When digging around the stash, matching bouclé yarns with smooth, I stumbled upon a trio that looked really nice together. What seemed like fairly bland reddish-brown and orange bouclé yarns somehow gained a sumptuous metallic gleam next to a purple (blackberry nip) Bendigo Classic 3ply. How could I not weave something with the combo?
A while back I made a draft I called “roses” because of the bright reds I’d chosen for it, but it took only a few tweaks to adapt it to the new colours. It looked great, so I started planning for a scarf, conscious that I didn’t have enough of the orange bouclé for anything larger.
To ensure the orange wouldn’t run out, I wound it onto the warping board set to the length of the scarf, then counted the number of ends. Since that included loom waste, I knew I could plan to warp a little bit over half of the number of ends in orange, since the spacing of it in the weft was the same as the warp. Factoring in these limitations, I knew I’d have a narrower scarf than the ones I’ve been weaving, but still a good size. So warped up the loom and got weaving.
Since I’m weaving almost only on weekends now, and July to October seems like birthday season, the scarf came together at a leisurely pace. I was happy to find these bouclé yarns worked as well as the grey I’ve used in the last three projects. There’s less than a bobbin of orange left, but plenty of the reddish-brown, which wove up nicely and I’d like to use in another DDW scarf.
The last third was woven a bit faster due to wanting to start the next project. A friend gave me some interesting slubby yarn from a scarf that had unravelled. I offered to weave it into a shawl for her, and when I showed her a few examples of items that make a feature of a fancy yarn she was instantly attracted to honeycomb. I’m thinking of weaving a test shawl with some slubby in the stash. Which means my next projects aren’t going to be more bouclé Deflected Doubleweave, but I do hope to get back to it.
When I was nearing the end of the Baroque scarf, I knew I wanted to do more bouclé deflected doubleweave, but I wanted to try using some other other bouclé yarns in the stash. That wasn’t as easy as I hoped. The grey bouclé I’ve been using matched well with Bendigo Classic 3ply, but the other bouclés came in many different weights and it was hard to find nice colour matches.
Then a bright green slubby yarn caught my eye. Not a bouclé but the same WPI as the grey. Being an almost fluorescent shade, it reminded me of electrical wires, which put me in mind of draft I designed after I did the deflected doubleweave Zoom class in 2020. If I recall correctly, I used the snail trails and cats paws overshot profile draft as a DDW profile draft, and electrical plug shapes appeared in the pattern.
So I dug up that pattern and tweaked the colours until I had a trio of yarns that suited… which included the grey bouclé after all. The slubby yarn was a bit thin, but it’s only used for a few stripes in the pattern so I gambled on it not mattering, and that paid off. There was a time I wouldn’t mix yarns that weren’t the same brand and weight. Thanks to the 4 and 8 shaft courses, those days are long gone.
I love how this came out. It’s unisex, cosy and striking. And I’ve wound a warp for another DDW scarf, this time using two other bouclé yarns from my stash.
I’m not sure why the first word that popped into my mind when I considered what to call this scarf was ‘baroque’, but when I did a google image search on the word plus ‘patterns’ lots of diamond shaped repeats in blues and grey/silver or gold appeared, so my subconscious seems to know what it’s talking about!
Technically, this is another sampler scarf. I want to see what the same yarns I used in the last scarf will do if I reduce the blocks to four ends, and if the floats weren’t overly long I might head down the route of making a garment.
Since it had been six months since I’d put a warp on a loom, my mind felt oddly stiff, as if I was waking up unused muscles. Fortunately, everything I needed to know came back to me and I was soon weaving again. A couple of weekends later it was done.
And I had come up with two more projects. Both scarves. One using the grey boucle, the other using a coppery-brown and an orange boucle. Seems I forgot all about making a garment. Well, I have enough garments. I’m on a roll with these deflected doubleweave scarves. A slow roll, but a roll nonetheless. Let’s see how far it carries me.
Looking over all the Daily Art pieces and considering what was worth framing had me thinking about what sort of art might sell. Recently, I refreshed the items I had for sale in the Guild shop and that got me thinking along similar lines.
Of the six items I put in the shop six months ago, two sold: a pink flannelette rag rug and a grey and white shadow weave cotton scarf made from the extra yarn in a kit. The four items that didn’t sell included a black t-shirt fabric rag rug with a multicolour twill warp and three cotton twill scarves. I couldn’t help but note that all the scarves had been stashbuster projects and wonder if my intention in making them was weighted too much toward using up the yarn than making something saleable. Perhaps I would have been better off culling those yarns.
I also noted that those four items weren’t my best pieces in the “to sell or gift” chest. When I considered which items to put in the shop this time, I put the nicest ones back in case I needed them as gifts. That is silly. It’s not like I give handwovens very often. So I’ve decided I will take the best pieces for the shop in six months. I only waste my time and fail to make space for new creations if I sell nothing because I didn’t put the good stuff in!
However, I do stand by my decision to keep the nicest flannelette rag rugs. They took a ridiculously long time to weave and in these tough times I doubt anyone would be willing to pay even a quarter of what they’re worth. Eventually mine will wear out and I’ll have something to replace them with.
We signed up to a streaming service recently, which has given me a rich vein of art and handcraft reality tv programming to binge. I’m not normally a fan of reality tv, but I love the Great British Bake Off, the Great British Sewing Bee, Good with Wood and Portrait/Landscape Artist of the Year. It turns out there is another show in the same vein: the Great British Pottery Throwdown.
I learned pottery between ages 6 and 12, then later it was included as part of my secondary education when I was 16-17. The last time I did any was in my 20s, when I did a terracotta sculpture short course. I had an idea that I would do it once every decade of my life, but my 30s and 40s passed by without me getting my hands covered in clay, and it’s doubtful my back would cope with it now.
So when the show gave me an itch to play with clay, I turned instead to coiled basketry.
This has many advantages. It’s entirely made from recycled materials – strips from old denim jeans leftover from weaving rugs and cotton thrums. It’s portable – I’ve been doing it while visiting Mum in aged care. There’s no need to find a kiln for hire. The materials produce only a little dust and don’t require safety equipment. You can take your time and it doesn’t dry out. And if you drop the object you’re making, it doesn’t shatter.
I had no idea what I was making when I started; I just coiled and sewed until I ran out of denim strip and found I had a little basket. Then I started another. That became a lid.
I’ve started another piece. This time with black denim and blue thread. So far I have a growing disc. I’m thinking maybe it’ll become a trivet or a wide bowl, but in truth I’m happy to let it become whatever the moment leads it to become.
I sold my modified Katie loom late last year. It didn’t make sense to have two 8 shaft table looms, and the Jane was the keeper because it’s wider and has a supplementary warp beam. I won’t say I didn’t feel a few pangs of sadness to see it go.
Since most of the second hand looms I’ve bought have come with free yarn, I decided to do a cull of my cone yarn stash and came up with a box of cotton, linen and wool to accompany the loom. Spreading the keepers over the kitchen table meant it was suddenly obvious that some of what I assumed were solo yarns were actually the same brand and type as others. Putting like with like back into the cabinets made it all look much tidier.
I have quite a bit of boucle yarn, which got me thinking of something I stumbled on in the 8-shaft course sampling. I really liked mixing boucle with smooth yarn in Deflected Doubleweave. It gave the fabric a lovely texture, and for some reason – probably just because there wasn’t a lot of texture explored in the course – I am drawn to texture and simple weaves right now.
A shawl or rug appealed, or maybe a tunic top, but I decided to do a scarf first as a test piece. I chose a pattern in the DDW sampler I’d called “Cha-cha-chains”, tweaked it in Fiberworks, chose the yarn, wound it, warped it and started weaving.
It was as dream to weave. Swift but not boring. It took me six months to weave mainly because of many, many distractions. It felt lovely on the loom, and thickened up slightly after washing.
So cosy.
I’ve worked out the specs and picked a pattern for another one now. Just need a free weekend to get it on the loom.
A year or so ago I saw a woman wearing a denim dress and found myself fancying a garment like that. It was essentially a shirt dress made with chambray, and I had some of that from a destash sale. I went looking for patterns and settled on Simplicity 8014, which had been voted best pattern of the year on a sewing pattern review site.
Having made the mistake of buying a pattern in US sizes that were too small for me, I took care to check the eBay seller’s information carefully and there was no indication it was in US sizings. So of course, only when it turned up was it possible to see it was was. I had to buy it again, and by the time it arrived I’d moved on to other projects so this one got put aside.
Recently I got around to making it.
I have to admit, I wondered how the pattern managed to be voted Best of the Year. The version I happened to want to make involved so many switches back and forth in the instructions that I eventually had to scan and print it so I could cut them up and put them in the right order. Even then, I had to tweak the order on the fly as well because I was top stitching in another colour and didn’t want to be changing the thread constantly.
Then there were some oddities with the collar instruction. The only time the seam allowance is mentioned on the pattern pieces but not on the instruction sheets is for the collar. The collar is the last part to be sewn, and the instructions are incomplete and in one place don’t match up with the diagram. Also, there is no mention of overlocking edges to prevent fraying, and the number of buttons for the view I did was two short of what was needed.
It seems like the manufacturer has decided to truncate the instructions so they took up less pages, and whoever got that job really didn’t care how they got it to fit.
This was originally a dress that I grew out of and turned into a skirt. Recently I tried it on and found it a bit snug. I love the fabric but redoing the waist would shorten the skirt, and I’m favouring long skirts these days. There was a skirt to top refashion I’d wanted to try for years, so this seemed like the perfect time to try it.
The ideas is, you turn the shirt upside down, unpick the side seams enough to create armholes, then join the hem at the shoulder line. If the skirt fits you can leave the waist as it is, but mine was not just too snug but also a bit long for that. So I cut off the waistband and added a new one that was also a tie. And I added a black band around the sleeves to match the waistband.
A more recent purchase was this wrap top I bought online with a voucher from sending fabric and clothes to be recycled. The shoulders were very wide, and with all the gathering at the top of the sleeve it made my head look too small for my shoulders. So off came the sleeves and a few finger-widths of fabric came off each shoulder before I reattached them. I found the gathering was rather haphazard so now it also has the same amount in the same position each side.
There has been more sewing, but that can wait for another post.
It was a test of a vintage pattern and I wasn’t all that impressed with it. The shirt came out okay, but when I went to wear it I found the facing fabric in the button band and collar was much too stiff and uncomfortable, so I cut off the buttons and sent it off to a clothing recycling company.
Just about that time, Tessuti released a similar shaped shirt with a collar, so I bought it, and recently did a test version:
The fabric is a rayon sarong I bought in an op shop. I used a very light facing in the collar and under the buttonholes. It’s very wearable, though the weather here has suddenly grown too cold for short sleeves and single layers. The pattern has some annoyances like teeny tiny photos of very busy cloth that you can’t make out the seams on, and the collar method seemed needlessly fussy.
Nothing bad enough that I wouldn’t use it to make the shirt I was testing patterns for. That one will be made from a piece of fabric I painted in the Maiwa class, plus some black and white linen I bought to go with it. I’d have probably started that project this week if I hadn’t come down with a bug that had me sleeping half of most afternoons. Not Covid, but probably the one spreading among friends with sinusitis as the main symptom.
I’ll get to it soon enough. And I’ve thought a lot about art and hobbies, how much of my time I want to dedicate to either, and how the reality is the opposite. I decided to try limiting hobbies to weekends and art to weekdays. This will be helped by finally getting a workable set up in the new studio side of the laundry. The last piece of the puzzle was a still life “box” that controls the direction of light on the subject.
I was happy with how the trial artwork went. Maybe tomorrow I’ll squeeze in another piece.
The last two weeks of the Print and Paint with Natural Dyes covered more methods that played with mordants and didn’t involve steaming the pieces. The last one was my favourite.
Module 7 was all about painting with mordant pastes with varying ratios of alum and iron. I was in full test everything mode, and tried eight dye baths instead of four, putting them in jars in a water bath rather than cooking them individually over 10+ hours.
I tore the samples even smaller with the intention of overdying one of each with indigo.
Unfortunately, when I tried making an indigo vat it was a complete failure. I had a memory from the Kay Faulkner workshop I organised of buying urea for our woven shibori dyeing, but I couldn’t find a recipe. Not even on her website, which should have been warning enough. I googled and found a blogger with a recipe using urea and soda ash… that did not work. Later I realised the urea was probably for using with the commercial protein fibre dyes in Kay’s workshop. After doing more research, I tried adding mashed banana juice and more soda ash to the vat, with no success. At that point I had too much else to do and put the bucket outside. I’ve bought some chemicals to try the recipes on the Maiwa site, but I suspect I’ll have to start from scratch.
After making the sampler, I returned to an earlier idea of cutting notches in foam brushes. Since they came in set and I had to buy several packs to get three small ones, I had a lot of these large ones and was able to make one for each of the six alum/iron pastes. I painted the white linen with wavy lines, inspired by a shirt I’d glimpsed on tv, and then dyed it with logwood.
For the natural linen, I painted tropical leaves freehand with Japanese sumi brushes then dyed it with pomegranite. This one I intend to dye with indigo when I get a vat up and running.
For Module 8, we mixed up mordant discharge paste. We cut our cotton and linen pieces in half and dyed them, and two bandanas, in two batches: one dyed grey with iron, the other mordanted with alum. The discharge paste then either bleached out the grey or removed the alum mordant so when those pieces were immersion dyed later the paste areas took up little to no colour, depending on the dye.
I’d bought some refillable pens which you can use to make your own textas, and tried it with the discharge solution before the thickener went in. It worked, but the solution with beet powder in it kept clogging up the pen. I also realised on the second day that I’d made the first solution half strength. It still worked but the result was paler. I also tried screen printing but the result was too blobby.
On the iron-coloured natural linen I printed leaf stamps that I’d made by tracing leaves from my front yard, and wrote the common names of trees.
On the alum-mordanted natural linen I used a stencil from a bundle I bought at Bunnings then immersion dyed in lac.
For the iron-coloured cotton I made a teeny skull stamp. I meant to draw neat diagonal lines but things went wonky and I just went with that, and used the stamp here and there in the gaps. I love this and wish I’d worked on a bigger piece of cloth.
For the alum-mordanted cotton I tried an Indian wood block and did a simple diagonal grid of flowers. Then I poured a whole lot of exhaust baths into the pot to make an orangey peach colour. Unfortunately, the half-strength discharge paste and the lighter dye colour meant that the pattern was rather hard to see, but I did a wheat bran bath later and that helped to lighten the design a little.
The iron-coloured bandana was entirely done with the refillable pen. I traced around the cat face stamp I’d used for Module 6 and then added details. This one is definitely a keeper.
The alum-mordanted bandana became a gift for a friend who likes pink and skulls. For this one I had the rare satisfaction of planning something and it coming out as I intended.
I have a few ideas I’d like to try now the course is done. Because I’ve made small colour charts, I wound up putting aside a half metre of lightweight cotton to use if I really stuffed up a piece. Since I didn’t, I’ve torn that into two pieces to play with. For the smaller, I’ve explored dyeing with white mulberry. The rest – a square – I’d like to use up some of the leftover pastes. I also ordered two metres of silk.
As I made more and more pieces it became clear I was going to have a long list of sewing projects to do. Since we don’t use napkins I’m treating them as small squares of fabric to be transformed into something, usually something that requires more fabric. The linen nearly all begs to be made into garments, but to do that I’ll definitely need more fabric – perhaps even painted in the same way. Thankfully, the silk pieces just need to be hemmed to become wide scarves.
Overall, it has been a lot of fun and I’m glad I chose the workshop. I learned heaps and it kept me distracted rather than freezing up and stressing during a very scary few months. But I didn’t get much else done, creatively, in that time and I really, really miss art. Yet it kind of benefitted me artistic practise in that it had me working in the laundry in a different way to how I did during the ink making workshop. I have a better feel for the space and how to make it work as a mini art studio.
Which will be my next task. And then… art resumes, perhaps even daily art.
