Finishing Some, Shelving Others

Between noise and chemicals from the construction going on in my house (across from my bedroom door no less), I've gone a little crazy this week. It's been hard to settle to anything and concentrate on it, even out of the house though that is worlds easier than in the house. I'd been trying to make progress on the Birka piece anyway. But I finally accepted yesterday that that was doomed. I went to a fighter practice to weave. I must have worked at least two hours, probably closer to three. I wove about five inches in total--that was net gain. I wove far more than that, but I was making mistakes so frequently that I did nearly half my weaving in unweaving mistakes. This isn't a pattern I understand fundamentally enough to reset the cards and go on, even if I were inclined to accept the mistakes.

I took it off the loom carefully and clipped it with a skirt hanger to either side of the pack of cards with enough tension to keep them falling all over the place. That way I can put it back on the loom and have another go at it once the construction is done. I'd woven up nearly half of it, about 4 feet or so.

I had far more success this week with wire work. The picture is of a bracelet I finished for a friend using the behind-two-rows technique. I'm getting better at the starting and ending part of the projects, the hardest part for me. I took in my stuff to a couple local beading and jewelry making stores, looking for clasps. The first place was less helpful but did have the clasp you see here. I was hoping to find something to fit over the often-less-pretty ends of the chain work, but alas, anything of that sort was far too tiny. Except two, one of which I also bought, but both came only in silver so I'll try it out on another project. For the copper I just had to make it as pretty as possible myself.

I think I may try either unworking the beginning which is behind-single-row and tends to stretch out more, or adding a few rows of single row at the end on future projects so that, either way, the piece's ends would be more symmetrical.

That aside, I'm very pleased with this latest piece. I was impressed at the second place that she recognized it as Viking wire knitting at once. She showed it around the other staff too. Fun stuff. They gave me some good ideas of other ways to end pieces and showed me some simple wire linking pieces that should be more sturdy than jump rings.

Public Displays of Weaving

(Largely a cross-post with the post of the same name on Soaked Kitten)

Construction began this morning on the front bathroom in the house we're staying in. Nevertheless, I figured I would try to be productive. But as the banging continued followed by odd chemical smells, I was driven to distraction. I grabbed my loom, my laptop and my husband and fled. My husband went off on errands whereas I got myself ensconced in Great Bear Coffee. I realized too late that by grabbing the lovely window alcove table which has the best natural light, I cut myself off from all possible power outlets. So, more weaving time than laptop time.

It's quite amusing weaving in public. It attracts attention even when I do it at an SCA event. Most people there know what I'm doing, but the non-weavers usually haven't seen tablet weaving in action and the weavers drift over out of professional interest.

But here in the middle of downtown Los Gatos, people are mystified. And of course, I have all the people walking by on the street as well as those in the coffee shop. Some of those in the coffee shop actually come over and ask about it. With the most thoroughly mundane in outlook I find myself groping to put it in terms they understand. With the more open minded or quick witted I can give my usual spiel and answer questions pretty easily.

The people walking by outside are funniest though. There is a certain social dynamic to looking in shop windows that seems to spill over onto this. As long as I keep weaving, I can see them stop and watch me from just outside. But if I look up and smile, they may or may not smile back but they universally take it as their signal to move on. The window display just looked at them! Time to go! Hee hee.

I'm still having to backtrack with some regularity on the Birka. Anytime my concentration slips, I'm liable to forget to mark my place and then I'm doomed. If I'm unpicking I inevitably have to unpick about four rows before I'm sure where my problem was and where in the pattern I've ended up. But some of my early mistakes were more involved than that. Now I know what's gone wrong and how to fix it when I make inevitable errors.

I'm now using a paperclip to mark my place in the pattern, and moving it after every single row rather than each pair of rows--it was too easy to get momentarily distracted and then not know if I'd done the first row of the pair or now. I'm working it into my routine--check pattern, turn all cards, clear the shed, put the weft through, move the paperclip, repeat.

I just realized that given the blog I'm on now, those last couple paragraphs probably have less context than they might. I'll have to repost them on Playing with String later.

Birka Back on Track

At last I tackled my threaded in Birka project again and this time I got it back on track. Once I backtracked enough to know where I'd gone wrong and why, and to establish where in the pattern I was, I marked my place, then hastily returned to the computer and made a turning chart specifically for the "reversed" turning pattern.

It was on coincidence that I'd been derailed about an inch after I'd changed directions. The first time through the reversed sequence I was excruciatingly careful to turn everything the right way, but on the second time through I began to relax and weave "normally" again, convinced I'd gotten the direction change to work. Unfortunately I was simply using my original turning cheat sheet turned upside down as my reminder. Well, clearly I was a bit inconsistant in remembering to reverse everything I came to. Some things were reversed, and other things I'd done just as they read on the page. Disaster!

I've woven up another couple inches with my new "reversed" turning chart. I did it in different colors even so I wouldn't mix them up. It seems to be working. No doubt I'll find my rhythm with this one just as I did with the Rams Horn and variants and the Anglo-Saxon diamonds before it. Till then, I'm sticking to my turning chart like felted wool.

Spinning Yarn and Tangling Cards

My Birka tablet weaving has been a bit intimidating so today I chose spinning as my activity while I caught up on my shows--now that I've been doing all this tablet-weaving, it feels wasteful to sit and watch something without my hands making something.

I was pleased to find that my spinning skill hadn't declined any in the months since I last tried my hand at. That isn't to say that I'm great at it, but it's reasonably thin and reasonably even and I'm getting better at prepping and feeding in the wool while the spindle is spinning, rather than giving it some spin and then stopping it and then letting the spin travel up some prepared length of wool and so on. I was even using continuous roving rather than breaking off managable pieces and tearing them lengthwise to make them thinner like I did in the beginning. This did become humorous however when I got up to answer the phone, clutching spindle and thread and unwittingly trailing roving across the whole living room and office. Regathering it seemed disturbingly like recoiling intestines.

This evening I finally tackled the weaving again. I got it going and was finding something of a rhythm with it. I have it in 4 packs now, one of which is two combined which only need be separated for two of the eight picks. Even with only four packs instead of five and overlapping them a bit, they take up a lot more working area than usual. And so the spin forming is more quickly a problem than usual. I decided to try changing direction after less than two feet of weaving. The direction change looks quite decent though I'd be tempted to try a couple other potential reversal points to see how they differ. But it looks of a piece, so I wasn't too worried about needing to change directions more often than usual.

Unfortunately, I apparently didn't have the reversed turning sequence drummed into my head well enough. I've messed up the turning sequence somehow and am now in that painful and slow process of working my way backward to a familiar point. I'm too tired to have the patience to get any further with it right now. Hopefully it will look less scary, not more so, in the morning.

Birka Madness

What have I gotten myself into? After doing several variations on the Ram's Horn pattern - of which I am very fond - and then a straightforward inkle project, I thought I would shake things up again. So I decided to try one of the Birka patterns. I got this from Guntram's page as a GTT file, based on Mistress Thora Sharptooth's extrapolations (if memory serves) from the brocaded band(s) from Birka. See earlier posts about how much slower and more painstaking brocaded tablet weaving would be compared to the regular sort.

Well, I'm not convinced brocading would take significantly longer than what I'll be doing now! I failed to pay enough attention to the turning sequence before stringing the darn thing up. If I had, I might have balked. As it is, I'm determined to give it a try. But there are essentially five, count them, five packs. That's five sets of four cards each (scattered through the set) that turn in different directions. There's four sets of patterns. All forward. 2nd and 5th pack backwards, 1st, 3rd, and 4th forward. 4th and 5th backwards, the rest forward. 3rd and 5th backwards, the rest forwards. You do each pattern twice for a total of eight picks before you get back to the beginning.

I'm still in the trial and error phase of getting this to work. I made a chart to figure out which cards were turning together and when arriving at the color coated chart you see in the picture. the yellow sections in the chart are backwards turns. The colors along the chart correspond to packs. I cut out samples of the colors and taped them to their corresponding cards making the packs you can see in the picture. However the packs stretch across so much of the working space of the loom I don't think I can leave them so spread out. With my tension bar still suck in one spot, moving the project forward is an ordeal to be postponed as much as possible.

I am trying to figure out how much I can combine packs without it becoming very painstaking to find the right cards to turn which way.

There has to be a better way.

It's just a matter of finding it.