YESTERDAY!
Ok, so yesterday I decided to dust off my spinning wheel, and something magical happened! I decided to whip up some crazy colorful yarn just for fun, and I was so surprised by how much I liked it that I finally got up the courage to start blogging again.
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| Poof! Magical colorful yarn appeared! |
I usualy spin lace, which requires a lot of twist, and I had 200 grams of my favorite beautiful roving, so over several nights I spun up the roving into fine lace singles. Then it came time to ply. For a few inches everything went alright, and then the singles broke... again, and again.... and again. Completely baffled I started checking everything from the bobbin, to the oil, and finally, the whorl. For all that time, through 200 grams of precious roving, and hundreds of yards of lace singles, I had been spinning with the LOW twist whorl! Essentially, I had turned all of my work into a pile of disintegrating nothingness. I even tried re-spinning the singles to add more twist, but they were so weak they broke during the process. Frustrated, but refusing to put fiber down I moved to my loom. I decided to try something "fun and new".
That was the beginning of another mistake.
I chose to try out Overshot. After warping the loom I treated the pattern like any other I had used before, completely oblivious to "tabby picks" and doubled threads. After a few inches of weaving I could tell that something was very wrong. I looked over the pattern again, and saw that the weft should be doubled, and that the TABBY PICKS in the SECONDARY WEFT COLOR were white. I should have asked for help then, but ignoring what I didn't understand, (always a bad idea) I doubled the thread and wove on. I tried several different things, distorting the pattern in several different ways, (one looked like the Bat Signal eating a bunny) until I finally threw in the towel and sent a picture to my weaving mentor asking her what she thought.
Being the wonderful person that she is, she firstly said that my horrible bat signals were beautiful, and then asked if I remembered to put a tabby pick between each pattern row.
Some small shred of recognition surfaced in the back of my mind and I promptly replied with: "Huh?"
My ever patient mentor then told me to look at my pattern again. She said to look for a secondary weft color, and this (super mysterious) thing called a "tabby pick".
I reported back that these suspicious aspects were indeed listed in the pattern, and finally asked the million dollar question: "What is a tabby pick?".
It turns out that a tabby pick is one pick of plain weave, that overshot patterns have between every pattern row. (insert my facepalm here)
I applied this new knowledge to my weaving, and lo and behold, the pattern finally looked the way it should. With a thoroughly deflated ego (probably a good thing) and a lot of frustration I put the loom, and all of my fibery treasures away...where they slowly collected dust... until yesterday.
As the weather slowly becomes more livable the need to have a good spring cleaning arose, so I dedicated last weekend to cleaning out my room/studio. I finaly made my way to the spinning drawer, and as I opened it a group of roving remnants caught my eye, and then some sari silk in a rainbow of colors, and lastly a small pile of metallic "icicle confetti" that I had picked up in the discount bin at the store a while back.
Thank you for reading my blog, and I will see you next time!
