Category Archives: Weaving

More Fog – Add Yellow

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A screenshot from Instagram show yesterday shows our weather.

Screenshot of a satellite photo showing mass of fog over a map of California.

Our farm is at the edge of the Central Valley, sort of where that arrow points. To put this in perspective, realize that the white band on the right is the Sierra’s (not much snow yet). The left side is the Pacific Ocean and where the fog narrows and goes to the left–that’s going between the hills and ends up over the SF Bay.

Screenshot with text about fog in the Central Valley.

Read the details above. To those of you who live where it is really cold it probably sounds like I am whining. Is cold different when you can see sun part of the day? Or sit in a sunny window? There was not even a glimpse of sun the last couple of days.

So let’s add some color!

Bright orange cosmos flower.

Cosmos from the summer dye garden.

Close-up of two sunflowers.

Sunflowers growing Across the Road a few years ago.

Shawl woven in orange and yellow yarn.

My interpretation of the garden woven in a cotton shawl.

Weaving to Finish

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I should catch my blog up on the weaving side of life. I am always trying to squeeze weaving into the day. There are a lot of ongoing projects and many that are off the loom but not finished. There is a saying “It’s not finished until it’s wet finished.” Wet finishing is an important part of the process, but there are often other steps between taking the piece off the loom and wet finishing. Here’s a round-up of all the projects that are waiting around to be finished.

Three handwoven wool blankets folded. These need to be finished.

These three wool blankets have been off the loom awhile. The one in the middle is ready for wet finishing. So is the one on the right…or maybe not. I am going to sew a hem. I have to decide if I’ll finish the hem before or after wet finishing this time. I usually do it after. The blanket on the left has a warp error the whole length of the blanket that needs to be fixed. I didn’t see that until the blanket was cut off the loom.

Four handwoven purple chenille scarves that need to have fringe twisted.

These chenille scarves have been off the loom a long time. They need fringes twisted before washing.

Handwoven cotton shawls in bright gold, orange, and yellow. These are folded and the fringe isn't twisted yet.

Two cotton shawls that need twisted fringe and then washing.

Three black and white handwoven shawls folded. Shawls are woven with a pinwheel design.

Jacob shawls woven in black and white pinwheels. I think that the pinwheels will square up with wet finishing. They are a bit elongated now. I have twisted the fringe on one of these but need to do that on the upper left. Bottom left doesn’t have fringe and the ends will be sewn together. to create a mobs wrap.

Handwoven cotton shawls woven with space dyed warp.

These are just off the loom. I wove the piece on the right first. I dyed the warp last week. This piece has twisted fringe and needs to be washed. I’ll wait until the fringe is finished on the other and run them through the washing machine together. These were on the same warp. The scarf on the right was sett at 10 epi, the sett that I usually use for this Ashford “caterpillar cotton” . Weft is 3/2 cotton. The scarf on the left is sett at 15 epi and weft will be 5/2 cotton.

Now for projects that are on the loom:

I dyed this yarn last week, along with the warp above. This one is hemp and will be dishtowels. I had to fix a threading error today and will have this ready to weaving tomorrow.

Baby blankets underway.

Wool blankets underway. I really want to finish these blankets this week.

A warp ofj mixed yarns, sourced from Art Fiber Frenzy.

Now I’m getting too tired to do more.

Convergence 2024 in Kansas – Day 5

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I left off with the second post for Day 4. I am so far beyond Convergence now that it’s hard to go back and finish but I like these best if they are in order. One more day and it’s a short one.

A fried asked if I had seen the troll yet. I thought she meant one at the Botanica Wichita but it turns out that there is another in town. You can find out about it in Atlas Obscura, something that I didn’t know about until now. The troll seems hidden but is in plain sight if you know where to look. It also pops up on Google maps when you enlarge that area.

The troll is a 7 foot tall structure chained under a grate of a storm drain. It is easy to miss if you’re just walking over the grate.

I angled my iPhone in a position where I could get a better image.

It is truly grotesque…

…down to the details of the fingers.

Another view of the Exploration Place on the Arkansas River.

I had signed up for two sessions on Sunday.

The first was another by Robin Spady. This is a technique that I have never tried and it intrigues me. She includes a booklet of most of the info she shares in class, and I look forward to finding time to try this technique.

I took a class in the afternoon about designing your own color and weave drafts.

The keynote speech was presented Sunday evening by Nikyle Begay who gave an emotional talk about the Navajo (Diné) experience with sheep from the early days of government intervention to the present.

The view from my room. I flew home early Monday morning.

Besides being greeted by Dan and Ginny and the sheep, look what I found on my one zucchini plant. (See mug for scale.)

Convergence 2024 in Kansas – Day 3

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This is Day 2, when I taught the Clasped Warp class. I signed up for some sessions on Friday and Sunday.

I went out early on Friday morning to walk along the Arkansas River. There are paths on both sides.

This is the Exploration Place. From a quilt on this side to a helicopter inside on the opposite wall it looks as though there is something for everyone here. The bridge that you see is a pedestrian bridge that crosses the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers at the confluence.

This is another view of the statue you see in the distance in the first photo. It is known as the “Keeper of the Plains” and was donated to Wichita in 1974 by the Kiowa-Comanche artist, Blackbear Bosin.

There is a small pavilion behind the statue and where the rivers meet.There are several displays about Plains Indian culture and beliefs.

Back at the hotel, I took a morning class from Robyn Spady about cool things you can do weaving with four shafts.

In the afternoon I had a short session about ice dyeing with indigo. I did a lot of that last summer but never had all these colors. Since I’ve been home I tried to get purple and failed. I’ll try again.

After this session I wondered through the fiber arts exhibits and the vendor hall. I have a lot of photos but will include only a few here. As usual, I am frustrated that I will never have time to weave all the things I already have in my head and now there are more!

Great boots!

Beautiful wedge weave rug.

The following pieces are just a few that were in the previous day’s fashion show.

The Noh coat. This refers to a style of coat that I remember reading about a few years ago. It would be interesting to weave fabric for this. I’ll add it to my list.

Woven in tencel.

Cotton top with the gradients of color different for warp and weft.

Remaking a jeans jacket.

I spent some time in the vendor hall. Lunatic Fringe took the Kansas location to heart with the yellow brick table drape and the legs hanging from their banner. They also wore witch’s hats the first couple of days.

In the evening I walked with a friend back to the Keeper of the Plains where fire is lit for 15 minutes every evening at sunset.

Weaving in 2023 – 2

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Before the last couple of lamb posts I started to take a look back at weaving in 2023. Here is the next about weaving

Warp #1308 was baby blankets. I need to get another baby blanket warp on the loom because I’m almost out. Do you know that one of the first things I wove was a baby blanket for my son who is now 43? I have been weaving pretty much the same blankets all this time. If people still like them I guess that’s OK. I have a lot of other ideas though. Just no time.

Warp # 1311 was for samples using the yarn I got back from one of the mills. The samples are Jacob warp with Jacob and Timm Ranch weft at two different setts. The photo on the left is before washing and the right is after washing. That is where differences in take-up and draw-in really show up.

These samples were all from one warp but resleyed to weave at 15 epi, 18 epi, and 24 epi. I used these for a Yarn Lab article for the Jan/Feb 2024 Handwoven magazine.

This is one of several clasped warp scarves and shawls I wove. They will be in an upcoming issue of Handwoven.

Warp 1326 was Timm Ranch yarn and I wove two shawls, one with indigo-dyed weft, and one with 3 supplementary warps to create the design.

The next warp is Jacob wool. I really like how the two sides of this pattern are so different.

This is Warp 1328 with 14 blankets. I weave these on my 60″ wide AVL production loom.

They look a little better when finished. Some of these are on the website now (here is one). Some are Year to Remember blankets that were custom orders.

This is another clasped warp scarf using Timm Ranch wool that I dyed with homegrown indigo.

Warp 1337 on the loom. This is Timm Ranch warp and Jacob weft.

I wove enough for four pieces and made two into mobius shawls.

So many ideas and so little time. Back to the barn to feed lambs now.

Weaving in 2023 – 1

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I saw a blog post the other day in which the writer had recorded everything she wove within that year. That gave me this idea. I’m taking photos and keeping notes all the time. I may as well use them. I won’t try to fit the whole year into one post however. Maybe I’ll post weaving, then I’ll post lambs, then weaving, then lambs. How’s that?

My warps are all numbered so I can find the info in my binder. This one is 1299 from January 2023, blankets on the AVL loom. My notebook shows that I wove 11 blankets on this warp, some of which were Year to Remember blankets. These three use temperature data from 2022 so the stripes are all the same, but the colors are very different. I weave custom Year to Remember blankets and use a sparkly yarn to distinguish the special date. I think I have enough warp still on the loom for one more of these this winter, so contact me if you want to know more.

This is 1301 a scarf using all these crazy yarns. I teach a class in weaving a scarf using a mixed warp wound with a paddle, “Mix it Up”. I haven’t taught that class in awhile and I probably need to change it from a 1-day class to maybe 1-1/2 days. I don’t know if people want to pay for an extra day, but I always forget that it takes longer in a class setting than I take if I’m just warping and weaving my own scarf.

Two more mixed warps on the loom. The one on the right is a shawl, now at the Artery I think. I wove 5 or 6 of these in different colors.

In February I demonstrated weaving at the Sacramento Weavers Open House. I missed it this year because lambs were coming earlier than the previous year. I wove a chenille warp on Saturday and a wool warp on Sunday.

This is the warp after I took it off the loom.

Warp 1317 was a handspun Jacob wool scarf. Two Farm Club members spun yarn from wool that was accumulated from years of samples sent in when registering rams. Each ram application requires a few locks of wool. We have been digitizing the papers and that means those baggies of wool are discarded. I decided to do a project like this and then donate the scarf to the Jacob Sheep Breeders raffle. I wove two scarves using wool two different people had spun.

Clasped Warp is a technique that I wrote about for Little Looms a few years ago. It has been used with rigid heddle looms to design warps that change color midway through the length. I decided to do the same thing on a floor loom, adding the woven in pattern to the elements of interest. This is a shawl woven on a 4-shaft loom using handspun yarn. I will have an article coming out in the next Handwoven on this technique.

I wove fabric for 4 bags to use in an article that was published in Little Looms last year. These are hemp and woven on a rigid heddle loom. The bag uses a length of fabric that is 8″ wide and 4 yards long. Folding it strategically gives a shoulder bag with and inside and outside pocket.

This was part of that last blanket warp. It used up odds and ends of the Ashford DK yarn that I use for the Year to Remember blankets. The shape isn’t exactly right because that warp is designed to weave throws that end up about 45-50″ wide. I wove random stripes and sewed two together for a bed-sized blanket. I should have woven them longer and then they’d fit the bed correctly, but I didn’t have a plan at the time.

More to come if I’m going to finish out the year.

Stars and Stripes in Black and White AND New Jacob Yarn

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Three days in a row with a blog post! I’m on a roll.

I didn’t write about my newest yarn because I wanted to have all the details. Here it is, although not on the website yet.

I shared this photo in a previous post. I just picked up the yarn from Valley Oak Mill a week or two ago. This is the last of the 2023 Jacob fiber.

The first thing I need to do before planning a weaving project and before listing the yarn for sale is evaluate the yarn. Measuring wraps/inch (WPI) is one step.

Look at what I finally figured out–how to put photos side-by-side. It only took 20 minutes of trial and error and I don’t know if I can do it again. Now if I could just figure out how to change the size of the spaces .

The point of this is to show the wpi measurements for the same yarn before and after wetting. The yarn on the left is wound straight from the cone. The sample yarn on the right shows the WPI after the yarn has “bloomed”. I soak the skeins in water for about five minutes and then spin them out and let them dry. It is important to plan a project based on what the yarn will look like when the knitted or woven or crocheted project is wet finished. In the case of all these yarns they measured 17 WPI when wound from the cone and 12 WPI after washing. That’s a big difference.

Here is how the black yarn looks.

Here is this yarn on the loom. I sett it at 8 epi (ends per inch) based on the 12 WPI measurement. It looks very open but remember that the yarn is under tension on the loom and it has not been wet finished. It will bloom as in the photos above.

The stars appear due to alternating 6 dark threads and 6 light threads in warp and weft AND the weave structure. Without the two colors you wouldn’t see stars and without the weave structure (tie-up and treadling) you would see a plaid. There is a trick to weaving this without cutting the yarn every time you change color and keeping the selvedges neat. I put boxes at the right height at each side of the loom and rest the unused shuttle there where I can reach under the yarn when I catch the active shuttle for six picks.

This is how the scarves look off the loom, not yet wet finished. The stars are black on one side of the scarf and white on the other.

Here are the finished scarves. I have two of the stars scarves and one of the stripes. They may be sold this weekend but I can make more before Christmas. I wonder if I should try other colors. I could use the Timm Ranch naturally dyed yarn or Ashford yarn. I’d like to weave some in cotton as well. Too many ideas, too little time. If you’d like one let me know soon.

Random Farm Photos

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Once again I had several great blog ideas to share, but other things happen. So here are random photos that were going to be in some of those post.

I have friends who talk about what they see on the Next Door website (or is it an app?) and I didn’t get around to exploring that until recently. I still haven’t spent much time on it, but right after I signed up I got an email about For Sale and Free stuff. I saw these bookends ($25) and knew I needed them. The person who had them was going to be driving near my place the next day and offered to deliver. Aren’t they great?

That’s random. What else?

Butternut squash on a gray plank deck.

Butternut squash harvested from my garden. I made “pumpkin” pies from these for Thanksgiving. They turned out great! The three little ones at the top are too green but I thought I’d try them. Not ripe.

Here are the rams I’m keeping through the winter. The two on the left are this year’s lambs. The four horn ram is Typhoon and the two horn is Blizzard, both born here. The two two-horn rams on the right were born in 2021. That’s Hillside Gabby’s Barrett from Michigan on the right and Fair Adventure Horatio from Colorado on the left. I would have used another 4-horn ram for breeding but Townes died in a freak accident when he caught his horns in a fence panel. After a fertility issue last year I had the vets do some fertility testing and Silverado was found to be not fertile at the time of the test.

I have finally been spending time at the loom. These rugs are woven from corespun yarn that is spun from the coarser britch wool that I have sorted away from the rest of the fleece.

This is a close up of the corespun yarn that is the weft for those rugs. It is listed here on my website. The rugs are here and now I have two more to post.

I use a big ski shuttle to weave with this yarn. What you see on the loom in this photo is the part that will be the hem and I’m ready to weave with the corespun yarn.

Speaking of weaving, these are some of the shawls that just came off the loom. I wove some holiday colors so that they would have a place in this room at The Artery in Davis. Everyone has an opportunity to bring more work in for the month of December.

These items are in the main display area of The Artery. That colorful piece on the left is a rug I wove at the same time as I wove the corespun rugs. I have two more of these here at the shop. Most of these items are not on my website because it is risky to have them listed on-line but not know if they might have sold here at the Artery. The pieces in the middle are blankets.

I took this photo out the window when I was leaving The Artery this week. The Artery is located at the other end of this block. At the beginning of the pandemic the bars and restaurants on this part of G Street were given permission to block off the street and have outdoor seating. The street is blocked at that the other end just past our store, so there is still access to the sidewalk and a small amount of parking, but it’s not exactly inviting when you look down the street and it looks like it is a crime scene or a medical emergency. Those of us at The Artery have tried to have the street reopened but The City is not interested. They have ideas about making G Street a destination venue of some kind. Where there used to be other retail shops, now mosts of the businesses here are bars and restaurants. So the street was closed off in 2020 or early 2021, and it still looks like this.

That was random too.

When I got home I saw that Dan was using our new (last year’s purchase) manure spreader to spread the composted pile on the pasture.

It is so much faster and more effective than the old way of taking the manure out one scoop at a time and then kicking it around to try and spread it.

Last random photo. This is the Jacob yarn that I just picked up from Valley Oak Mill on Tuesday. This will deserve it’s own post soon. I am weaving scarves with it now.

Overshot Explorations and More

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I tried a new class last week. I used overshot as a way to guide weavers through exciting discoveries of sampling treadling techniques, choosing colors, and changing yarn sizes.

Two weavers came on Thursday to warp their looms. On Friday they were joined by two more weavers and they all wove overshot samplers.

This is the Sample Wall with examples of the drafts and the variables they could try.

I didn’t hang the “orange peel” sample but had it available. This is a good example of the effect of sett on the appearance of a piece. These are woven on the same warp of 5/2 cotton. The one on the right is sett at 12 epi (ends per inch) and the one on the left is sett at 15 epi. With the warp threads that much closer together the orange peel pattern is elongated and the circle becomes an oval.

The next photos are some of the weavers’ work on the looms near the beginning of class.

Two weavers chose black warp as in the samples. One weaver used white warp. Those are all cotton but the bottom one is wool because I already had that on a loom. That is white wool warp with gray tabby weft. It is so interesting to see the differences.

This was the first time for this class so I over-estimated how much warp would be woven. Two people have come back to continue work. Here is the sampler one of the students finished the next day. I will wait to see what others finished at home.

I hope to offer this class again but its not scheduled right now. Look for Overshot Explorations.

Woven Goods

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It’s the season for selling when you’re in the business of making. Now I seem to spend extra time taking photos and then trying to keep track if the items are at The Artery or here, listed on the my website or on the Fibershed Marketplace site . Ideally there were would be three batches–some at the Artery and not on the website, some here and just on my website, and some here and just on the Fibershed site. The goal would be to have everything sold by Christmas and to not double-sell anything…but those lines are crossing. I have to be vigilante. Here are a few examples of what I’ve been weaving.

DSC_4954Chenille scarf using clasped weft.Shawl 1065-2-1Local yarns dyed with coreopsis and dahlia flowers.Shawl-1059-3-1More local yarns dyed with mushroom and black walnut.Ponchos 1067This is the stack of ponchos that I finished in early November just before the Fibershed Wool Symposium.IMG_1021 This is how the loom looks from where I sit.IMG_1027 The rainbow colors are a result of a prism that hangs in the window behind me. After my mom died a friend gave me the prism and said that it was to remind me of my mom. And it does, as it reminds me of the friend, Sylvia.IMG_1023Coreopsis dyed yarn.IMG_0308The computer that holds the “brains” of the loom. This loom does not weave without me doing everything (for those people who think that having a computer hooked up means I’m not really weaving). It only keeps track of the pattern that I have put in.IMG_1028This is what that pattern looks like. It will be completely different after fulling.IMG_0307A look down through the warp threads to the cloth below.IMG_0305OOPS! I think I have this in an earlier photo and I haven’t told the story yet of what I did about it. That will still come.Poncho 1067-1Some of the finished ponchos.DSC_4987

DSC_5076Poncho 1067-4-3Talk about a versatile garment. I have grown to love the poncho. It’s really just a blanket with a hole in the middle for your head. Whether you’re at the computer late at night (gee, does that ever happen?), in the car, or trying to stay warm while reading in bed it’s an easy garment to throw on. And it also makes you look young and pretty! Just look at those photos! (Disclaimer–that’s really not me.)