It had to happen – the inaugural warp for my Toika loom. What a dream it was to wind on. The warping basically involved sitting at the from and winding onto the back warp beam through a raddle placed in the beater. I have never warped this way before but getting a new loom is sort of like learning to weave again….trying new ways, thinking new strategies. Syne also found this with her new loom.

I dived into a chenille painted warp with unmixed colours. Wildly interweaving vivid softness incorporating a very fine Irish linen weft. Although I really like the soft drape of all chenille I just ‘felt’ like a touch of the crisp within.

And herein lies my new year’s resolution – to feel more. The textiles we wear are really an extension of our skins. It’s how we learn much about texture and touch.

Some children’s books have textile touch swatches in them to make the book sensory beyond hearing and seeing. Handweavers can create fabrics that promulgate seeing, touch and smell (eg. the patchouli in paisley shawls from India).

Beyond technical knowledge of textile construction is the intuitive approach to textile design. An approach that doesn’t need proof of success before I start to sample or even attempt to set up the loom.

Happy New Year to all….what is your weave resolution!

Well the time has arrived and I’m assembling my new Toika loom.  It’s alot of pieces but I enjoy a good jigsaw. Although I haven’t been posting I’ve had alot of weaving and life going on in the background and the assembly of the loom was almost a meditative practice for me. I’ve nearly finished the actual assembly but now have to make ‘Cosmos’ feel at home…attending to the creation of aprons or texsolv to handle my inaugural warp.

The wood on the loom is a beautiful blond colour which is refreshing compared to the darker wood looms but I guess it will darken somewhat with time. Jukka from Toika also sent a photo of the felled trees waiting to become looms. I think it’s important for a weaver to appreciate where our tools come from in our environment. It further connects my textiles to our human and natural environment. 

What will I weave?? This is the next step. I think it will we a warp ikat/painted cloth.

In November I provided an online workshop for the Online Guild for Weavers, Spinners and Dyers on Easy Ikat and Warp Painting. The results from the participants were amazing. Although the workshop was for fibre reactive dyes, one weaver used her dye skills to paint natural dyes on the warp! My instructions could be followed exactly or used as a guide within a weaver/dyers own ideas and skills.  Leigh has a group of excellent posts detailing her progession in the workshop and her final results are beautiful. Thank you Leigh. I’m planning to have a similar workshop again online in the near future which will be more widely available… so stay tuned.

Photo: Courtesty Toika Finland

I know you won’t find my travel pictures boring because they are all about weave. Perhaps the little things I’ve noticed on my trip can be noticed here in Australia too, if I only look about for it. But when you go to a country where textiles count it just seems to mean so much.
Meet Tshering from Experience Bhutan the travel partner of Active Travel. This photo really captures a young commanding man with great integrity and leadership qualities, perhaps inspired by Bhutan’s quest for ‘gross national happiness’.

Here he is standing at the Trongsa Dzong wearing the white kabne. A white cloth wrapped in such a way that it stays on! Something that is a challenge with scarves. The cloth was very long which I think helped the situation.
  
Most men still wear he national dress – the Gho – and they really look fantastic as you can see. Tshering’s Ghos where mainly handwoven with a supplementary warp patterning or striping rather than the weave of the women’s kiras. Many have a striped weave which held little weave secrets up close.
Every day each of the Bhutanese guides/organisers wore different woven ghos. On this day, I originally thought that Tshering’s striped gho was a plain weave. Ho hum. But this wasn’t the case. Of course not. Similar to the tartans of Scotland it is woven in a very fine twill, making the drape and comfort of the garment far better than the drapeless nature of plainweave. The twill is the ‘birds eye’ and Tshering said the pattern had the same name there.

My husband also got into Bhutan’s national dress and you can see the Australian version here too. The short socks and Blundstones look a little wrong – but, who knows, it may take off.

A Tingma is a Bhutanese weft pattern design which uses discontinuous supplementary wefts in addition to a ground weft. This photo illustrates a lovely example this type of weave. Usually woven for the women’s dress (Kira), this is a smaller table runner size. A silk on silk textile, it looks alot like embroidery and the technique for creating it is rather like embroidering around the warp threads as the cloth is woven – row by row.You can also see the back of the cloth with the supplementary weft ends pushed to the back of the cloth and left in their expansive and disarrayed state. The back of the cloth tells me just as much about the weaving and its technique as the front. The back tells me that the supplementary wefts (ie the wefts that weave the fancy coloured patterning) were inserted in an open shed. Only the top threads of the open shed were manipulated to place the supplementary weft across. The front of the cloth tells me how those threads wove in and out to create the pattern.

I’m currently counting, making stories and analyzing these threads. The first most interesting discovery was the ‘locked down’ nature of the lines that sit horizontally on the fabric. Normally horizontal lines of pattern go over a number of ends and are caught by one or two ends at regulated patterned intervals

The ingenuity and tenacity of this textile lies in the use of soumak on a very fine scale to produce the horizontal veins. This locks down the weft and creates more options for design that we may avoid due to the possiblity of floats that may be too long.

This ship is bringing my loom home.
It is the MOL Cosmos and I’m naming the loom “Cosmos”.

I had a discussion recently with Amanda about how many weavers name their looms. I’d never thought to do this and was drawn to the idea. I’d always expected that the loom would be female rather than male – I don’t know why. But the name Cosmos, although genderless, seems a male name like Cosmo, which I like.

According to my dictionary Cosmos means “..refer(ing) to the universe as the cosmos, especially when considering it as having an order and pattern.” What a perfect name. Does anyone else name their looms? And does naming make a difference?

Can it be possible that a square rather than round spindle will spin? Well yes, and spin for a longer time.

I just bought this spindle from UK Spindlemaker Michael Williams. I have been wanting to buy a special spindle for a long time…but not having access to trying any I have to depend on reviews from those I respect as spinners and women of the yarn. I had heard rave reviews about Mike’s spindles from spinners such as Liz, Helen and Jane (an author of Creative Spinning) at the Online Guild of Weavers, Spinners & Dyers, so I took a chance at buying a square whorl as he had one in waiting. It was serendipity, so I got it.

It spins like a dream and is really enjoyable to use. I got a 17g one so I can spin quite fine. There are many stories or myths about the ‘magical’ feeling of spinning fibre into yarn and it really must be on a finely crafted and engineered spindle. If I was a scientific person I would say that the health benefits of spinning must be extraordinary.

Michael says of his square whorls,

“The four corners have weight which is further from the axis and will produce a longer duration of spin. A square spindle with sides of a given dimension can spin up to 33% longer than a circular whorl of the same diameter and weight. (I used applied mathematics to calculate the improvement).”

I was recently introducted to Jing. It has worked out really well in producing screen videos. Check it out. This one is about using the color tools and menu in Fiberworks.

I’m excited about receiving TWO blog awards this week!! Thanks to Shirley and Meg. Now I have the very difficult task of passing this on. So many fantastic blogs which I love to read. I’m still thinking on how to go about choosing.