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...

I think I have mentioned that I am the person running the Norrskensfest event in November. I decided early on that I wanted to run it much like Mist Bardic is run--with the feast during the day. Then, after so enjoying all of the singing at the Umamedeltids event earlier this month, I decided why not go all out and run a Bardic competition as well, with the rounds interspersed between the feast courses? So we will be doing a Norrskensbard competition, with the winner serving the four shires of northern Nordmark as their bard. And a bard needs regalia.

So now I am planning on making a cloak for the Norrskensbard, embellished with Norrsken (northern lights). I asked on the Drachenwald A&S group if anyone knew of a period depiction of the northern lights, and got a couple of suggestions from the 1500's. One involves candles in the sky, the other is a bit more useful.

When I saw that second link I realized that the sharp angles it involves would lend itself really well to tablet weaving, and a cloak with a nice wide tablet woven border with northern lights on it would make spiffy regalia. Therefore I asked on the Historic Tablet weaving group if anyone has seen a pattern with northern lights on it, or if anyone would be willing to design me one. I got a few suggestions as to how I might do my own design, but so far no one has pointed out any patterns that are ready to go for such a project.

However, going to that group reminded me that, back in November, a lady from that group had sent me an article she had written about an unusual tablet weaving technique. The lady is normally a Swedish speaker, and had written two versions of the article, one in each language. After I read the English version I asked her if she would like me to do some editing of that version of the article for her, and she replied yes. However, life has been so busy ever since I hadn't gotten to it. So, yesterday, I opened the articles again, and did the edits, in the process learning the theory of how the technique works (it involves turning the tablets onto their points, so that there are two sheds, then weaving from left to right through the upper shed, then, before turning the cards, going back from right to left through the lower shed (and, in the process, also going through a single shed made up of several border cards in the traditional horizontal position, but skipping the shed in the first and last cards on the left to right pass, so that when you do the right to left pass you can go through that shed without the work coming undone). As she explains it, with this technique the colour in the top point of the card is the one that is visible, so one can weave any pattern by simply turning the correct colour point uppermost.

It occurred to me that this technique might lend itself well to experiments for a northern lights motif, so I checked my yarn stash to see if we have anything useful. I don't have any weaving weight black, but we have a cotton yarn in very dark blue, some slightly thinner yarn in a really bright turquoise sort of colour, and some variegated red/pink in the same weight as the turquoise. I have no idea where these latter two came from, since they are not colours I would normally use, but they contrast well with the blue and are not too far off from colours the northern lights actually takes, so I will run with them.

I went to thread the yarn onto the cards, and remembered a friend showing me the continuous warp technique many years ago, wherein one takes four spools of yarn, shoves the end of each spool through the holes in the full stack of cards, then ties the end to one end of an inkle loom before drawing the first card in the pile through enough length of the yarn to thread that length onto the loom, then repeating the procedure for each card in turn, until the loom is fully warped. No tangles, no fuss. Works great if one uses the same threading pattern on every card.

There was only one problem with this idea. We didn't have an inkle loom. heck, lord_kjar had never even seen one before. So we consulted Google Image, found one we liked the look of, adapted the design to work with the materials we had on hand, and a faster sort of construction, and set to work. Four hours after deciding that I needed it, it was ready to go. However, it now being well after midnight, I decided that it would be smarter to record the adventure for posterity, do yoga, and go to bed, and try warping the loom tomorrow, when I am more rested.

One of the things which has been lurking on the bottom of my to-do list for quite a while now is to go through the literature to find the mentions of talc and see how the natural rocks compare with my experiments. Given how many other work-related tasks I've had to do, it has been put off in favor of more urgent tasks. However, it is something that is important to do, and given the issues I've got just now getting Mathmatica to do calculations, I decided that today is the day. After many hours of work, I now have a table of 34 papers which either came up in a Scopus search for "talc" and "metapelite" or which I already had on my computer. Now that I've got that list I will need to go through it and see which ones are actually relevant and extract the data, but given that midnight is fast approaching, that part can wait for another day.

I am also making good progress on a job application that is due this week--it is pretty much ready to send--the only information that would be nice to include is if I had any idea of the cash value of the tuition waiver I had when at UAF. I filled out an on line form asking them, so with luck it will be easy for them to look up and they can send it to me.

Another task I accomplished in the "been needing to do this for a while" category is the vacuuming. While I left the floors clean before departing for my 3.5 weeks of back to back conferences and short-courses, they got fairly dusty while I was out of town. Yes, I've been home for a week now, and normally I clean the floors more than once a week (they need it in Milan--I think all the traffic outside my window kicks up lots of dust. But whilst in recovery mode from the time away I didn't get to it. But today I did a load of laundry, and I so wasn't willing to take the clothes out of the washer without cleaning the floor first, for fear of dropping something on the floor and needing to re-wash it to get the dust off. I am *much* happier now that the floors are clean again, and intend to keep them that way.

I wound up staying up way too late last night--I finally got the weaving pattern for the project I started at the textile forum, and compared it to the one I'd attempted to re-create. I almost had the pattern correct on my own--I only forgot one important point which made it impossible. The way my teacher does the patterns uses ovals set at an angle to indicate if the cards turn forward or backwards, and which of the to top threads is active depends upon which direction the cards turned. So when I did my pattern always showing the thread from the top front hole in the cards I was correct only for those cards that were turning towards me. Even so I still had the pattern about 85% correct, and it was an easy thing to fix my version once I saw the original and remembered that detail. I felt it was worth doing my version even though I have hers, because my version is annotated with letters telling which two holes are on top for each card after each turn. This will make it *much* easier to figure out where things should be if I make any more mistakes. However, having gone to the effort of analyzing the pattern closely enough to create this diagram, I may not make any more mistakes. Certainly I didn't when I went home last night and picked up the project to try "just one repeat", and couldn't bring myself to stop till I had done three of them. I might not have stopped even then, but it was 1:30 in the morning and I still needed to do my yoga before going to sleep, and I do want to be on day shift this week, since my boss indicated that he might be able to help me with the Mathmatica issues sometime this week.

Now it is not yet midnight, so I think I'll close this here and see if I can get yoga done and me into bed while it is still a reasonable hour...