Saturday was spent mainly blending the Falkland and oatmeal BFL roving, its getting much greyer now. I think I need scales to measure the contents correctly, I was going for 75% Falkland and 25% BFL but as I've gone along I think its now more like 50/50 now. All the yarn is still on one spindle as well, hoping that plying it 3 times will sort out any inconsistencies.
I spun up several batts and have loads more to be getting on with, I need to start spinning every day. The weekends spinning seems slightly thicker than previous but still thin enough for 3 ply. I'm wondering if its thicker because I've added more BFL to the mix, it certainly feels different when I'm drafting it. I'll have to force myself to try and get back to the original mix, think I'll order some more Falkland today.
The spindle is about two thirds full now and at a wild guess I'd say there was about 200 yards on it, maybe more or that might be wishful thinking. I am spinning a lot thinner these days though.
Sunday was spent playing with my inkle loom and doing a little more spinning. I should of finished off what was on the inkle loom but was itching to get started all on my own so I cut off what was done and warped it myself. The warping went fine, I used the already made heddles but next time I will make my own and make them a little longer. One small problem I had with the heddles was that I was threading the yarn through them instead of folding the heddle over, makes no difference really, just a little awkward.
I went through my yarn stash looking for none stretchy yarns and used some stuff that can best be described as string, nasty itchy stuff. Weaving with the string didn't go very well and I gave up after a couple of inches and cut the warp off. At least I got to practise warping the loom and learnt to fold the heddles over so not really a wasted effort.
I warped the inkle loom again but using an acrylic wool, yes its stretchy and probably not the best yarn to be learning with but I don't have a lot of cotton and none the same weight/size. Warping went much better this time, now I had figured to fold the heddle over instead of passing the yarn through them. I probably need to look into tying off more, changing colours and tying was easy enough but tying the whole bunch I'm not sure I'm doing it right but it does seem to work.
I'm not 100% happy with the colours I currently have on the inkle loom but will finish the whole band as I really need to practise my edges. Its not that the colours are bad just that I've used pink for the edges and weaving and yellow in the middle and the yellow is hard to see in anything but good clear light. I havn't done the yellow in a solid band, I did a single line of dashes and two lines of alternative dashes surrounded by pink. I should of used the yellow on the edges and for weaving and the pink in the middle.
Coming from frame loom weaving I'm having a hard time getting the edges on the inkle loom right, I think they need to be much tighter and pulling then in tight seems odd to me at the moment.
I've got several odd balls of cotton heading my way, I should of gone with crochet cotton but have no idea on how that stuff is measured. I'll have a better understanding when I get my book on inkle weaving this week.
Over all a pretty good weekend, oh I did some knitting as well. I got the variegated cable plait bookmark finished but haven't started another one yet, I'll do that today as well as some more weaving on the inkle loom.
Hope you all had a good weekend, have a great day folks and take care.
No comments:
Post a Comment