A couple weeks ago, I got a suspicious contact through my website, someone wanting to come interview me about weaving and take some videos in my studio to be used on a morning television show. In today’s world (and maybe because I watch too many crime shows), we have to be careful about things like this, right? But I checked it out anyway.
It turns out that Levan Reid is a real person, and he really does collect “happy news” stories for WBZ Boston (a CBS affiliate). My first impression of him was his radio announcer’s voice! He told me what he was looking for and about the process. It sounded like a unique opportunity for me, so we got the ball rolling.
The next week, he came to my house with a cameraman, Richie Lourenco, and we spent 45 minutes up in my studio talking about weaving, looking at my looms, and chatting. Levan was so professional and so friendly. He made the whole experience seem easy.
Since he had put the idea of “happy news” in my head, my thoughts went immediately to one of my current projects. The Weavers’ Guild of Boston’s challenge this year is to weave something for a child that is inspired by a book. The products (a pillow, blanket or bag, for example) will be given to children afterward. I had gone to The Silver Unicorn in Acton MA and found a cute book by Jory John called “The Sour Grape”. Besides having an appropriate life lesson moral, I loved the colors used by illustrator Pete Oswald!
I decided on some 8/2 Valley Cotton yarn and a warp long enough to make several projects. First off (after sampling, of course!) was a book bag for my 21-month old nephew Sebastian, which was sent along with a copy of the book. In addition to another book bag that will be submitted for the WGB challenge, there will be some dish towels in these very fun colors.
I think in this photo he is trying to make a face like the Sour Grape. Hehe! Photo by Kendra Leonardi
Back to the WBZ news story. The video was featured several times through the day on Friday 20 January 2023. They had decided to run it as a break in the snowstorm coverage that was otherwise dominating the day’s news. I was so pleased with how Levan and his team condensed the whole story to just 2 minutes. They captured the vibe of my studio, my “happy place”. To me, my engineering career seems like a different lifetime (ending 22 years ago!) but looking at this I recognize what an impact in had on current thinking.
What better way to enjoy heavier handwovens than as throw pillows?! These two were added to my spaces this winter. Here are their stories.
A fiber artist’s couch pillow collection
The Irish Wool Seat Cushion
A long time ago (probably 2018, before Covid anyway), my daughter took a trip to Ireland. Knowing I love fiber, she brought me some lovely Irish wool yarn as a gift. It was heavier and coarser than yarns I usually work with, so it entered my stash pile to wait for inspiration.
Fast forward to the fall of 2020 when my local weavers’ guild announced a challenge to make something with something from our stash. To facilitate the process, the first meeting of the year was devoted to brainstorming ideas for our projects and inspiring each other. Everyone had uploaded photos of their yarn to a common folder so we could look at them during a Guild meeting on Zoom. We each provided as much information as we could on our yarns, and then opened it up to ideas from the floor.
So many inspiring ideas came out of this meeting! Many were the usual things like a scarves and towels, but people also suggest creative weave structures and finishing techniques that would be appropriate for the specific yarns. I remember being very impressed by our conglomerate creativity!
For my yarn, among the suggestions was a seat cushion. I had never thought of that – what an idea! So that’s what I ran with. I found an interesting 8-shaft pattern on handweaving.net that I thought would be fun to weave on my 8S LeClerc floor loom. I found another contrasting but similar weight yarn in my stash (double points there!) to use in the warp. Having so little of this precious Irish yarn though, I needed to sample. The most important information would come after washing and fulling the sample. So I simplified the structure and wove a small sample on a 4-shaft loom. The shrinkage was much less than I had anticipated, which was really good news. My 775 yards of pink wool would be enough for the weft for 2 pillows! I used every last yard of the Irish wool and the darker burgundy wool warp.
8-shaft braided twill with pink Irish wool weft and burgundy stash yarn warp
During the spring of 2021, I finished weaving the 8S fabric and fulled it in time for our annual end-of-year supper (alas not “pot luck” this year), which we gleefully held outdoors in person! The weather was threatening, but we were eager to see each other and share our projects, and the outdoor gathering was a success.
Then the fabric sat for awhile longer, waiting for another burst of inspiration on how to make the seat cushion. The original plan had been complex, comprising a trapezoidal shape with 1-2″ side panels and high density cushion foam inside. But that was intimidating, so it was put off. Then I ran across a blog post on Gist Yarn’s website on how to make an envelope pillow using handwoven fabric. Looking around my studio, I saw no fewer than 3 pillow forms sitting unused. So the plan was hatched.
Office seat cushion with Irish wool
With the size defined, the pillows came together with a pretty multi-colored cording around the edges made from mercerized cotton (also from my stash!) One was stuffed with a feather pillow and is on my chair now. The other became an 18″ couch pillow that I’m thinking of giving to my daughter, who was kind enough to purchase the yarn in the first place. What goes around, comes around.
Twisted cotton cording
Honeycomb for my Honey
In 2021, my husband and I became beekeepers. We love our bees! (The queen is named “Bee 39.” Hehe!) It was my idea really, but I was more than pleasantly surprised when Dan took the lead with them. He spent hours watching YouTube videos and reading books and just going out to the garden to observe our industrious hive of black and yellow honeybees. So, most of his Christmas gifts this year had a bee theme. (Men are so hard to shop for. It pleases me to no end when I can give him something he’s not expecting and he loves it!)
True confessions: We usually eat dinner sitting on the couch watching Jeopardy! Hubby Dan props his plate conveniently on an old couch pillow that is dedicated to this function. However, dedicated or not, the old one was getting pretty ratty looking. He didn’t know it, but he needed a new “dining pillow.”
Dan’s new honeycomb dining pillow
Last fall I was playing with crackle. One of the variations was to treadle it as honeycomb. As I looked at the structure, the wheels were turning, and I knew that his new dining pillow was going to be a honeycomb structure. Back to my stash I went. I found some pale yellow and taupe Tencel and some novelty yarn that would work perfectly for little honeycomb cells outlined in black. I decided to keep it very traditional, with 8-end/8-pick cells for the entire width, as evenly structured as the comb in our hive.
I jumped right in with a 20″ wide warp with enough length to sample some weft colors and wash it to make sure that the cells would behave as expected. I’m glad I did that because I was debating about single or double stranding the black outline yarn. Although I was leaning toward the double, the single ply looked best. In the end, that was a really good choice, as I would have run out of the doubled yarn.
Honeycomb Closeup – Ecru Tencel warp and weft with black cotton novelty yarn
The pillow wasn’t finished in time for Christmas, but that was OK, because the loom attachment he was building for me in his workshop wasn’t done either. We’re a good pair!
One of the holdups was waiting for a 6-treadle retrofit for my little Harrisville floor loom. After treadling the crackle sampler with a 4-treadle direct tie-up, I knew I didn’t want to weave a whole length of honeycomb fabric dancing on 1, 2 and 3 treadles through the whole thing. So it was worth the wait for the convenience. It wove up quickly, finishing off one cone of the Tencel and all the novelty yarn.
The fabric done and vigorously washed and dried, I decided to use the same envelope pillow cover structure for this one. I added a black and yellow twisted cording on the edges and stuffed it with the pillow form from Dan’s now-retired dining pillow. Since the honeycomb structure is so elastic, the cover did require a couple snaps on the back.
Envelope closer with added snaps; Taupe Tencel weft on the back side
If anyone walked into my studio today, they wouldn’t notice that I am down several cones of yarn and some pillow forms, but I know, and that makes me happy.
Earlier in the pandemic, I dyed a bunch of core spun wool bumps that had been waiting in a bin in my studio. Over the past few weeks, I wove it all into rugs on my Glimakra loom. The warp is 8/4 linen sett at 6 epi. One of the rugs (second photo) has some other corespun that I got from my friend Laura. It was processed at a different mill and was much denser than mine. As a result, the rug has stripes of texture. The last rug is made of cotton loopers. It’s the only one that’s truly washable.
Wool-bump rug with magenta zig zag 35.5″ x 40″Textured striped wool bump rug, 36″ x 42″Wool bump rug with rectangular theme – 35.5″ x 56″Wool bump rug with magenta and green stripes 35.5″ x 50″Red and green loopers rug 36″ x 26″
This time at home with fewer distractions has actually been good for me! I’ve been working on several different projects, rotating around so I don’t get bored. Although lots of yarn shops are open for mail order, I’ve taken the isolation as a challenge to finish some projects that have been hanging around too long and to use up some of my stash yarns.
Woolen basket
Status: Completed
Basket made from fulled wool fabric with a cotton lining
This was made from a small piece of wool fabric woven from the left over warp for the Plimouth Plantation blanket. I sewed it into the rectangular basket shape, finished the top edge, and fulled it in a sink full of hot water and peppermint soap. I shocked it in cold water a couple times as well. The finished size is 10″ x 7.5″ at the top and 4″ tall.
Then I built a “basket block” exactly the right size out of Lego blocks that live in my attic. With the basket upside down on the Legos, I used my steam iron on the wool setting to further shape and full it. (Yes, I had pre-tested the Legos to make sure they could withstand steaming.)
Like a hat block, only for a basket, and made from Legos!
It was good and thick, but I was worried that it might start to sag over time. So I lined it with some cotton fabric lined with a medium weight Pellon. Not sure what I’m going to use it for yet. Maybe some Legos.
Bouclé shawl
Status: Completed
Boucle shawl with beaded braided fringe
I wove this shawl last fall. It has an Icelandic wool warp that I hand dyed with my favorite colors and a purple mohair bouclé weft. The pandemic project part of it was the fringe braiding. I threaded 3 beads on one strand of each braid and spaced them randomly on the braids. It was washed afterward, and then I trimmed the braids. This project was part of this year’s challenge for the Nashoba Valley Weavers Guild. It’s still TBD whether we’ll be able to get together in person at the end of June to show off our products.
Triangle shawl
Status: Completed
Tidying my studio one day, I ran across some silk/cotton yarn that was waiting for inspiration. I realized it was similar to some yarn I had used for a project last year, which I had some leftovers from. So I took the skeins of stash yarn and combined them with the smaller amounts of more colorful leftovers to make this shawl on my triangle loom.
Shawl made on a triangle loom out of different silk and silk/cotton yarns
The thing about weaving on a triangle loom is that the warp and weft build as you weave. There’s no loom waste, so you can predict exactly how much yarn you’ll need. It takes about 10 hours to weave a fullsize shawl like this one, depending on the complexity of the color pattern and the texture of the yarns. However, I came up with a sample sized loom that has the same sett as the fullsize one, but it takes me only 20 minutes to weave up a sample. (I teach a 2-hour class on this for those who are interested.)
Tablecloth
Status: In progress
Here’s a project that has been sitting around for too long! Years ago I wove some yardage on an 8-shaft Macomber loom that I no longer own. It was about 20′ of material, a striped warp of primary and secondary brights, with black weft. After washing, the yardage was just over 16″ wide. My thought had always been to somehow sew it into a tablecloth, but it had somehow never materialized.
The brown paper pattern pieces laid out for a 60″ x 60″ tablecloth
After measuring my tables and playing around with some panel ideas on paper, I wasn’t inspired. Wandering out of the box, I started playing with some diagonal panel ideas. Calling on some high school math, I determined that there was enough material for a 60″ x 60″ tablecloth and worked up a pattern for laying out the pieces.
Clara helping to lay out the pattern pieces on the cloth
Coincidentally that night, a package arrived from Chewy.com that was padded with a very long length of 30″ wide brown paper. Perfect for making a fullsize pattern. That was the confidence I needed to cut into my precious handwoven cloth!
The project is still in progress, but I’ve sewn about half of the 237 inches of seams so far. I’m using a fagoting stitch to butt the selvedges against each other and avoid lumpy seams on my table. Once the seams are done, I’ll hand sew a rolled hem all around.
The fagoting makes the seam flat and nearly invisible.
Sprang sample
Status: Complete
Last summer at the New England Weavers’ Seminar, I took a class with Carol James on Sprang. She’s an excellent teacher, and my fascination with historic textiles and textile techniques made this a great match for me!
Sprang samples using two different double stitch patterns
Sprang is an ancient method of producing cloth. It uses threads stretched parallel to each other on a frame or a backstrap. The threads are twisted methodically to produce various patterns, often resembling lace. Two rows of cloth are produced simultaneously, mirroring each other. Carol’s website can give you lots of visuals if you’re interested.
I circled back to this technique over the past couple weeks and reconnected with Carol by email. She sent me a couple new patterns for a Double Stitch, which I had to try out. Here’s my sample still on the sprang loom. I tied some cords on the sides to pull it out so the pattern can be seen. It’s not perfect, but I did manage to learn the new stitch.
Fiber friends rug hooking
Status: In progress
A cute rug hooking picture, perfect for fiber fanatics
Yet another years old project recovered from the depths of a closet. I had purchased it from Windfall Farm, a vendor at a NH Sheep &Wool Festival. When it saw the light of day a couple weeks ago, 3 of the animals and some grass were hooked. I’ve been working on it gradually in the evenings when we settle on the couch. It’s showing promise!
Chevron scarf
Status: Fiber spun into 3-ply yarn; scarf >2/3 knit
Chevron-shaped scarf with handspun yarn
This project was partially completed when we landed in this pandemic. It’s knit from handspun yarn. The fiber had been dyed with 3 colors by Spunky Eclectic before I came into possession of it through the Boston Area Spinners & Dyers annual challenge. It’s 80/20 merino/silk in a colorway called “Mahogany”. I separated the fiber into 3 piles, roughly corresponding to the 3 dye colors. After some sampling, I decided to chain ply the singles into a 3 ply yarn, which would result in less color blending than a 2-ply.
The pattern is inspired by a shawl pattern by Andrea Rangel in Taproot magazine, issue 35. It was easy to memorize after a couple repeats, so I don’t have to concentrate too much while I’m knitting it. The overall pattern is K2 P2, and one stitch is added in center every 4 rows. The spinning is all done now, so just the remaining knitting is left to finish.
I used the colors in sequence, so the grays at the bottom, browns in the middle and purples at the top add another dimension to the piece.
Unfortunately, BASD probably won’t get to meet again before the summer, so I probably have extra time to finish it. Actually, I have a little time now!
What’s next?
A new sprang project with baby alpaca
I’ve got plenty of other fiber projects both in progress and formulating in my mind. However, with inspiration from the sprang sample, I decided to use another hand dyed warp to make a scarf. The yarn is 100% baby alpaca from Hampden Hills Alpacas. This is absolutely amazing yarn, but I’m learning that soft, airy yarns like this are not easy to weave with sprang! It took me hours to get the 2 1/2 yard warp on the sprang loom, and the stickiness of the yarn makes each row take extra long, but I think the lace pattern is going to be beautiful when it’s done!
Depending on how long the pandemic restrictions last here in Massachusetts, hopefully these projects will be completed and I’ll be on to more! Stay well, everyone!
As a member of the Weavers’ Guild of Boston, I volunteered to make a blanket for one of the houses at Plimouth Plantation. The idea is to have blankets that resemble what would have been in the houses originally, but that are touchable to the visiting public. This was almost a year ago, and I had just gotten a new-to-me Glimakra counterbalance loom.
The pattern was simple, a 4-shaft 2/2 twill sett at 8 epi. It was to have 5 color stripes at each end of the blanket. The tricky part is that due to the width, it had to be woven in two panels and then sewn together. In order for the stripes to match up, the beat and measurements needed to be precisely the same on both panels.
Not wanting to test run my new loom on such an important project (and with someone else’s yarn,) I made a prototype with some Harrisville yarn I had purchased. The loom has a sectional warp beam, so I decided to try that out in the process. That had a steep learning curve, but worked out well in the end!
Prototype blanket
Using a 10 dent reed, I sleyed 1-1-1-1-0. (My instinct regarding the forgiveness of the Harrisville yarn proved correct, and after fulling, the reed pattern can’t be seen.) To ensure even panels, I marked the stripe pattern on two long lengths of adding machine tape and pinned it to the blanket panels as I wove. As soon as I started weaving, it was obvious that sett at 8 epi, a square beat of 8 ppi was unrealistic. With only the epi specified, the picks per inch were up to me, and the prototype ended up at about 15 ppi, which made a very thick blanket after fulling. True confession: I actually ran out of one of the stripe colors with about a half dozen picks remaining to weave. I called Harrisville and talked with a very nice person, who found the same color in stock and sent me the 30 or so yards I needed to complete the project. Thank you, kind person at Harrisville, for coming to the rescue! The slight variation in dye lot, which can’t even be seen in the photo, makes the actual blanket look just a little more authentic!
Once I was comfortable with the loom and had convinced myself that the design was viable, I was ready to weave the real thing. Again, I wound a sectional warp. This time, however, I relaxed my beat, pulling the beater just enough to set the weft into place, which resulted in 10 ppi. This was not as easy as beating it in with a good pull like on the prototype, but with some care and constant measuring, I was able to make 2 *exactly* equal panels. I used a temple on both blankets to keep the cloth from drawing in excessively.
First section of the woven blanket on my Glimakra loom
Once the weaving was done, it had to be seamed and bound. The seam was made by sewing a continuous end, alternately catching one weft on each side, consistent with the 2/2 twill pattern. The result looks like an additional warp end. The ends are folded and bound with a decorative blanket stitch.
Closeup showing the center seam and the blanket stitching along the edge
Fulling was accomplished in my shower, which has pebbles on the bottom, but was inspired by a waulking I participated in with Norman Kennedy at Marshfield School of Weaving last summer. At a waulking, a small amount of water saturates the cloth, which is bunched up lengthwise and passed along in a circle, each person squishing and pushing the fabric along. By myself in the shower, the motion was somewhat limited, but after over 45 minutes of pushing the cloth around with my feet, I had a nicely fulled cloth. I draped it on a clothes rack to dry, first in the shower and then outside.
Shrinkage was 17% in the weft but only 11% in the warp, which was surprising due to the relatively loose beat. The finished blanket size is 58″ x 87″. As of this writing, Plimouth Plantation has a delayed opening due to COVID-19 restrictions, but hopefully sometime this summer the blanket will be in use in one of the houses there! (In the mean time, Clara is enjoying it.)
A friend recently asked me about baby blankets. They are one of my favorite things to weave! Whenever I warp my loom for a baby blanket gift, I put on extra warp so I can make one or two extras while I’m at it. Each one, even from the same warp, is unique, a different weave structure or color pattern, and different finishing. All of them are 100% cotton.
Cotton windowpane check blanket – This is one of the first baby blankets I made. It was for my friend Audrey’s baby Hannah.Warp for tartan blankets
Here’s a example of a warp for 2 special blankets. The warp was designed using a name draft for “Mikkelsen”, one baby’s family name. I know it’s hard to see the name in the warp stripes, but weavers have to start someplace when they are designing! The first blanket was woven for Maren’s (my first AFS “daughter”) baby, Anne, and was a balanced tartan plaid. The second blanket was for my cousin Casey’s baby Emil. It was a more stripey pattern, but Casey picked up on the Scottish roots of the pattern, which reflect some of our family heritage.
Mikkelsen plaid blanket with yellow satin bindingBaby bairn Emil in his blanket with a flannel binding
There were 3 pastel blankets off this warp – a plain weave, a birdseye and a waffle weave. One of them was given to my friend’s grandson Carter. The other two were sold.
Two blankets off the same warp
If you’re looking for an extra special baby gift for someone, let me know what you’d like. I’ll work with you for the perfect custom creation!
