Weaverly

Crackle

I'm thinking about ways to use a 4 shaft loom, and put a small sample warp onto my table loom, leaving 4 of the 8 shafts vacant. The warp is navy and yellow, end-and-end. Mercerized 10/2 cotton, 28 epi.

The threading is an original crackle variation.

Playing with blocks with a 16/4 cotton weft in turquoise.

Now some blocks with a weft of silk nail, natural.

Modifying the block sizes, with a peach silk weft.

Alternating weft colors with the block changes, here in cottons.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, the Christmas cactus is running riot. 

In the Department of Books, I have a really, really good one to recommend to you today. It's Florida by Lauren Groff. 

At the Intersection of Bored and Audacious

The last of the many tied-on warps is finished.

It's a faux huck on 16 shafts. It repeats every 112 picks. Straight threading.

And here it is after cutting off and washing. Very scrunchy, highly textured. Click to enlarge.

After all that purple, I really welcomed some complementary orange at this morning's breakfast.

Now for a brand new warp. Here's the audacious part. I wanted to blend a 4-shaft overshot and an 8-shaft point twill, so that I could weave both of them on a 16-shaft warp. It was a fun exercise, one that kept me occupied for an entire day. After blending, it turned out that 4 of the shafts were not needed, but in order to better distribute the uneven numbers of heddles on the remaining shafts, I doubled some of the shafts, and came up with the following really strange threading:

Maybe some of you math wizards can explain to me why the blended drafts originally required only 12 shafts. Be that as it may, here is the new blended 16-shaft warp. Point twill and overshot. Check.

More audacity: my Christmas Cactus has produced a February blossom! 

Change, Changes, Changeable, Changing

We are among the 25% of people in the US without terrible winter weather. Nevertheless, it has been very changeable here lately, the skies recomposing minute by minute. 

Even a bit of sunshine breaking through.

Indoors, my Monstera continues to surprise me. I've discovered that the toothed leaves emerge in a very special way: tightly furled, like cigars, not like the plain ones.  It's so much fun to watch them. It takes about five days for one of these to emerge fully. 

When I'm not watching my Monstera, I'm doing wardrobe building. Here's the finished pullover, assembled from narrow strips from the narrow loom. The asymmetry is perhaps not pronounced enough, leading one to think the arrangement is accidentally lopsided. I think the next time I will be more aggressively asymmetrical, so there will be no doubt about my intentions.

I have enjoyed wearing it, however. It's as comfortable as an old sweatshirt.

In the Department of Books, I just finished reading Nell Painter's Old in Art School. Noted historian retires from Princeton in her sixties and goes to art school to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. What a story!