Jane's Journal

While Zaphira is probably still freaking out about being pronounced Empress by her traveling companions, I meanwhile am mostly freaking out about her new dress. I'm so horribly unsure about how to go about it that the indecisiveness is paralysing. I'm getting there, though, the plan is formulating in my mind.
(What I was mostly unsure about was whether to go for the full 12th century style, which is unfitted rectangles and triangles and slightly baggy -- which might not work so well for my pear-shaped figure -- or mix 15th century fitting with the 12th century dress and call it a crossover event)

This week I will not have the time to work on the dress, there's 2 dress shirts, 2 trousers and a t-shirt that need making, but after this week it's July and that means the August event is just around the corner. I will have to get started on the dress soon.
Meanwhile, a new dress means new accessories as well and the colours of the new dress (which will be my summer dress) don't match my winter accessories. A new belt is an absolute must, just as fake hair for the braids, some ribbons to bind them with, and a veil.

My sock yarn stash is HUGE, so that was the obvious choice. Sock wool has somewhere between 20 and 25% polyamide (nylon) to make it sturdier and it comes in a ton of colours. I also realised I have a ton of colours that match my new dress linens, from the pinks and blues of sunset in various shades of light and dark. Combined with a light grey it works really well -- even off-white would have been too bright.

The design took a little while longer, I must have spent two hours in the Gimp, happily bucket-filling the honeycomb pattern and creating patterns. I had maybe 30 tabs open in my browser for inspiration, reading 'A Spinner A Weaver's blog about how to make a design pop and using her patterns as inspiration. In the end, after several drafts, I decided to copy her beautiful design (first one on the page) in my own colour scheme.



While Doortje helped me sort the colours, I cut 5.3 meter lengths of each colour, hoping to create a 4 meter long band. It should probably be a bit shorter or I might trip over it, but it should be long enough to wrap my waist twice and hang to calf-height.
As the dress will be blue, the band's main colour is red/pink with some blue details in the center. I haven't got a clue how wide the band will become once I start weaving, sock wool has some body to it so I might up with a 6 cm wide band (or more!). I used roughly 10 grams of yarn per colour, so it's a nice stash buster for all those odd ends at the end of a skein. And it's a good test for this heddle, as it's fully threaded except for 2 holes on the side.

Threading the warp is what I hate most about any weaving project, although it wasn't too bad when I still had my inkle loom (I sold that on Marktplaats a few years back). The reason I stopped cardweaving altogether is because I always mix up S- and Z-, that I don't know how ABCD on the holes go, from which side you should look at your cards, which way you should turn if ABCD is actually ADCB and by the time you figure out one of these, the others are all mixed up again. It was just a hot mess, combined with lots of tangled yarn. Ugh.
(Maybe some day, though? Never say never, right...)



After cutting all the ends, I threaded the heddle in the right order and had a big bunch of knotted yarn hanging from my heddle. The rest of the evening was spent carefully pulling the threads from the knot one by one, trying very hard not to tighten the tumble and hoping very much that it will not felt while I'm pulling on them (I've had sock projects felt together for a bit when frogging). I tied the long tails into five bunches, which I can unroll when I need, and are easier to untangle later on if needed.

The belt will have the darkest wine red on the outside, with a lovely colour fade to fuchsia. Then a stripe of lighter blue, with a pinstripe of fuchsia will border the main diamond/snowflake in the grey field in the centre of the band.
I am already loving it!

Tonight I can start weaving, and hopefully I will have some free time in my schedule next week to start work on the dress. I think I've figured out pretty much what I want to do with it now, so all I need is time and some free head-CPUs to work with.

(Ok, maybe I have been watching too much Grey's Anatomy...)

As I was weaving on a purple trim in diamonds and chevrons, I realised my work was off-center. No wonder, as the right half of my work only had seven cards, and the left half had nine...

Time to graft ( two extra cards into the weave! )

Crossposted to card_weavers.

With this hot weather my rechargable batteries are acting up and draining on me, so it took me a while to get some good photo's (although 'good' is a relative term). I've gotten to a point in my weaving that it was now or never for pictures, so I took some pictures last night. This is my new inkle loom, in Dutch known as "Bandweefgetouw".
(Click on the pictures to go to a larger version on my Flickr page)

Lots of threads there and some finished weaving. If you look at the picture below, I've nearly finished this one. I set it up using the full length of the loom which will allow me to weave a band that is 3,4 meters long. I can also skip pegs to make shorter weavings.
There's also a smaller version of the loom available for less money, but since you can always skip pegs but not use pegs twice, I opted to buy the bigger loom. It's some 70 centimeters long, I'm guessing, and 30 cm high. To stabilise it while weaving, I use two clamps to secure it to the table. One was delivered with the loom, but since I can't screw the 'feet' on the bottom of the loom any tighter, it can still shift if I only use one c-clamp.



Here you see the 'leashes' (in pink) which anchor one half of the threads. The other half can be lifted or pushed down to create the two sheds. The technique is the same as weaving with a heddle, although it does take some getting used to. It's easy enough to set up, and like weaving with a heddle it takes a bit of getting used to weaving tightly enough. It's also important to have all leashes at the same length or you risk 'floaters'. (Leashes are made by wrapping thread around two pegs and cutting one end of the loop. In tying a knot, the length can vary.)
The block at the back is used to adjust tension. Once the tension is loosened you can shift everything around if you get too close to the leashes.

I set up this band with one continuous length of thread (acrylic Zeeman thread of 99 cents) that changes colour over its length. This makes for a band with a very subtle shift in colour (the colours float slightly to the left over the length of the band, just look at the one edge).

For my next trick band I want to use the same thread, but skipping a few pegs while setting up so I can make it so that the colour of the thread is grouped. This should give me a band where the colours shift lengthwise, which should create an awesome effect. It's hard to have lengthwise colour shifts on warp-faced weavings.

After that, I can try my new cardweaving tricks. I've bought Candace Crockett's book on cardweaving, which is very inspiring and shows step-by-step how to influence your designs.