Goodbye Unemployment...

There has been cooking...

baked lotus root chips with cayenne pepper and salt

and weaving...

log cabin pattern with variegated warp

and noodling about on the guitar...

some kind of chord...

but on Monday I'm going to work for the first time in 10 weeks. I'm going to miss my days of R&R, and I highly recommend it even if you have to go kicking and screaming -- I needed a break MUCH more than I realized. But I'm relieved that I found a good job and that I will be a desk-bound business-casual heel-wearing member of society again.

Unemployment Towels

Not long after my last day at work, I started planning this set of towels. They're the most complicated project I've woven yet! The pattern was in an old issue of Weaver's Craft magazine (Issue 19, 2006), and it's called "Crocus in Snow". The original pattern was blue instead of pink. I have no idea whether pink croci exist, or whether they'd pop up out of the snow. But I like the pink; it's cheerful. Do petunias like snow? Probably not.

Yesterday afternoon I had a job interview, so while I was waiting for 1 pm to arrive I sat down at the loom, finished the last few pattern repeats, and cut the towel fabric loose from the loom!

I have now finished my unemployment towels, so I suppose that means I am ready to go back to work.

They started as a warp, or 423 pieces of cotton yarn that will run the length of all four towels.

Up close, the pattern doesn't look like much.

From a distance, the pattern appears: pink circles with yellow centers! Like magic!

Four neatly folded towels, resting on the loom that created them.

Without warp, there can be no weft.

The first post-planning step in weaving is to make a warp, or a collection of threads into which the weft will be woven. These can be all one color, many colors, or a repeating pattern of two or three colors, but they need to be the same length and they are often quite long.

The easiest way to create a warp is to use a contraption called a warping board that allows string to be wound around a series of pegs. My first couple of warps were wound on the warping board of my co-worker who taught me how to get started, but if I was too impatient to wait until I could go over to her house I would create a warp using a combination of dining-room chairs and pegs clamped to tables. That gets rather tedious when I need 400+ ends that are about 5 yards long.

My first unemployment project was to make a warping board for myself. I used this pattern from All Fiber Arts:
http://www.allfiberarts.com/library/graphics/gallery/wrpbrd_pln.gif. It's a bit hard to read, but the pattern was good enough. I modified it slightly (of course) because I don't see myself ever needing a 16-yard warp.

Here's the end result! It's not beautiful, but it works.

Whole lotta weaving going on.

I'm making progress as a weaver. I'm working on my first set of dishtowels, all the while asking myself why I'm doing this when they sell perfectly good towels at the store. My conclusion is that it's challenging, satisfying, and (most importantly), while I'm weaving there is not a single glowing rectangle anywhere in my line of vision unless Rob is trying to play "Words with Friends" with me on the iPhone. It's also good to be a total beginner at something once in a while, and to be reminded that impatience will only get me broken warp threads that will cause even more frustration later on.

I decided to tackle a log cabin pattern as my first real project, a project that has a pattern and everything! As so many other weavers have said, log cabin weave does seem magical since the weave structure is just plain weave (one over, one under, one over, one under ... rinse and repeat). The magical pattern blocks of stripes that appear to be rotated comes from the order of the warp and weft threads. That means I have to attentively count weft threads while I weave, or the pattern will switch on me before I am ready.

Those are 457 individual warp threads, each 5.5 yards long, to give me four dish towels.

The work in progress

See the magic!

The last picture is of the fruits of my impatience, also known as broken warp threads. Since they're not connected to the back beam anymore they have to be weighted in order have the same tension as the rest of the warp. The key works well, and so do pill bottles with a couple of screws in them. These bobbers fascinate the kitties, especially when I am actively weaving and the threads dance a bit. All the more reason to keep it all covered up when I'm not around.

My first woven scarf

Only 4 days after starting, I finished my first scarf! It is a coarse and plain weave, much like a peasant might wear. Or a hippie. :-) I couldn't even wait to cut the starting end free of the loom to try it on. It went quickly, and weaving it was really fun. I can't wait to start on something else!

Weaving 101

A couple of weeks ago I got the idea in my head that I wanted to learn how to weave. Good thing one of my co-workers at Audi knows how to weave! She invited my over to her house so she could show me how to get started. I'm working on -- what else -- a starter scarf. I used some of Deb's tencel yarn for the warp and some of my stash for the weft.

She told me she had a small loom that I could borrow which was pretty generous of her. I was picturing a table-top loom but she was kind enough to let me borrow a 4-shaft floor loom! We had to use the top-down-top-up procedure to get it into the back seat of Das Beetle, and even then I had to drive home with the passenger seat folded forward. Yay for convertibles!

Anyhoo, here it is all set up in our living room. It's a good thing that we had a big empty spot where that solstice tree was. The kitties have been little angels about it, although at first they thought I brought them the best cat toy ever. I keep it covered with a sheet when I'm not using it just to deter the right combination of curiosity and a skillfully-wielded paw.

I weave. I have woven. Weaving has been done.