Project Dates:1/1/2025 – 5/20/2025
There are several ideas that have been surfacing, desires of various artistic techniques I’ve wanted to try, all vying for top spot in the attention contest. They have interrupted my project flow, guided my direction from behind the scenes. First there is the magic dye pot. That idea has intrigued me for a while. Layer a bunch of fiber and natural dyestuff and out comes a variegated dye product. Mystery and serendipity all-in-one! I started to choose fiber from my stash to do this. Checked out what natural dye stuff I had and ordered walnut dye stuff on January 1st to fill a necessary color-gap in the deep brown spectrum. I have onion peel for a beautiful golden hue. From one of my birthdays in St. Louis and an excursion to southern Missouri in the early teens of this century, I visited one of my weaving heroes, Carol Leigh, and picked up a natural dye starter kit. I intend to use some of that in the dye pot to fill in the burgundy and purple hue spectrum.
For the fiber, I chose my beast fiber. That is not the name I gave to it, but my very first weaving instructor. I signed up for a spinning class with one of the other instructors and was looking for an inexpensive fiber to play with. She had this bag of unknown wool fiber and thought it humorous to call it beast fiber. It’s been sitting in my stash ever since that late nineties period.
Then I wanted to augment with something more consistent and softer and in February found some mohair fiber online. Bought that, and when it arrived, opened the small box. A cloud of gray softness greeted me and I put it into a larger plastic bag to give it more temporary space. It sat for about a week on the floor when my cat started to worry it. Upon investigation there was a small white worm that had got its attention. Looking at the bag further, it was loaded with white worms! Yuck!
I quickly proceeded to scour it to kill the vermin. Boy, was I upset about that. Got a full refund. But I didn’t want all that beautiful mohair to go to waste. It wasn’t the mohair’s fault … much! I spent the next two days scouring the whole five pounds of it. The first batch out of the scour, I spread on a screen to dry. I picked out the dead worms from that bag. I left it over a week to dry, and to settle my disgust and disappointment. The rest of the fiber sat in about 5 more mesh bags, hanging to dry.
I’ve been working my way slowly through that first bag to card and spin with the occasional picking out of unwanted … debris. I’m more than halfway done, but interest comes and goes. I will say, the carded mohair fiber is exquisite. Took me some time to get over the vermin which still occasionally appear, despite the picking that I did as this first bag was drying on the open rack.
The other bags have since dried, and will require dry-picking of the vermin. I can so wait for that, imagining a long and laborious process.
That mohair experience brought some degree of cloudiness to the magic dye pot enthusiasm. Not sure what I will end up with there yet, which fiber to use, whether to spin single or combine it with the planned beast in the magic dye pot.
In the meantime, my birthday arrived. I’ve been saving for the last year to satisfy my shaft envy with a new multi-shaft table loom. Having reached my budget target, I pre-ordered. It was supposed to take nearly two months before arrival. A pleasant surprise when it arrived three weeks later at the beginning of April.
While waiting for the new loom, I searched for a multi-shaft project that would take advantage of the soon-to-be sated shaft envy. I searched for a design that was a three-dimensional illusion. The irony is that almost all the projects I found were for 4-shafts!
Some years ago, I ran across a coverlet weaving that started the creative envy for this type of weave design. The picture showed a really cool curving four-leaf design. There was no information regarding the number of shafts required, and at that time, I couldn’t find much information in the books I had or online.
My plan is to duplicate the design, thinking it would take up more than 4 shafts. I’ll try recreating it by experiment with my iWeave application.
Lastly, in the realm of creative impetus, there is still the desire to work with the combination of linen and wool, better known as linsey-woolsey. This started a few years ago when I detoured into working with flax and linen. I made a few samples with various linen thread and wool to test the results of that fabric. The plan was to use materials that would create a linsey-woolsey fabric.
So, these four ideas, magic dye pot, mohair fiber, three-dimensional weave, and linsey-woolsey are circling my mind, seeking a center drain from which to emerge.
Thread Idea 1: I could dye purchased linen in gradient warp to create three-dimensional illusion, and weave with mohair grey weft which could be a single ply.
Thread Idea 2: Same as Idea 1, except the weft is two-ply (magic dye pot beast & mohair).
Need to pause and investigate mohair in spinning. Did I neglect to mention that would also be a new experience, spinning with mohair? Is it better carded with something else? Combine a singles ply with a second ply of wool? More textile research and immersion, oh well!
After researching, it seems that one or two-ply mohair alone might be what I want. Mixing with wool doesn’t sound appealing, and I would need to do that after carding the mohair locks. One more step that just doesn’t appeal nor do any of the reasons to combine wool and mohair appeal (Blend when looking for heavier outcome with more body as opposed to lighter, fluffier, and more of a halo effect for thread that is mostly or all Mohair). I want the halo affect and to keep the softness.
There are spinning differences also. Suggestion included the following. Need to spin woolen using a pinch and jump technique avoiding compressing and sliding along the spun fiber between fingers. Light and infrequent touch. Set tension to light and use a larger whirl to reduce the amount of spin. This is opposite how I normally spin, so may take a moment or two.
Leaning towards thread idea 1, but that doesn’t satisfy my magic dye pot desire.
I could separate the two and do the beast fiber with magic dye pot, especially since I don’t know how this will turn out.
So, after sleeping on it, I am no longer sure. I wonder if I am combining one too many desires that are actually several separate projects: new multi-shaft loom, magic dye pot, linsey-woolsey, and mohair spinning. In the excitement of creative ideas vying for attention, this (over-complicating an idea) happens to me frequently.
I’m thinking the mohair might hide the weaving patterns I’ve been looking at. Although, the mohair, the little bit I’ve carded feels luxurious. Used in the weft, possibly as a single, it could be soft and lovely. Could it benefit from some color in the wool from the magic dye pot?
Thread Idea 3: Spin mohair singles as weft and weave with magic dye pot wool. Oh, but that would mean spinning the warp as well. Hmmmmm. That’s one more mental obstacle I’ve yet to hurdle in my fiber journey. Well, I thought I was onto something but I don’t really want to spin the warp as part of this project. That is an obstacle for another day.
Thread Idea 4: Linsey-woolsey in a multi-shaft loom project sounds doable. The warp would be the linen, purchased, maybe dyed in gradients, like purple! The weft in wool, but which wool? Probably a black or gray already dyed. Could test mohair single (Thread Idea 6), to get that out of my system.
Thread Idea 5: Magic dye pot might be best on its own, doing it with the beast fiber? This has less energy behind it. In fact, for some reason, the dye pot idea is waning and receding.
Thread idea 6: Leave the mohair spinning project on its own for now. We could try spinning a single, and test it as a weft (Thread Idea 4).
Reminder to self, that the mohair came about when I selected the beast fiber, and then wanted something to make it more consistent and softer. Not sure, but I think the beast fiber is an amalgam of various wools, certainly seems like a mutt mix of wool fibers.
Thread Idea 7: Bought both plum and black flax. This will be the warp. I like the idea of the spun mohair to be the weft. Black and silver sound delicious. Let’s the pattern be the focus. Now on to the pattern.
I’ve got this thing going where I want to put as much originality into a project as possible. I’ve already proven to myself ad nauseum I can follow directions and copy another artist’s instructions and project in many of the textile mediums. I yearn for original work. I sought to expand this piece into 16 shafts, but that is not straightforward. After all that mental meandering and dithering, anxious to try out my new loom, the challenges and length of time to come up to speed to alter the weaving pattern to 16-shafts, led me to use the existing 8-shaft design. I will have a whole separate discussion about my little side-track of learning network or profile weave design.
I used newly purchased black linen, and chose similar size threads from my stash in a range of colors in the blue and green hues with an orange and purple (not shown here, because that was a later inspiration). Without those latter two, the project was leaning a little towards boring for these eclectic tastes. The weft fibers ranged widely including wool, mohair, Tencel, and synthetic. My linsey-woolsey desire was partly assuaged.
The loom arrived, early, unexpectedly, but a very pleasant surprise. Putting the loom together was mostly fun. I love those kinds of kits. Starting as a young child with model cars and planes, to miniature furniture as a young adult, to any other kind of put-it-together kit you can image. Love that whole concept.
Ashford recommends warping from back-to-front which is new to me. I’ve only ever warped front-to-back on my 4-shaft LeClerc. It required a tweak to the way I used the warping mill to measure out the length of warps. Eight hundred rolls of the mill back and forth later, and I had a warping chain ready for its next step.
The warping steps began on April 20, and took a couple of days. I tend to take lots of breaks and do a variety of things. It is seldom that I have the patience to sit down on one endeavor until the end. I am too anxious for that.
Warping began on May 3rd, and by May 8th the loom was threaded, the reed sleyed, and the warp lashed onto the front bar.
Another first on this project was using my WeaveIt program to keep track of both the heddle threading and the weft treadling. Each motif took 192 ends in the warp, and 192 treadling’s of weft to create each motif. The program was an incredible time saver. The project was a table runner that was two motifs wide which came to about 18” and seven motifs long with a three-inch fringe on each end.
As mentioned, the weft threads came out of my stash. Some were recent purchases in the last couple of years, and others have been in my stash since the days of Franklin Mill and my tailor shop in the mid-eighties! Franklin Mill was a textile mill outlet that sold fabrics and textile supplies. It was directly across the street from my drycleaning/tailoring shop. The mill was this fabulous old stone building with wooden floors. I digress.
Using so many different weft thread types, I didn’t take into consideration, at least not enough, of the elasticity differences, not to mention a very slight wraps per inch difference. So, some of the wide stripes were a tad wider than others. Lessons learned for the future!
Ever since my 4-shaft loom came into my life as a wonderful gift from a friend in the mid-nineties, I have had shaft envy. Like many other weavers before me, I imagined the gargantuan leap of complexity and quantity of styles available to me, if I only, oh, had a loom with more shafts! I checked out many blog posts and comments that attempted to quell or at least keep that envy in perspective. Didn’t listen to a single one. I am extremely happy with my project, the opportunities that more shafts provide, and I love the loom. The rhythm difference between using my hands to raise the shafts and my feet is just different. I don’t mind either way.
All-in-all, throughout this meander, it was a very satisfying first shaft-envy-fulfilled project! And Samson approves the geometric gem-like motif!
Oh, yes. The magic dye pot, the mohair spinning, are now on the back-burner awaiting their chance to make it to the turn-of-the-wheel creative experiment.
Enjoy!
Alex
