Warp #6 Review [MFM]

Well, here I am on my old Dell desktop 'cause Lulu, my laptop, has gone to the dark side. Literally - the whole right half of her LCD screen is so dark I can barely see what's on it. Makes it awfully tricky to edit my pics, not to mention read what I'm typing. What is it with me and LCD screens lately? It's like I'm putting out some kind of anti-LCD vibe that eats whatever I come into contact with. Happily, I have found a replacement screen for much less than I feared it would cost and a local place that will install it, so all will be right before long.

In the meantime, I'm not going to fiddle with the colours of these warp #6 review pics at all, 'cause the really expensive, uber sharp, super saturated screen that we got for this computer thinking that it would help with colours and photo editing is actually so super saturated that it kinda wigs them out - really must play with its contrast and brightness settings and see what we can do about that.¹ Hopefully when I can see on Lulu again, I'll come back to this post and find that the colours are pretty accurate.

Here are the pics of the finished scarves from Warp #6. These include scarves 18, 19, 20 and 21:



And here are the specs on each:

Warp: My standard 8/8 cotton at 10 EPI. This warp was only 7" wide in the reed, so the scarves are narrower.

Scarf 18: 4/8 unmerc cotton, 61" x 5.5" plus 5" fringe. Just about 9.5 PPI when finished
Scarf 19: 4/8 unmerc cotton, 51" x 5.5" plus 5" fringe. Just over 9 PPI when finished
Scarf 20: 4/8 unmerc cotton, 56.5" x 5.5" plus 5" fringe. Just under 9 PPI when finished
Scarf 21: 4/8 unmerc cotton, 61" x 5.5" plus 5" fringe. Just under 10 PPI when finished

As you can see, I've been trying to fine tune the PPI on these scarves. My favourite weight on this warp is Scarf #20 which, you may remember, I intentionally beat more loosely than I had done the scarves before. Since then, I've woven a few even looser yet; will be curious to see if I like the hand even better or if they turn out too loose.

The first couple scarves on this warp were beat at the same 9 PPI (UT) that I'd been doing for a while but they're less firm once finished than the last warp or two because this time I put half a dryer sheet and a couple of towels in the dryer with them as they dried - the last couple of warps I left out the dryer sheet and used a huge, heavy terry robe instead of the towels. Not sure how much of a difference the robe vs. towels make, but the dryer sheet does seem to be a key factor. I've also used a full used sheet (one that had already gone through the dryer once) in the past and that also works.

Another change I made this time was to press straight down on all these scarves and to not press along the length of them with the iron down. I think that's the reason for the additional shrinkage compared to their on-loom under tension (UT) length: these scarves all came in at right around 15% shorter once totally finished than they were measured under tension on the loom.

So there you are! Warp #6 all done. :D And, even better, I'm all caught up as far as warp reviews go now (with the exception of poor Warp #3, which is still waiting for its fringes to be twisted.) There's one more scarf to go on Warp #7, so I suppose I'd better get down to the yarn room and figure out what's going on the loom next. Maybe those blue/green/browns I had planned to do before this one, or maybe something else entirely!

Not right now, though - right now I'm head downstairs to finish up the wool blanket that's on Mabes. Poor ol' girl was feeling rather neglected, but now she's all dressed up and has somewhere to go. :)


1. Although the super-saturation is awfully pretty for World of Warcraft and other computer games, I have to say! Hmm, priorities, priorities...

Weaving in the dark [Scarf 21]

Okay, so I know I wasn't going to weave any scarves this week but I just couldn't help myself! Actually, come to think of it, I was helping myself, 'cause it dawned on me around noon that it would take a lot less effort for me to weave a scarf today than to do my Warp 5 review. A warp review requires getting out the photo gear, waiting until the light is Just Right, taking and editing a bunch of photos and then thinking of something to say about each scarf. Weaving a scarf, on the other hand, was a no brainer. All I had to do was pick a weft colour, sit down and weave. Considering that I had a pile of other stuff today, the no brainer option won. :)

I wanted to use a neutral tone in this last scarf on the warp and, after considering all the colours you see above, finally settled on the natural, unbleached cotton. I often don't really care for a light coloured weft on a warp with dark colours and especially stripes since I find it's too contrasty and that the weft overpowers the warp. I decided to try it anyway - for the first bit I was afraid I was proving the rule once again, but after a bit I decided that this one was a happy exception. I'm particularly interested to see how it looks once the fabric is wet finished, as I think the colours will smooth out even more. We shall see!

One other interesting thing about weaving this scarf: like the title says, I wove it in the dark. Sort of, anyway. You may recall that I mentioned after weaving the first scarf on this warp that my eyes didn't want to focus on it. That's been true for all four of the scarves now: every time I look at the warp, my eyes want to focus on a point farther away, or perhaps closer to. I've never had that experience with another warp, so it must be some trick of the colour combination. Maybe the green tint to the brown and the reddish orange are working their mad complimentary colour magic, like Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Jedi mind games: "These are not the warp threads you're looking for." It hasn't been a big problem, really - it's actually been rather conducive to zenning out while weaving. I must say, however, that it's rather unsettling to not be able to focus on the warp when I'm really trying to.

Then tonight, when I came back downstairs with Lulu so I could listen to WeaveCast while weaving, I didn't turn the main room lights on again. The three smaller lights I have attached to or near the loom were on, but the main overhead lights were not. That made the warp much less jumpy and I found I could look at it almost normally.

Here's Scarfa #21, the first scarf woven under my new rules of engagement:

Warp: 8/8 unmercerized cotton at 10 EPI
Weft: 4/8 unmercerized cotton

Not quite 20" in


Weaving in the dark. Hard to tell, perhaps, but the room is much darker than usual.


Scarfadone!

I really like the way you can see the scarf at three distances in this one. The top layer is between the beater and breast beam, the middle is between the breast beam and the knee beam, and way down in the bottom right corner is the fabric wound around the cloth beam.

One last quick note: I spent a fair bit of time today poking around the new WeaveZine site. Syne has integrated WeaveZine, WeaveCast, and her WeaveGeek blog into one site and has added lots of cool new stuff like forums. You should go check it out! If anyone has wandered here to Scarfaday via my post to the WeaveZine forums, hello and welcome!

It's the end of the month as we know it... [Scarf 20]

Well, folks, there it is: the 20th and final scarf of Scarfaday Month One. It's hard to believe that a whole month and yet only a month has gone by already! Truth be told, I'm not sure if it seems longer or shorter than a month... funny how that goes, eh wot?

I hope to post a wrap up of the month tomorrow so I'll just blog today's scarfa as usual. I do want to mention a couple of things first, though:

1) I'll be going back through old posts tomorrow see if there are questions in the comments that I never got around to answering. If you've got questions about anything you've seen in the blog so far, add a comment to this post and I'll answer as best I can.

2) Scarfaday is not over! Tomorrow I'll wrap up Month One and on Monday I'll be posting my revised rules of engagement for March and the months following. There will be some changes but I definitely plan to continue for as long as I can, so please keep coming back!

3) Be sure to check back Monday when I'll also be posting about my first free giveaway. I always get a big kick out of the giveaways I see on other blogs so I'm going to have one too - yay! Hopefully it will be the first of many. :D


And now for ... dum dum dum dum duuuuuuuummmmmm ... Scarfaday #20! My last Scarfaday v1.0 day was really busy, and most of the highlights had nothing to do with scarves! It went sort of like this:

10:30 am: Meet with a customer so she could choose her fave of the baby blankets I wove a month ago and decide which binding she likes best. I love it when customers love my fabrics as much as I do! :D

11:00 am: Stopped at a local sewing store that's going out of business, where I might be able to pick up a lot of notions for a song. How many zippers can one person really use? I aim to find out!

12:00 pm: Lunch with da galz. This was great for all the usual reasons but even more GRATE because a friend's daughter is finishing up the first year of a graphic design program and is looking for a month long work placement - a volunteer work placement, I might add - and asked if I'd be interested in hiring her. Ooooh, boy, I cannot tell you how excitin' that is! It really seems like everything is falling into place for me this year. Woooot, and again I say Woooot.

4:00ish pm: After more errands (and more fabric stores) I finally got started on today's scarfa with the lovely burnt orange:


Was a bit anxious before I started weaving that it wouldn't look as nice in the warp as it did in my mind but after just a few shots I was really happy with the results. :) As much as I liked the red and the black, I think I like this one the best so far - at least on this warp. The burnt orange is about halfway between the old gold and the rust in the warp, and it contrasts well with both the black and the off-white. Turned out really well, ifIdosaysomyself.

The weaving didn't take long since I made a point of beating this one even more gently than I have recent scarves. I was really happy with the drape of Scarf #4.5, you may recall, and that one I'd also beat more lightly than the others on its warp. I'll be really curious to see if this one's too sleezey or if I like the added drape.


I decided to weave this one and the one before it shorter than the others I've done lately because 1) I think it's fair to say that guys tend to wear shorter scarves (true? not true? opinions?) and 2) I've done so many long ones lately it seemed time for a change. Still, I'm tempted to go right back to the loom and weave another in the same colour but longer. Might do that over the weekend.

At any rate, today's scarf is 66" under tension (UT) and yesterday's was 60" UT. I'm usually a bit dodgy about keeping track of how long I weave my scarves since I'm not weaving them for anyone in particular - I aim for something between 60" and 84" which, as you may imagine, is a target that's not very difficult to hit. For reasons that I hope will become clear soon, it's now important to me to know just how much they take up and then shrink. I figure if I post it right here then I can't possibly lose the little slip of paper I made the note on...



There's still enough on the warp for at least one more scarf and, since I made these two a bit shorter I can make the next one longer than usual. Variety is the spice of life and all that!

So! Thus ends Scarfaday Month One. See you tomorrow for a wrap up and then Monday for the start of Month Two!

Penultimate! [Scarf 19]

Another quickie post at the end of another quickie scarf but this time for a much better reason: I've got a date! Dinner anna movie with my Sweetie Pie. :D So, since I promised to be done with S/D by 8:00 pee em, I gotta be quick here!

I was going to use the burnt orange, as you may recall, but changed my mind at the last minute and went with somber, serious black. Maybe it was because I've had a kind of bummer day - nothing in particular happened really, it's just One Of Those Days.¹ Plus I spent part of the afternoon and evening struggling with business decisions for the shop and trying to convince myself and my partners that we need to spend some $$ on advertising, so was feeling pretty somber and serious for that reason, too.

Not that the scarf itself is a bummer, mind you - I quite like the black. It's a little more understated than the red but still just as striking.


Scarf #19 started....


...and ended...


...with my standard hemstitching. I've been hemstitching all of these and not twisting the fringes 'cause I think the twisted fringes would be Pretty Bulky in this heavy weight of cotton, plus the untwisted ends look really nice once they've loosened up a bit in the wet finishing. I make sure they're always secured before I wash them so that they don't unply - keeps the scarves from tangling around themselves in the washer, too. Takes a bit more effort up front but saves tons of times sorting out tangled fringes afterwards so it's well worth it.

Here's today's finished scarfa:



This one's #19 - can you believe it?! Only one more and I will have accomplished my original short-term goal of a scarf a day for the entire month. That feels Pretty Good, letmetellyou.

See you tomorrow for The Last Scarf woven by the original ground rules! Maybe I'll use that burnt orange yet...


1. Hence the cheer-me-up date - yay for sweetie pies!

Red Hot Pokers [Scarf 18]

Oh man, I've done it again! Got the scarfa done nice and early and moseyed upstairs for dindin and a bit of the ol' boob tube, and here it is 11:00 pee em and I haven't blogged it yet. And I had so much to say today, too! How 'bout this: I'll give you the cliff notes version now, a preview of coming attractions, sorta thing. Then tomorrow I'll fill in the details. Maybe here, maybe on HFD 'cause most if it's pretty OT.¹

Here's what I fit into my day today: Time Out registration for beginning sewing classes, another coffee bombing plus my first (but hopefully not last) virtual coffee bombing (tho' the bombee doesn't know it yet), knitting a couple of samples for an exchange with my spinning group, weaving my scarfa like mad in the afternoon 'cause Wednesday is TV bonanza night chez moi (Mmmm, Life on Mars! Mmmm, Life!), and then the bonanza itself.


As for the scarfa part, it went like this:

3:00 or so: Realized I'd better wind a warp PDQ and get 'er on the loom, so I wandered into the yarn room and perused the shelves for something Guyish. I wound up (ha!) with a black, a brown with a definite greenish tint, a rust, a gold and an ivory. Ron says yes, they're good guy colours. Huzzah!


4:58 pm: Got the loom dressed and ready to go:


I decided to go with the regular, balanced stripe this time and at first was kinda sorry. It looks SO stripey with SO much contrast!


Still, variety is the spice of life and all that, so I kept on keeping on to see what happened. I rummaged a bit further and came up with about half a dozen possible wefts, one of which was a burnt orange that I was sorely tempted by. In the end, though, I went with a brick red to tone down the brighter gold and rust in the warp a bit - still tryin' for something that Ron might conceivably wear. Not sure how well I succeeded in that respect, but I'm quite happy with the result anyway. :) And tomorrow I can try my burnt orange content in the knowledge that I stuck to the plan today.

Not that sticking to the plan is always desirable, no sirree. I'm not much of a planner really and like to make spur of the moment decisions about stuff. Still, every once in a while it's nice to stretch the ol' plan making muscles and then ever so satisfying when I stick to whatever plan I've come up with and it works out okay. :)

Anyhoo, this was the result, at a little while after 6:00:



I have to say, weaving this scarf was a bit surreal. For one thing, my eyes really didn't want to focus on the fabric while I was weaving. I kept zenning out and then realizing that, not only had my mind disengaged from the work at hand (literally), so had my eyes. I don't know if that was due to my frame of mind or some kind of colour interaction but it was Rather Funky. For another thing, I had the best weaving zen while weaving this one that I've had for a long time - had lots of ideas, inspiration for new projects and experiments... felt really great. My internal dialogue was going at such a constant rate that I didn't even notice for almost an hour that I wasn't listening to WeaveCast - today it would have been a distraction from mind games well played. All in all, a very good day! All days should start out with coffee bombing!

I'm not sure what to call this palette. Things like "forge", "lava", "flame", "volcano" and "Hephaestus" all occurred to me but the thing that kept bubbling up over and over was "red hot poker". Somehow that doesn't sound like a very catchy palette colour, though. ;) Will have to think on it further. Any suggestions?

See you tomorrow, possibly with ensuite burnt oranges!


1. OT = Off Topic, for those of you who don't speak internet. (Hi, Ma!)