theirs.  A plain stockinette sock, though I think I will use a pretty heel stitch and a picot top.

I missed going to the Maryland Sheep and Wool festival.  Not that I needed yarn, or fleece, or more handpainted silk top, or another drop spindle, but the trip, the day at the festival, would have been fun.  Instead I bought myself a used copy of Else Regensteiner's book Geometric Design in Weaving.  It arrived this morning and I have flipped throuh.  Then I went and found some graph paper and some colored pencils, so I can really work through it.  She demonstrates geometric design across various styles of weaving, including tapestry, twill and block designs. 

The weaving class I will be taking this summer starts next week.  I am not taking the class devoted specifically to tapestry weaving this time.  Instead, I registered for the studio weaving class.  The teacher for that class is also a tapestry weaver, but he uses horizontal floor looms, rather than upright tapestry looms, and creates designs influenced by Navajo rug weaving.  So while I will be working on a four-harness loom, I am going to take advantage of his own specialty and do some more tapestry technique.  I will decide on size and weft during the first class.  I might even be able to make a small rug.  The usual tapestry workshop is held on 3 consecutive weekends, from 10-3 on Saturdays and Sundays.  Taking this studio weaving class instead will have me going every Thursday evening til the first week in August -- a nice change of pace.  I am really looking forward to it.

Wool delight

First... ya know you're adapting to a new climate when you look at the temperature announcement online and think, "Gee, it's only 90, that'll be pleasant."

Kind of a contrast to my current knitting.  I am still chugging away on the Sausalito jacket, made from a wool-cotton blend that feels like knitting cotton, and for a change, went rummaging through the WIP pile.  And I found a really cute sock toe that I had started from the Apple Laine Apple Pie sock yarn Kim gave me as a going away present more than a year ago.  So I picked it up and started knitting.  What a pleasure to be knitting with wool!  And even more of a pleasure than the wool is combined with mohair, silk and nylon. Sigh.  I love touching the yarn as I knit, which is not a pleasure I get from knitting with cotton.  After a nice deep toe section, I began experimenting with different stitches to use on the sock, but tinked each one back and continued in stockinette.  It feels good on my feet, and makes the sock a good mindless knitting project.  I have to admit, the handknit socks I love to wear most are my stockinette Claudia Handpaint socks.  So this is going to be another stockinette pair. 

While I am being good and sticking to the Sausalito jacket, and looking forward to my weaving class, I have to admit to a general malaise.  Thus, almost no blogging. I miss Robbyn very much (she stopped blogging a month ago), I missed Maryland Sheep and Wool and Kim's company there, I miss knitting with wool and alpaca...  So Knit Club on last Friday was a great experience.  On Sunday I grabbed myself by the scruff of the neck and went for a wonderful two-hour walk in a gorgeous local park with a colleague.  Came home, looked at the chaos and filth, and went to bed with the latest urban fantasy series I'm reading.  OK, I did do the dishes but then gave up, cuddled with the cats and read.

More weaving, and lots of Magpie

 First, the picture of the Magpie.  This is Rowan Magpie that I appear to have accumulated in pieces over the years.  Some of it was acquired when in a moment of insanity I decided I was going to knit a Rowan jacket whose name I have forgotten -- it looks like a Kilim, and required combined stranded and intarsia knitting with something like 14 different yarns.  I now acknowledge I am not going to knit this jacket, as much as I would love to own it.  Other skeins of Magpie I acquired at my LYS.  Anyway, I am destashing all but the Oatmeal colored Magpie (I still plan on using some of it for a vest, with some Noro Shinano, swatched ages ago).  It is on my Sell or Trade stash page on Ravelry, or you can email me if you are interested.   The Antique Gold colored skeins are not Magpie, by the way -- they are Rowan's Designer DDK.  Also for sale.

The online community of fiber artists came to the rescue via the Yahoo!Group Tapestry2005, where a member suggested turning my tapestry-in-progress upside down (the benefits of working on a small loom) and beating the bottom edge straight.  I did that, retied the string of knots supposed to hold it level to the sides of the frame, and wove in a metal ruler below the knots, to help form a base.  I am continuing to weave the image.  You know how in knitting you have to modify an image to make up for the shape of the stitch?  Otherwise the image comes out oddly elongated.  I am running into a bit of that in my tapestry weaving and need to pay more attention to the shapes that result, so that I can weave greater width into my images.  That first tapestry, the Northern City Lights, suffers from that, with the image elongated and not wide enough.  I am now thinking about a more satisfying image (to me) to represent that Northern City Lights idea.

I also succumbed to my latest weaving obsession and bought, as I suggested in the last entry, a rigid heddle loom.  I chose the Glimakra Emilia after my usual obsessive search for information.  I deliberately chose a rather narrow loom (15" weaving width, I think) and one that was reviewed as having a good (i.e., relatively large) shed and a good tension device.  My goal is to "weave close to the thread" as Betty Linn Davenport said on Syne Mitchell's podcast about rigid heddle weaving.  An early birthday present for myself.  Now I want to create a record of my weaving stash, since I have accumulated some weaving yarn/thread, so I am looking forward to the start of Weavolution, which is going to be a Ravelry-like online resource for weavers.  Just as I do on Ravelry for knitting, I will be able to inventory stash, projects, get ideas, communicate with weavers, etc.  I am looking forward to it!  The Beta testing is going to happen in June.

Knitting is continuing on the Sausalito jacket.  I am kinda ready to be done, but I still have both sleeves and the left front to knit, so I can't run out of steam now.  I am knitting the first sleeve -- it is pretty mindless knitting at this point if I pay attention to which row I am on, so I am getting it done in front of the tv.

We are enduring a historically extreme drought here in San Antonio but it has been drizzling on and off and really looks like rain.  Who knew rain could be so exciting!

Weaving

     Unable to stand the thought of not spending any part of the summer at the Southwest School of Art and Craft, I registered for the weaving class.  It is meant as a basic course in 4-harness weaving.  I am hoping -- expecting, really -- that there will be some flexibility about what I can weave.  I do remember the basics about winding a warp, calculations, etc etc, but would like to get some teaching about winding a warp of several colors and using more than one color in the weft.  They have a more advanced studio course, but I thought I would do this one as a refresher first.  The tapestry workshop conflicted with a professional conference, so that got me thinking about taking the 4-harness class.

     I have also been obsessing about getting a rigid heddle loom.  I sold my multi harness loom in order to buy the large tapestry loom, and to tell you the truth, I found multiharness weaving -- even four harness weaving -- put too much machinery between me and the fiber.  Deborah Chandler, in her book Learning to Weave talked about how she likes to put a warp on the loom because that is the only time she gets to touch the fiber.  That set off alarm bells in my head.  The tactile part of fiber arts is very important to me.  But I began to like the idea of using a very simple loom (like a frame loom, or a tapestry loom, or a rigid heddle loom) and manipulating warp and weft by hand.  Part of that came from looking through the book Time to Weave again.   

So I went back and listened again to Episode 14 of Weavecast, in which Syne Mitchell talks to Betty Lou Davenport, who has written two of the books available about rigid heddle weaving (including Hands On Rigid Heddle Weaving), and then reviews the Schacht Flip loom.  I decided I was on the right track when Davenport said one of the things she likes about weaving on a rigid heddle loom is that you "weave close to the thread."  Hands on weaving, indeed.

By today (Saturday) I had battled a really bad cold well enough that I was interested in doing something creative this afternoon.  So I put the iPod in the boombox so I could listen to a book, and got back to work on my tapestry-in-progress Tropical City Lights.  The last time I had seen it, it looked like this:   the cartoon behind the warp, the first inches of the black background woven, and just getting to the color part. 

I know just enough now about tapestry weaving to know that each time I reach a bit of color or shape, I have some choices about how to produce a tapestry version of it.  So I am weaving this with my reference books arounds me, knowing now that creating lines can be done in various ways, for example.  So far, in addition to the hatching and weft blending I have done before, I have also tried to create vertical lines by warp wrapping, and finished an uneven shape (eccentric weft, in tapestry-speak) with my first line of soumak.    The results after today's weaving looks like this:

 

My digital camera has become a tapestry tool in more ways than one.  Not only do I design with it, I use it to remind myself that the picture actually is on end, and if I want to see it as it will appear when finished, I need to look at it sideways.  I spent a lot of time in the tapestry studio with my head to one side before I realized it would be better to rotate a picture:

  Aha!  There we are.  One consequence of weaving a picture side to side is that hatching and weft blending result in vertical images, as in the blue at the bottom of the piece.  At first I was a bit taken aback, but I like how it will work out in the image as a whole.  I get a surprising amount of the weaving done each time I sit down with it at home.  One concern I have is that the line of knots at the bottom of the weaving (on the left in this rotated picture) is curving rather than providing a straight edge.  I have to ask around to see if that is something I need to fix now.  I am not sure why that is happening, except that perhaps I did not tie that line of knots tightly enough to the sides of the frame when I started.

On the knitting front, I finally finished the back of the Sausalito jacket, and will start one of the sleeves tonight.  And finally, as a parting image, a picture of one of the few things in bloom in the Conservatory Garden in Central Park last Sunday.

Fiber arts and museums

I-cord is great travel knitting.  I-cord in hand, I flew to New York to stay with my sister and to go out to New Jersey with her to visit my mother.  In between visits, I got to play in NY, including the theater one night with said sister and her boyfriend.  My sister and I also went to two museums -- the Museum of Art and Design and the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum.  The latter is actually the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and is part of the Smithsonian.

The Museum of Art and Design used to be the American Craft Museum on West 52nd St.  It is now on Columbus Circle.  Their big inaugural exhibit is called Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary and showcases art work made from reused materials, everything from nails and metal bottle strips to plastic forks, cotton swabs and shopping bags.  The resulting art work is stunning.  The piece using plastic forks and cotton swabs is a huge installation vaguely resembling a sea anemone, with incredible grace and depth -- truly interesting to look at, rather than a "hey, look, I am making art from funny objects" result.  One piece not represented on the web page is the one I chose when asked on a survey which piece I liked best.  Using paper from newspapers and magazines, the artist created pseudo-museum artifacts and set up on a table a faux exhibit of items looted from Iraqui museums during the war.  Each item had its informational card, with faux facts (i.e., "a pottery shard from the 10th century" describing a small paper bowl) and quotes, not from historians, but from people involved in the war.  Donald Rumsfeld for example.  Other gorgeous pieces included a bench -- a gorgeous piece of reclaimed wood studded with thick nails the artist then bent at 90 degree angles.  He used a torch on all of it to obtain a certain patina.  The nails are thick and flattened and you WANT to sit on that bench.  The artist obtained a beautiful curve, almost a wave, across the bench. 

One fiber piece I remember, though it may have been in their permanent collection and not in Second Lives, was a beautiful fabric assemblage that included some tapestry pieces.  They also had pieces from the permanent collection by the fascinating weavers Helen Hernmark and Jack Lenor Larsen and some interesting embroidery pieces.

The Cooper Hewitt is a small museum, and part of it was closed as they set up a new exhibit.  The exhibit we saw, though, was very interesting.  it is called Fashioning Felt.  They had a beautiful range of contemporary design work in felt, ranging from thin nuno felt scarves, to industrial felt, to felt dresses, felt stones, felt furniture, felt art.  In recognition of the use of felt for yurts among nomadic people, they turned one room into a sort of nouveau yurt, with beautiful transparent art felt curtaining the walls.  I decided that was what I wanted to do with my own patio. (Yeah, right. But hey, that patio would be much more interesting as an art installation.)  The link will take you to great pictures from the exhibit.  They also had 3 short videos showing how felt is made by industry, by artists, and by the yurt dwellers.

As usual, I came away inspired.