kareina

After work today (which, since I work half-time means starting at lunch) my apprentice and I went yarn shopping, looking for something in wool to use for the northern lights band for the Norrskensbard cloak I want to make (since the cloak will be wool, we wanted wool tablet weaving, too). There are no local stores selling weaving yarn, so our only choice was the shop that sells knitting yarn. It took a long time to find anything interesting (her poor husband, who drove, got bored and sat down at the table to wait for us)--the best "northern lights" colours were available in cotton, bamboo, acrylic, or blend of any of the above plus some variant of poly fiber, none of which we were interested in. The wools, for the most part, had colours that didn't quite work. Then, just as we were about to give up we noticed the little basket right by the register containing some hand-painted (variegated) alpaca/silk/cashmere blend from Uraguay that happened to be in shades of green and pinkish purple. Often containing shades that are darker than typical aurora, but it spoke to us (and felt *really* nice in the hands). There were two skeins left, each of which contained ~400 meters, which sounded like enough for edging along the front of a cloak if one used 40 tablets (how many she happened to have available not currently on another project).

With that in hand we then returned to the main wool section, and finally decided on a very dark blue "baby wool" which is a bit thicker than the green/purple. That one contained only 175 meters per ball, and they had 5 balls left in the blue, which would only be slightly longer than the green/purple. Not being absolutely certain how much was needed for the warp, we decided to get a couple balls of the matching black baby wool for the weft--it would rarely show, but the hint of black might help darken up the sky, a little.

Then we came home and warped up the loom together, using the continuous warp method. As expected, we ran out of the first two balls of blue before running out of cards, so we started the next two and kept going. We ran out of cards around the same time we were wondering if the pegs of the loom could take any more yarn, so it is good we had only the 40 cards available.

As it turns out, our paranoid guesses as to how much yarn would be needed were generous, and there is still plenty of both the blue and the green/purple yarns available--we can decide later if we need/want to weave more, or use it for something else.

After dropping her off and then eating dinner I couldn't resist playing a bit with the project. Many years ago I photocopied the section of Peter Collingwood's tablet weaving book (which I had checked out of the UTAS library) on double-faced weaving, and just before I decided to weave I remembered its existence. That book shows several options for weaving diagonal lines with that technique, some thicker, some thinner, some with smooth edges, others with jagged ones. Therefore I decided to experiment--first with what he describes as the narrowest and smoothest option--lines only a single tablet wide. It turns out that the difference in width between the two yarns makes this option pretty much invisible, and my attempt at it looked almost the same as the plain blue-top/green/purple bottom.

So then I tried his suggested two cards wide option, and that was just visible, but looking kind of thin. So I skipped his three cards wide suggestion, and went for four cards wide (which the chapter didn't even address). However, at that point I was tired of messing around with a single diagonal, and decided to see if I could instead take several points and grow them in two diagonal directions each to meet in the middle. This sort of worked, but I lost track for a bit of which cards should slide into and out of the pack when, and got a result that is a bit more random than the W like pattern that I had originally aimed at:



I would love to do more, but the clock says I should have done yoga an hour ago and been on my way to bed by now, so it will have to wait...

Had another lovely choir practice this evening. My new student ID card and PIN code for it works--no more waiting around in the cold calling other choir members to be let into the building, we can let ourselves in now!

The best part was the walk home--the Northern Lights were out!!! I haven't had a good view of them in years. And it is a warm evening (hovering right at freezing), so when we got home we grabbed archinonlive's camera and tripod and went back out, to the lake edge, where the light pollution isn't quite so bad. While the camera is only the ordinary sort of digital camera, not a fancy one, he still managed to get a couple of photos to come out. ( photos behind cut )