A second weaving post and other progress reports

Weaving on the Tia rigid heddle loom

I've slowly been weaving and have finally reached the end of my first warp on the Tia rigid heddle loom.

It's been sitting until I get ambitious/brave enough to finish the ends and cut it off the loom.  Knots?  Braids?  Twisted cord?  Hemstitching?  There are more options but I want to keep things relatively simple.

Then I can soak it and all that other post-finishing treatment and see what it really looks like.  It's possible that the red will bleed into the white, but I don't care if the white goes a little pinkish.

The above pic is a closeup of what the weaving looks like.  It's not too bad for a beginner.

The selvedges aren't too terrible, either.  I did a lot of experimenting as I wove -- how tight to pull the yarn, what angle to leave the weft at before beating, that kind of thing.  Once I get things figured out, it'll be more about practicing to build consistency.

It's relatively balanced, especially considering that the weft is thinner than the warp.  Where it's not balanced, it's slightly warp-faced.

I have no idea what I'll do with the piece of cloth.  Maybe a bag?

I also don't know what (or when!) my next weaving project will be.

Appledore-ish gansey project

I did a bit of swatching for the Appledore-inspired sweater I'd like to make, and then today I cast on!  I chose my fuzzy gray handspun yarn on 2.5 and 3mm needles, which seems to be knitting up at a fairly shocking 4 st/in because it gets splitty if I use finer needles.  Or maybe the fuzz makes the yarn want to knit up at that gauge.  Or it's this particular skein and other skeins are finer.

Anyway, it did not go well.

First, I miscounted the number of cast-on stitches and had to re-do part of the cast-on.

Then, I joined and wasn't sufficiently careful not to twist.  Yep, twisted.

So I went back a ways and then rejoined.

Twisted again!  Argh.

My third attempt succeeded in not being twisted.  But after a few rounds, I noticed a section of about 10-20 stitches where the rib was offset.  Although I can usually fix those pretty easily, there were a few rounds that would need to be fixed, with some risk of unraveling all the way down into the cast-on.  And I wasn't willing to live with it.

I give up.

I took it all out.  I will choose a different yarn and see if that works any better.  As before, the first step is to swatch.  I expect about 4 st/in for the batch of handspun I'm going to try next -- it's somewhere in the worsted-Aran-bulky continuum.

Feather and Fan Hobbit Shawl (aka F&F Travel Shawl)

I'm on the third (of 4) skeins of yarn, as of the middle of row 95.  This project may not last long enough to be a proper travel project!  That's OK -- it's still a nice shawl (though on the small side) and it gets 200g of yarn out of my stash.

The name of the colorway is Middle Earth, and thus I'm mentally calling this the Hobbit Shawl.

Lavori 07/30

I'm playing with charts to see what the problematic area of hex mesh will need to do in order to behave in a relatively orderly manner for the rest of the pattern.  The doily is sitting at round 164, as charted, while I figure things out.  I'll be fine for rounds 165, 167, and 169 if I follow the chart for the second rep of the hex mesh (i.e. mentally adding a hex mesh motif for the first part of the chart).

But then things get weird in round 173.  The hex mesh has to absorb the leaf tips while staying more or less in pattern.  Also, one side of the hex mesh in round 173 has a yarnover between the hex mesh and the next left, and the other doesn't.  One of those is wrong, independent of what I end up doing to accommodate the extra hex mesh motif.

I'm sure some people could fix this on the fly.  Not me, though.  And my confidence was shaken by my carelessness in my first attempt, where I overlooked a critical detail.  I'm charting more carefully now.  And hopefully I'll have the sense to test my fix before committing to the many many stitches per round of the actual doily.

I want to start knitting on it again, though!  I'm starting to get close to the end!  Well, at least in number of rounds left to go.

100 posts

Hmm, blogger says that this is post 101 for this blog.  At least one of them is a draft that never saw the light of day, so I guess this is really post 100, or if not, then close to it.  Yay, me!

I don't really have much to say about it.  This blog started as a way to write about doilies and share pics.  Then it morphed into a general knitting and spinning blog, though again kind of geared towards an audience.  I was a very minor player in the greater doily-knitting and lace-knitting blog ecosystem.

Then the blog went dead for a decade.

Now I'm back.  I'm posting again.  This is still a general knitting/spinning/yarn-fun blog, though I'm trying to make sure there is regular or at least semi-regular doily content.  I've been knitting doilies for all those years even if I wasn't blogging about them, after all!  But it's more of a journal for my own use rather than something aimed outwards.

I'm writing more about day-to-day progress.  More ruminations that are kind of clueless as I stumble along towards enlightenment.  More about plans and ideas and anything else that enters my mind.  I'm trying to include more pics even though I still suck as a photographer.

Any readers I once had are long gone, probably.  Blogs are a thing of the past, a very minor waypoint in the vast social media universe.  Even mailing lists, another formerly active environment for inspiring fiber-related content, are tiny compared to their former glories.  So maybe it is a good time to quietly creep back in, with no further ambition than having a place to write boring prose about knitting, spinning, dyeing, and now weaving, for as long as I feel the urge to do so.

We'll see if I make it to 200 posts and if I can do it without another decade-long hiatus.