My yard is wild

 My yard is wild. No, really. Through combination of scattering native wildflower seeds in certain spots and neglect, my yard has gone wild. I’m embarrassed what the neighbors might think. The lawn is mostly weeds with a smattering of grass. I’m pretty sure the weeds are all natives, or at least naturalized like dandelions. Things like ground ivy, self heal and clover run rampant. It really does all look a mess, but this morning when I opened my front door I startled some goldfinches who were snacking on seeds from some of my flowers, and a yellow tiger swallowtail butterfly was supping on a coneflower while the little golden birds flitted here and there. Every time I walk out my door I am surrounded by the hum of bumble bees. Droves and droves of them. There are always hummingbird moths flitting among the bee balm along with the bees, and occasionally a real hummingbird will fly by. There are so many other interesting things to see that I often want to just wander amongst the flowers and loose myself, but I watch my toddler granddaughter during the day so losing myself is never an option.

What I made with the fabric woven from handspun singles

 Here is what I made with the wool fabric I wove from handspun singles (both warp and weft). It’s more of a poncho than a serape. It is closed on the sides at the bottom 5 inches. It was almost a ruana, but I eventually went with what you see instead. I cut up the smaller bit of cloth that I wove on the extra bit of warp I had and added it to the bottom of the garment to get a little more length.

The only raw edge on the whole thing is the bottom front edge, all other edges are selvedges on the weaving and not hemmed. Instead of hemming the bottom of the garment, I hopefully will be tablet-weaving a band with which to decorate it. I probably won’t get to that until the summer.

It’s kind-of all higgledy piggledy and thrown together. I don’t really have the time or the energy for really precise things right now. Hopefully in the not too-distant future I will. It really was woven as an experiment and I made what I could that seemed easy enough with the fabric. 

Fabric woven with handspun singles after fulling

 In the last post I showed fabric woven with handspun singles (warp and weft) as it looked straight off the loom. Here it is after fulling. Take up and shrinkage was quite startling in the width. Un-fulled the fabric measured 120” x 25.5”. Fulled it measured 100” x 16”.

The smaller piece, which was woven in plain weave and with two-ply weft, had much less take up and shrinkage. Pre-fulling it measured 27” x 25.5”. Fulled it measured 21.5” x 21.75”. 

I don’t know if the dramatic difference in the longer piece is due to the twill pattern or the singles in both warp and weft, or a combination of the two, but it is dramatic, especially in the width.

I have so many questions running around my mind about long-ago weaving, the processing and the results. I read that in medieval times, singles were preferred for weaving. I wonder why. I thought weaving this cloth with singles would result in a light fabric, but I ended up with a thick, cushy fabric. In fact, the smaller piece woven with two-ply weft is much thinner and less cushy. I have more experimenting to do.

Cloth woven with handspun singles is off the loom

 The cloth I wove with handspun singles as the warp and the weft is off the loom! These picture show it fresh off the loom before any washing or fulling. I used gelatin sizing on the singles. I ran out of sized singles at one point (about halfway through the weaving) and scoured my handspun stash for any singles I had. I finished the weaving with un-sized singles. You can see where that happened in the weaving as there is a sudden draw-in of the fabric. Next in the process will be fulling, which will also wash the yarn. I expect some of the whites to brighten up a bit. It measures about 120 x 24 inches pre-fulling.

The smaller plain weave piece is what I wove after finishing the length that I wanted in the twill pattern. I still had a bit of weft so I wove the plain weave with some two-ply yarns I grabbed from my handspun stash. This piece measures about 27x 24 inches pre-fulling.

Weaving with Handspun Singles

I have been wanting to weave with handspun singles yarn, so I spun up a bunch of woolen-spun singles wool yarn for both the warp and the weft. I usually warp my loom from front to back, but since I was using singles I warped from back to front -something new for me. I also sized all my yarn with gelatin.

The wool is from a few different breeds, all natural colors. I also have been wanting to weave this large advancing twill diamond pattern for a long time. 

I’m about 1/3 of the way through my warp and I am on the last of my weft yarn. I will either have to spin up some more or switch to other handspun yarn I have. I’d really like to keep it as singles, though, and all my other yarn is two-ply.

I will add more to this post later.

 

A Handwoven Jacket for my Granddaughter

I am very happy with the way this little jacket turned out. I made it for my granddaughter with a small bit of material I wove with a bit of extra warp still on the loom after having finished weaving throw blanket. I had woven the blanket in double weave so that off the loom it would open out to double the width and continued in double weave for this little bit of fabric. After fulling I had roughly a 12” x 54” piece of fabric.

I had to do some creative piecing to get the fabric to fit into the pattern, but it all worked out really well. I had JUST enough to create the front of the jacket. I am really proud of how it turned out and it’s such a cute little fall jacket on my little granddaughter.

The fiber was all hand dyed by other artisans and then handspun and handwoven by me. The content of the yarns is wool, silk, yak, linen, and I used a bit of cotton weft in the fabric for the jacket, but not in the original blanket.

Finished handwoven Icelandic cloth

Here is the finished cloth I wove with the Icelandic tog and thel yarns I spun. The first picture in each set is fresh off the loom, pre fulling. The second picture in each set is the fulled and finished cloth. 

The fact that I was able to weave three yards instead of just two, coupled with the fact that it didn’t shrink up as much as I had anticipated in the fulling process means that I have more cloth than I thought. Pre-fulling it measured 3 yards long, 28 inches wide. After fulling it measures 2.8 yards long, 21 inches wide. 

Icelandic Warp

This is 4 yards, 300 ends of Icelandic tog warp ready to go on the loom. Actually, not all of it is Icelandic, I had to supplement with about 50 yards of mixed Cotswold and Gotland that I had on hand because I didn’t have quite enough tog. Altogether it’s 1200 yards of warp.

The weft is Icelandic thel, pictured below, ready for weaving.

Icelandic Wool

This is the yarn I’ve managed to make from two Icelandic sheep’s fleeces. One of the fleeces, a beautiful multicolored one, was smallish. The other, a white one, was probably average size for Icelandic. 

I separated the tog (the longer, stronger outer coat) from the thel (the shorter, finer inner coat). I got about 1,100 yards of tog and about 1,800 yards of thel, both spun into a fine, two-ply yarn. My intentions from the beginning have been to weave with the yarn. I also have 300-500 yards of thicker, combined tog + thel yarn that I spun from fiber left behind in the combs after combing the thel, plus other combined remnants. I won’t use the combined yarn in the cloth I’ll be weaving with the separated yarn.

What I’ve learned so far is in order to  make cloth with Icelandic wool, you need many fleeces for just one project, say enough cloth for a dress. My two fleeces will not make enough cloth for me, but maybe there will be enough for a baby outfit for my little granddaughter. I wove a small test swatch and discovered that fulling drastically reduces the size, more than other wools I’ve woven with. The width reduced by 42%  and the length by 27%. I have estimated that after fulling the cloth woven at 30 inches by 72 inches I will have a piece of fine wool cloth approximately 17 inches wide and 52 inches long. 

I read somewhere that traditionally, the household had to present new clothing to everyone in the house (including workers and slaves) by Solstice or Yule or thereabouts, or else you’d get coal in your stocking (lol, not really, but it the equivalent to that) and you would probably be looked upon as lazy. Well, if you were producing that much cloth and clothing every year, you certainly weren’t lazy. That on top of all the cloth produced to sell and trade - after all, vadmal cloth was the backbone of the Icelandic economy.

So what I’ve learned so far is it had to take a lot of sheep and a lot of work to keep everyone clothed and to produce enough cloth to keep the economy thriving. Everyone must have been spinning in every spare moment.

Weaving a Christmas present

My daughter will be having her first child in early February. For Christmas I am weaving a baby wrap for her. It's a really long wrap that can be tied on one's person in such a way as to hold a baby or toddler against you, keeping your hands free to do other things.

The weft is all handspun and hand-dyed by me. No wool. It's all plant-derived fiber and silk. There is just over 5,000 yards just for the weft, so I went with commercial cotton for the warp, which is 8 yards long and 648 ends.

The spinning was a lot of work and the dyeing was a little different from my usual. I dye mostly with natural dyes and acid dyes, but for most of the fiber, I needed fiber reactive dyes. I was nervous about using them for the first time on such a big project. I only screwed up a little in that the colors on all of the plant-derived fibers came out pastel when I wanted them to be stronger. The silks came out much stronger. And then I have some carbonized bamboo that is undyed because it's a dark gray. Doesn't really fit with the color scheme, but I'll make it work somehow.

I chose the fibers to be wicking and breathable and washable. I hate giving new mothers things that have to be hand washed.

Anyhoo, I got the warp on the loom - am I the only one who gets blisters when warping? And I've started the weave. I'm about 30 inches in on a 202-inch weave. Pics below.

A Jacket made with Hand-dyed, Handspun and Handwoven Cloth

Okay, I haven't posted anything in a while, and I'm not sure what kinds of changes Blogger may have made lately, but I'm having trouble with this post. It has a lot of pictures. I have tried to write commentary to go with the pics, but my whole draft keeps disappearing, even if I save as I go. So I will just say a few words here and add the pictures, hopefully you can get the gist of what I did through the pictures.

I made a jacket using naturally-dyed, handspun, handwoven wool. This was my process: