For the last few months (as many of you know), 
 I've been spinning wool
and weaving long narrow pieces of cloth.

Then this morning I started sewing them together.

​This may not like a seem a particularly momentous thing. 
But when I say I had no particular goal in mind,
what I really mean is that I have had about a thousand different ideas about what to do with this fabric --and as long as I was just making and collecting, all were still possible.

Many of these ideas are still possible of course
since I still don't really know how I am going to hang/ display/ share this body of work, 
but as I am scheduled to have a show at the Latimer Quilt and Textile Center in Tillamook, OR  in July/August 2017, displayed they will be.

Today is not the day to go into all the possibilities that may or may not lie ahead.
Talking about, much less writing down ideas before they exist in the physical world
is a sure way to flatten them before their time.
​And so much is still unclear.

But today I dressed up in grey silk trousers, a black shirt, vest and even a necklace (I'm not generally much of a jewelry person),
​and took the next step. 

It is time.

PS -- And speaking of Exhibitions,  I am proud that a collection of my tapestries  (mostly the Rough Copy series)-- will be displayed in LaConner WA at what is now called The Pacific Northwest Quilt and Fiber Art Musum (Formerly LaConner Quilt and Textile Museum), from May - July 2017

It is very exciting to have work in two such wonderful Northwest textile centers,
if a teensy bit scary as they overlap by a month (July 2017), which means there needs to be entirely different work at each place.  
​YOWZA. Back to it.
xoxox to all.

One of the calming things about weaving tapestry
is that what you weave is what you get:
 the work on the loom looks pretty much as it does when it is done.
At least this is the case with my tapestries.**
Even wet finishing  (total immersion in warm soapy water), doesn't change the images, though it does improve the hand and drape of the cloth.

**If using some weft faced techniques, wedge weave for instance, tapestry fabric will distort when cut from the loom; Connie Lippert and Alex Friedman  use this technique to great advantage.

 My experiments thus far have not been exactly scientific, of course, so everything I say must be taken with a grain of salt.  Indeed, I'm not sure I'd even call them experiments -- more quiet meandering explorations-- but each each thing I try has taught me something, shifted a pre-conceived idea, or  led me to slightly alter my direction, and that is always interesting.

 Last week I wrote about spinning wool singles for this cloth, and promised to talk about sizing this week.  I had hoped to do some experiments with flour paste between then and now, but didn't get around to it so can still only speak to xanthan gum and gelatin.  Starch, too, awaits future experiments. But here's what I know so far.

The comic above shows the basic procedure: total immersion of clean damp yarn in one solution or the other, followed by weighed  hanging until dry.

In this phase, I much preferred the gelatin.  It dissolved easily in a small amount of cool water, then became nicely liquid when further diluted with hot. I immersed the skeins, squeezed the solution through, then hung them to drip.
note:  I'd used gelatin before, immersing dry rather than damp yarn; this time i found, unsurprisingly, that the yarn absorbed less gelatin solution. More on this later.

The Xanthan gum (I used the recipe in Sarah Anderson's wonderful book, A Spinner's Guide to Yarn Design was not so straightforward. It probably would have been easier  if I had followed Sarah's recommendation to use a blender to mix the Xanthan gum with the water though. Not having a blender, I tried a whisk and ended up with a gloppy, lumpy solution a bit like egg drop soup. I finally pushed it through a sieve which got rid of some of the lumps, but the consistency (which Sarah had described), continued to be, well, gloppy.
This meant that it needed to be worked into the yarn with more vigor than the gelatin and, once hung, that it took forever to dry.  It also meant that it didn't pool in the yarn as much as as the gelatin, which is  a plus (I had to turn the gelatin skeins more often.) 

Given the consistency of the xanthan gum, I expected that once they were dry the strands would be glued to one another and hard to wind into balls. This turned out not to be a problem.  Indeed, the yarn seemed less stiff and 'lineny' than the strands sized with gelatin.
This stiffness is something I'd liked with earlier gelatin experiments as it made the yarn easy to manage, especially when threading heddles, so I was a little disappointed by the lack of stiffness in the xanthan gum skeins.  Perhaps I needed to spend more time working it into the yarn?
Or perhaps it would be possible to warm up the xanthan gum slightly and make it more liquid which might make it go more easily into the yarn? I don't really know what it is though, so maybe heat will make it do something else entirely. I'm a big fan of gluten (my husband and son are bakers), so  don't have much call for such things to hold my bread together.  Anyone know anything about this? 

I also found the gelatin sized yarn less stiff than with the earlier gelatin experiments when I had immersed dry yarn into the solution. Next time: Dry yarn.

In the actual weaving, there was not much difference.  I did have a broken warp with one of the the brown xanthan gum sized pieces, but I believe that had more to do with a careless join in the spinning phase than any particular failure of the sizing.  Of course if I had used gelatin on dry yarn, it might have held together a little better, but I can't do the experiment on that particular strand of yarn, so that is only speculation.

Today I'm weaving with leftovers.  The warp is unsized wool (3" staple suffolk X), the weft a motley collection of sized and unsized singles. In all of them it is the twist/ grist relationship that makes the difference -- also that that the sett is appropriate to the yarn.
In short: sizing can be helpful, but the yarn needs to be up to the task.

Gosh, it always comes back to yarn, doesn't it?

2 October, 2016
an experiment:
hand spun singles tapestry weft 
used as both warp and weft
​in a balanced plain weave
on a backstrap loom

3 October: It's working!

5 October: Never mind.

15 October: same yarn, trying again

16 October: not a single broken warp!

18 October: MORE OF THIS

But spinning everything twice is a waste of time.
Time for the super high speed flyer on my Lendrum Saxony Wheel (70/1 ratio)!!

But this flyer is a technical and sensitive creature,
most particular about the yarn it makes.
Anything under 4000 yards per pound and the yarn won't draw onto the bobbin, causing endless 'eyelashes'  and a bobbin like a baby hedgehog.
​
Fewer fibers in the drafting triangle, however, and the yarn flows like water.

Result: singles both finer and stronger than the early experiments,
cloth even more translucent -- the very thing I was after in the first place!

A couple of weeks and several warps later, I had learned a great deal,
not least that when spinning a singles warp very very fast
 each and every join must be perfect.
While I had no more actual  breakage, a few areas grew worryingly fuzzy after repeated trips through the rigid heddle.  PVA glue rubbed into the yarn with my fingers and allowed to dry (a scrap of wax paper keeps it from touching the other warp strands while it dries), fixed individual problems, but this is an emergency fix, not a long term plan.

Time for another experiment,
which I will have to write about next week as this has already gone on too long!

All of this makes the yarn smooth, manageable and, I believe, a little bit stronger than it might otherwise have been.  Also, I can weave sooner.
Another bath once the cloth is off the loom allows the fabric to bloom, releasing the temporarily tamed twist energy into the fabric itself.
Should I ever want the cloth to be less energetic, a hot iron and a camp press cloth--or lots of steam--will of course smooth it out.

OK -- now I really am done.
​ Back next week with "Sizing So Far"

Last night, as the snow fell, I did a little mending.

This morning (after shoveling and before remembering that it is tuesday which means blog day),
​ I wove a few feet of hand spun plain weave fabric as the snow continued to fall.

600 years ago (ish) in Greenland,
someone spun, wove, sewed and mended
 every garment.

My patches are haphazard, half-assed and untidy,
the stitching just barely functional.

Many of the scraps are from unmendable favorite garments
and of dubious durability,
But I use them anyway.
And they wear out again,

I'm lucky in this.

In Norse Greenland in the 1300s, I'd have had to take much more care.
Indeed, I'd have been trained to take much more care.

I've been hand spinning most of my yarn for 35+ years,
knitting my clothes for longer than that,
weaving for nearly 30
and like to believe I'm better at all of these things than I am at mending.

Some of my  garments survive because even half-assed attention is better than none,
but even with tools like this:

not to mention this:

I've yet to spin, weave and sew (much less get to mend), even a single dress.

Nor, for all the care and effort I put into my materials,

would such a garment be likely to survive for centuries
buried in the permafrost.

​ Woven into the Earth: Textiles from Norse Greenland by Else Østergaård; Aarhus University Press,  Denmark

More comics and tunes in 2017
Says it right there in ink and watercolor.
Start as I mean to go on.

Actually, I'd be fine if I didn't have to do that much more snow shoveling,
​but perhaps I can take that drawing to mean more attention to my house and garden as the season demands --scrubbing the toilet and turning the compost pile and weeding and such. You know.

 And really, it is best if I don't make gradiose plans.
My life is already packed with things I like doing --
so many that the best I can hope for is focus and simplification.

Adding a few refinements to my sketchbook diary practice
(ink and watercolor over the pencil and maybe a few more hourly comics),
is probably not an unreasonable dream though,
especially since I started with the ink back in October. 

 I've also been playing music pretty steadily for the past 11 years, so a little more time every day  with my amazing new baritone concertina to strengthen my fingers, learn tunes and help the bellows become more flexible etc. is not out of the question.
​
Everything in moderation, right?

​

As if.
Looking back at this first entry in my first comic diary (which I didn't even know I was starting),
I see that the problem of competing ideas and projects is a recurring theme.

Funny how every day feels fresh as I'm living it,
every angst brand new,
​even as I keep repeating myself.

One of the unexpected delightst of keeping a comic diary for a chunk of time
is the fun of returning  to the old images.  
​Flipping through old Moleskines (I'm on the 9th since 2012),
I often crack myself up.        

Important stuff, eh?

Not so entertaining are the wordy journals of my youth which, though sometimes sweet, are not things I enjoy revisiting-- and certainly nothing I'd want anyone else to look at ever ever ever and certainly not out here on the internet.
For decades, these have languished in a box in basment beside worn out boots and term papers I wrote in 1975.

Happily, a week or two later, while burying a couple of unsatisfactory-but-hard-to-get rid of tapestries, I realized that the compost heap (home of many an unfin. proj.),  was the perfect home for the journals as well.
In they went, layered with eggshells and apple cores,
​without regret..

Looking at the snow-covered pile this morning (FYI, our winter compost goes in a worm bin in the basement), I felt nothing but satisfaction.
The worms and microbes and spent tomato vines and bits of yarn and corn cobs and ideas and carrot tops and that stupid mean thing I did in 1986 are busily  transforming themselves into nourishment for the future while I get on with the essential business of learning a new tune.
How about: Grandma Hold the Candle While I Shave the Chicken's Lip?

Truth to tell, I'm lazy about my garden and may not even get to turning our compost pile for a year or two (too busy drawing comics and weaving and so forth).

My wonderful sister Evelyn R. Swett,  however, will enter the the growing season with buckets of black gold.
A glorious gardener, Lyn is particularly passionate about compost
and has just created a little book, Compost Compositions, with some of her amazing  photos.

It's almost like getting to look at a bit of her diary without any boring parts.
How cool is that?
Maybe that snow shoveling drawing  up at hte top of the page means I might get to be more like her this year!
 I can only hope.
​
Anyone know a tune about compost?