Monthly Archives: March 2011

Black Wrap or Blanket

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I thought I had photos of me holding a big ball of weft for this project. It was a length of velvet cut into one long strip and wound into a ball, and it looked rather impressive. But I can’t find it.

This is one of those projects that sprang out of an intention, but soon evolved away from it, yet somehow ended up with the same end result. I had a big piece of black velour in my fabric stash that I thought might weave up into a nice evening wrap. Then I adopted a smaller piece of red velour. This was going to be my Goth Wrap.

Later I wound up with another piece of fabric – some rather syntheticy velvet of about the same weight as the velour. For the warp I chose some Bendigo Cotton 4ply from an abandoned crochet jacket project. (I discovered I didn’t like and wasn’t good enough at crochet to want to make an entire jacket.) I measured and tied on enough for a two metre shawl/wrap.

When I went to chop up the velour, however, I realised that both the black and red pieces would be great backdrops for Paul’s photography. So I let him adopt them. That left me with the velvet. It took me an hour to cut it up in a big square spiral, walking around the dining table many, many times as I did. (Yay excercise!)

I started weaving and about halfway I realised that I wasn’t going to get two metres of fabric. I’d get barely more than a square. This wasn’t good. Wraps are supposed to, you know, wrap around you.

So I unwove it all. The fabric I’d got had been fairly thick, so I needed a way to weave looser. I decided to do a shot of the Bendy cotton between each shot of velvet. This worked really well to open up the fabric, and created an interesting grid-like pattern.

Last Saturday I did the final bit of weaving, and discovered that I still wasn’t going to make it to two metres. So I dug through my fabric stash and found a piece of black satin. I cut it up and wove it, and found that I liked the subtle change from matt to shiny at the end of the shawl. I still didn’t make it to the end of the warp, but it wasn’t far off, so I cut the warp and tied the fringe – keeping it nice and long to add to the overall length.

Only as I was tying the last of the fringe did I look down and realise there was still about a third of the ball of velvet weft left, sitting where I’d left it the last time I’d been weaving.

There was some cursing.

I’d cut the warp. There was no going back. So I wet finished (washed) the wrap and trimmed the fringe and tossed the leftover weft in a place I couldn’t see it and hopefully pretend it didn’t exist.

This is what happens when you do in snatches of spare time: you forget things. You get a little tired of a project and slip into finishitis mode.

The washing did interesting things to the edges:

Either the cotton shrank or the velvet strips relaxed, but I’ve ended up with excess weft forming loops at the edge of the wraps. I rather like the way it looks. And the wrap feels much nicer and looks more interesting than if I’d simply hemmed the rather syntheticy piece of velvet.

Hectic

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Lots going on around here, but not much of it crafty or sketchy. I took some photos today of a wrap I finished weaving on the weekend, so there’ll be a post soon. After a day stealing moments to tidy up parts of the work room, this evening I decided to go through the yarn stash. Next thing I knew I had culled over two kilos of it.

The smaller it gets, the more I realise that I put off knitting this or that yarn for legitimate reasons (too scratchy, not a colour I like, etc.) and I may as well give it to the op shop. I tend to put yarns like that into the weaving stash too, which filled my weaving to-do list with projects I wasn’t particularly inspired by, so some of that got removed too.

As for the yarn I’m keeping, I have some free weekend days coming up, and I’m thinking it might be time to whip out the knitting machine.

Frogging, Tinking and a Little Plane Knitting

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Mum and Dad came over on Friday, so I got Mum to try on the Lallans hat. It was waaay too big on her as well. So now it is this:

I’ll try knitting it again. At least I know how the pattern works now, and making smaller hats is faster. Only trouble is, Mum wants one now so I’ll have to knit two!

The second headband I knit was a success, however:

Knit from the leftover Colinette sock yarn that was supposed to be machine wash, but felted ‘like the clappers’ (as they say). These little headbands are a great way to use up leftover sock yarn.

My attempts to find a way to knit a sock with a heel that won’t break the smooth colour transition up in a graduated yarn have resulted in a lot of tinking and reknitting. The yarn is getting fuzzy and I’m a bit sick of the sight of it. But last night I think I may have finally succeeded. More on that in another post.

Before the trip and on the way back from Adelaide I knit sock bookmarks:

They’re fun and take me less than an hour each. I’m making them as gifts. They’re also good for using up little balls of leftover sock yarn, but not good for reducing stash because I don’t count little balls of leftover sock yarn in my stash total.

Our weekends for the next few months have been filling up with an unusual number of social and work commitments. While it’s all good, fun stuff a part of me is sulking at the reduced crafting time. When am I going to get my Projects for 2011 done? Still, there are a few weekends where Paul is busy but I am not. I’ll be making big crafty plans for them.