Weaverly
Alice Schlein
recent posts
Category: Handweaving
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The blanket you saw here is being added to, gradually. It needed to be wider, so I’m adding two more strips, one on each side. Although the first four strips were all handspun warp and weft, for these additional strips I’m using Harrisville Shetland wool from my stash as warp, and handspun wool as weft.…
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Everything looks like rectangles today. The screen of my TempoTreadle, the the number stickers on my Louet Jane, the windows with their weather drama. The little fluffy ends of the heddles add a contrasting illusion of grass on the bottom of the picture, as if this were a prairie scene. The sleet is blowing horizontally…
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It’s not as cold as in other parts of the country, just enough to get my attention. I’m in between warps, but to keep my circulation going, I played around with some 8-shaft drafts on the computer this morning. This one I entitled freezing.wif. It actually looks like icicles to me. There are a lot…
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The first thing I did this morning, after thanking the weather spirits for preserving our electric power, was to take a few ice pictures. Full disclosure: I Photoshopped this first image severely. Couldn’t resist. Back indoors I went to work on the two small warps I wound yesterday for the rigid heddle loom. These will…
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The last few days have been devoted to sewing the final section of blanket to its companion strips. The blanket looks pretty good on the bed, but it’s not quite wide enough yet. I think two more strips, one along each side, will be just about right. The pillow on the right is doublewoven jacquard…
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I’ve been accumulating a collection of 3-yard strips woven on a rigid heddle loom. The yarns are all handspun wool and wool blends, plied, from a stash that goes back over 50 years. Spinners will recognize that wool yarns have widely differing takeup and shrinkage properties depending on breed of the sheep, amount of twist,…
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There are many versions of the children’s folk song “Here we go loopty loop”–you may have learned “looby loo” or other variations — but I especially like the last line of the refrain, which goes “all on a Saturday night.” On a recent Saturday Night I loopty looped this 8″ wide warp as a stashbusting…
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It’s been 20 years since the publication of The Woven Pixel: Designing for Jacquard And Dobby Looms Using Photoshop® (see sidebar). Bhakti Ziek and I, at opposite sides of the country, thought it was important to document our individual explorations in digital weaving and make our joint efforts available to the weaving community. We worked…
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On my walk yesterday morning I passed a construction site and saw this very amusing dumpster. I did not mess with the image at all, except to crop it a little. It kept me laughing for the rest of the day. Back in the studio I worked at my current RH project and was thinking…
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Yes, truly, that’s what I have entitled this draft. I doodle on the computer when the yarn refuses to behave. Or when the weaving pixies run amok, as they have this week. It’s an amalgamation on a simple point twill, no networking here, and I designed it with the help of TempoWeave on my Mac.…
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Sometimes it’s simple, like what to have for dinner. Other times, it’s more serious. But mostly, we just enjoy hanging out together. Occasionally I have conversations with my yarn. I find wool yarn is the most forgiving, Too tight? Too loose? Wool doesn’t care. Skipped a dent? No biggie. Here I am working on a…
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What do you do when your hands aren’t working the way they used to, and you have to give them a rest from throwing shuttles? Hereabouts the solution is to make a deep dive into the stash of handspun wool and warp up a rigid heddle loom. The longish skeins of habdspun are used for…
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The following image is a scan of a fabric I wove on a rigid heddle loom a few weeks ago. It’s a balanced plain weave of 12 epi and ppi, hand washed and hung to dry. The yarn is a handspun wool/linen blend from my stash (I spun and plied the yarn from a custom…
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I collected as many pincushions as I could find for an impromptu group portrait. The felt ones were purchased on Etsy, the handwoven ones are scraps of my own fabrics, and the one nestled permanently in its own ply-split basket (my one foray into ply-splitting) is my own creation. Why so many pincushions? Well, I…
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Further explorations of network drafting with initials greater tnan straight 4-end. In this first example, for 8 shafts, I have used a point twill as the initial: 1-2-3-4-3-2.The resulting threading is tromped as writ, and the tieup has no floats longer than 2. Maximum float length in the resulting draft is 5. The same process…
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