SpinnySpinny

More things far too tedious to mention here have been going on, mostly involving housing. But there is good news to report, finally. We have an apartment, one that is not crumbling and larger than a shoebox. Sadly, we don’t get it for another week, but we have signed the lease. There are two bedrooms, two large hall closets and a decent sized living room that will be the textile studio! It means leaving downtown, but you can’t have everything.

And, even better, I have a loom to go in it. It’s sitting in someone’s garage for the moment but I’ve put down a deposit and she is ok with holding on to it until next week. It’s a Leclerc Nilart 45 inch, 12 harness jack loom. It’s big, much larger than the Artisat I had a while back. It’s an older loom and the model isn’t being made anymore, but parts are still available.

Finally some fibery stuff happens around here, in between the coughing and post-nasal-dripping and all that fun stuff. It’s nice to know that when you can’t do anything involving complex thought, there is still fleece to sort. Or something like that. I’m finally getting on with the huge backlog of dirty fleece and even doing a bit of spinning.

I started a mindless project with some Ashland Bay multicolor Merino top, a scarf for The Not-Really-Allergic Boyfriend. It’s all single, with warp and weft of opposite twist. I picked up some burgundy to go with the purplish multi warp, but I think I’m going to end up with black weft. I still haven’t resolvevd the loom question, however. This needs a proper modern multi-harness loom and I don’t think I will survive using the table loom on the floor. But I don’t have to decide yet, I’ve only promised to have it finished by February.

It’s nice to finally do something rather than make samples all day long. And something that isn’t fussy and tedious. It will be a little uneven and that’s ok. I’m enjoying the part where I buy the fiber ready to spin, but not so much the bits I have to pick out of it. I’ve never seen a commercial wool I’ve been entirely happy with, there are always neps or VM or even sometimes lumps of nasty stained fiber. And it’s never as long a staple as it could be. As much work as it is, I will continue to scour and comb my own because the results are so much better.

The Pima cotton is giving me fits, but I got some writing and another swatch done anyway. I wove something roughly the size of a coaster with weft stripes of fuzzy llama yarn. I keep wishing I had a real loom but when I actually start thinking about it, what I need is a place to put a real loom. The loom itself is much less of an issue. I still have the table loom, but I’m not using it because there isn’t even a place for that. I have no table to put it on, and using it on the floor is horrible. Even if I had a better piece of floor than the high-traffic middle of the living room. So I did it on the frame loom, with string heddles and sticks and everything. I could have finished the fourth selvedge but I left it as fringe because it gets much more difficult as you get closer to the end. This is seriously primitive stuff, I had to pick up most of my pattern sheds by hand. I can keep one on a shed stick, but I’d have to tie up harnesses if I wanted the rest of them.

I went to Carolina Homespun yesterday, partly because I needed a tapestry beater and partly to just get out of the house. I picked up, err, “A Few Things” and looked at some other weaving stuff. One of the big problems with early weaving technology is that there is no simple warp spacing mechanism. With no reed to hold the warp in position, it’s very hard to maintain width for anything but narrow warp-faced fabric. It is possible to set up something with a rigid heddle, but the finest you can get with those are about 12 ends per inch. Seeing that most of my interest in weaving starts around 20, that isn’t much help.

With the writing, I’ve been trying to get all the Elements and Principles stuff done. I completely hate it because most of it is theoretical principles of design stuff. Supposedly these are the qualities of good visual composition, but it’s all very eurocentric and doesn’t consider the many non-Western artistic aesthetics that don’t fit into it’s nice neat boxes. And it’s all visual. Tactile perception, a large part of textile design, isn’t even remotely considered. I’m supposed to provide “illustrations, photographs and/or small samples” for each item. I’m not going though the work to spin and weave swatches just to talk about theories of visual design, so I’m doing it with photographs. I selected the images, but I haven’t finished all the writing. I took one new picture, but mostly I just pulled old stuff out of my library. (Yes, they are all my images, I changed the resolution so they look ok online but that’s it. If I find someone is using them, you will be hearing from me.)

I need to get back to that cotton. Ick.