Inspiration from Afar

Hi Bonnie,

Last summer we spent some time dyeing lots of wool with mainly plant material and cochenil.

I ended up with 2 kilo's of wool in beautiful soft colours. As my old blanket started to wear out, it was a good idea to make a new one.

I have used your woven words-system to organize the colors.

My words are: TRUST(vertrouwen) and GRATITUDE (dankbaarheid) for the middle-part and LOVE (liefde) for the side-parts.

Quite a few things went wrong, but I am very pleased with the result and it feels lovely to sleep under.

Before weaving the blanket I had to weave a sample to determine the sett.

As I wasn't sure to have enough wool I decided to alternate thick wool and very thin cotton.

The threading was 1-2-3-4 and I've tried several threadlings.

Twill 12-23-34-41 looked best. I've also tried plain tabby without the cotton threads

I wouldn't mind the texture, but didn't like it in my coloured stripes.

The sett was 5 thick and 5 thin threads in 1 cm, which is about 25 threads to an inch altogether.

I've tried to weave the whole blanket in one go (double width), but made a mistake in calculating the thick and thin threads.

So after dressing the loom I found out, that I only had half a blanket. So this became my middle panel.

After weaving this I've warped my loom again for the side panels.

Photo below shows the connection between two of the panels sewn by hand in the green stripe. It also shows the finishing of the top- and bottom of the blanket.

Yours, Irma Spaargaren

A Message in the Cloth

Bonnie

Here is a picture of a recently completed "woven word" scarf. Last month my 16 year old niece came to visit for 10 days. While she was here I used your woven word technique to plan a scarf for her. Using Courtney's words: Happy-Independence-Calmness in the warp with her chosen colors of 10/2 cotton. I used ribbon as the spacer between words. I threaded the project in 4 shaft Swedish lace. I wove in a few words of my own into the fabric. The weft was a mixture of threads, cotton, tencel & silk. I kept the ribbon as the spacer in the weft as well. I am continually amazed at how this technique makes me use new colors and they always seem to work together.

Thank you,

Karen Driscoll

A note from Bonnie: Oops, I forgot to put in the close-up detail, and every time I try to add a picture after I have already up-loaded pictures---well the first pictures disappear.

Another note: At the same time I was winding a warp using Karen's idea---Karen was weaving using my idea---pretty cool

When A Master Explores Plain Weave

Bonnie,

I have to say, I am glad I took the Exploring Not So Plain workshop. Learned some helpful information and had a really good time. Round robin's are all organized before hand and not much teaching necessary. This one gave lots of ideas for plain weave and very good for beginners. Loved that you had so many "keep 'em busy" projects.

I AM ENCOURAGED BY THE POSSIBILITY OF COMBINING THE SUPPLEMENTARY WARP WITH THE WOVEN WORDS. A FRESH LOOK FOR ME TO EXPERIMENT WITH. I WILL TRY ANOTHER ONE SOON. I WANT TO DO PEACE ON EARTH FOR THE
HOLIDAYS AND START A PEACE SERIES. I HAVE 16 YDS OF THIS ON THE
LOOM. THIS ONE IS PEACE, WORLD PEACE. I SCRAMBLED SOME OF THE
LETTERS AND REVERSED THE S SECOND PEACE.. IS SCRAMBLING LETTERS
PART OF THE THINGS THAT ARE OK?

Barbara Herbster

Bonnie says, "If it weaves up to look like the picture above---well, yes, it's Ok."