Thursday, September 16, 2010
I am determined to update and refresh the look of my website (http://www.sharonalderman.com/) and to do that signed up for two classes through the Salt Lake Community school: Phtoshop CS3 (which may not last because of low enrollment) and Web Site Design, which met tonight for the first time. We were assigned the creation of blogs and having had a dormant one for quite a long time, I have decided to re-activate it.

The object of this blog is to record my weaving which will help me date work as I make it and share the joys and tribulations with you, Gentle Reader.

Today I finished washing and ironing a dozen cotton towels woven in autumnal--appropriate!--colors. I had finished weaving the last one yesterday, cut the warp from the loom, serged them apart and hemmed them before putting them to soak over night. Today they were washed vigorously by machine in hot water and then ironed dry.

The warp before this one was a creamy white, linen singles (20/1) that I wove in a two block pattern so that warp emphasis and weft emphasis alternated catching the light nicely. There are four of them, the fifth had a law that couldn't be corrected by needle-weaving so it is going into my own collection; its usefulness to me won't be at all affected by the flaw in it but such things never leave home!

Prior to that warp I was trying to figure out a way to use some silk/stainless steel. I hve just 300+ yards of it so there isn't enough to make a very big sample. My best guess is that this yarn, unlike pure silk, won't shrink very much if at all, so I need to capitalize on that quality. It is very fine (from Habu, NYC) but 300 yards is just that: 300 yards. It isn't stiff, so I think I will put it into a finely woven scarf. The more I thought about it and the more I hunted through my yarn stash to find the proper silk to put with it the less it came together but a very fine silk shawl did come out of it, not using the silk/steel at all. I used a very pale 40/2 tussah for the majority of the shawl and a darker tussah (20/2) as outline threads to make squares with three-end huck squares within each at one time or another along its length. It's lovely.