Weaving A Gem Of A Life

From me to me

My birthday was last week. I celebrated with dear friends by renting kayaks and paddling on Irondequoit Creek. It was really lovely, but of course I didn’t think to take any photos.

Today I went to the One World Goods store in Pittsford before getting my groceries at Trader Joes. I’d previously stopped and browsed in this store, committed to Fair Trade, but not bought. I’d been thinking about one of their handmade purses since that first visit months ago, and decided I wouldn’t wait any longer. Well, I bought a bag and more. I figured that I’d consider them birthday presents to myself.

First I picked out 3 pairs of earrings. The ones on the cards are from Mexico, the Om symbol earrings from India.

The bag was made in Guatemala, with wonderfully colorful embroidery, lots of zippers, and an adjustable strap.

I couldn’t pass up the pants, handwoven and sewn in Nepal. They fit just like I wanted my pants made from my cotton/linen fabric to fit. I couldn’t wait to get home and compare the weight of the two fabrics.

I had to laugh. They feel very much like the fabric I’d started weaving, the looser beat, the fabric I thought was too loose for pants and am saving for a top. It figures, doesn’t it? Anyway, when I get up the gumption to go back to the pants with my handwoven, I can use these as a sort of guide for sizing.

On the weaving front, this past weekend was the annual Roycroft Summer Festival in East Aurora. It was sooooo hot – in the 90’s both days. And we’re set up on a blacktop parking lot. The crowds were very thin…people stayed home in their air conditioning and/or pools. So sales were poor for all the artists that I spoke with. But I enjoyed doing another community weaving project as part of my booth. I had everyone from preschoolers to grandparents take place. Here’s a teenage boy – I blurred his face since I didn’t ask permission to take or use the photo.

Here’s what the weaving looked like at the end of Sunday. I’m going to do a bit more work on it before I hang it, but I do enjoy this process and may well do more.

MonkeyBoots IronMan Jim

I’m going to start this post with the good news. My grandson had told his mom on several occasions that he wished he had a sock monkey. As it so happened, I had 1 pair of sock monkey socks in my craft trunk so made it for him. For the record, I don’t like making sock monkeys. The sock fabric is too stretchy to be fun to work with, and heaven help you if you need to take a seam out. That being said, Jack thought he was the nuts (a little monkey humor there). It was all I could do to keep Jack away from the monkey while I was sewing and then while we waited for the little boy to come and get him.

Well, the almost-five-year-old boy LOVED the monkey! Way more than I could have hoped for. So much that he gave him 3 names, just like the boy has 3 names. The monkey’s name is MonkeyBoots IronMan Jim. Quite the monkier for a little simian, don’t you think? I liked the humor in making this monkey a vest with another monkey (Julius Junior) on it.

On to other sewing adventures….

I took both my courage and my scissors in hand and cut out the pattern pieces for my pants.

I spent several hours yesterday sewing. Lessons learned or remembered quickly:

The handwoven definitely frays more than commercial fabric, so needed some type of seam treatment.
French seams are tedious and time consuming, not something I was willing to do on these pants.
Zigzag stitching was ok, but looked pretty ugly.
Overlock stitch looked better than zigzag, but was better still when I sewed both raw edges together rather than doing them individually.
I will not sew for money. Just like I won’t knit for money. I’ll do it as gifts or for myself, but that’s all. It’s not one of my favorite activities and I’m not interested in investing the kind of time and attention it needs to have a professional-looking finished product inside & out. Don’t think I could get my money back on that kind of time commitment, either.

Ok, so this morning I sewed on the waistband, made the ties, and then could try the pants on for the first time. Lessons learned the hard way:

Although I’ve never done it and doubt that I’ll start now, it makes a lot of sense to make the pattern out of muslin (or similar) first so you have an idea of fit and can make adjustments as needed.
Before getting this far, stop and think. Do I own anything similar I can lay on the bed so I can compare shapes and sizes?
Don’t believe either the measurements or the pictures on the pattern.

When I sewed that vest from my handwoven fabric I made a size medium. It’s really too small. You can fudge a bit with a vest, but I sure didn’t want to make that mistake again with the pants. Plus my actual body measurements were what the pattern called large, so I made the pants large. Big mistake.

They are SO big that it’s way too much fabric bunched up at my waist, and it sticks out very unattractively in both front and back. Only at this point did I realize I had been wearing a pair of drawstring waist cotton shorts, so I laid them on the bed to compare sizes.

Those pants are A LOT bigger.

So I went back to the pattern and looked at the photo on the front again.

I realize that model’s probably an extra small, but there’s NO WAY that her pants fit the way mine are cut. Even if I’d made a medium instead of the large, the legs of my pants are WAY wider than hers, and the drawstring is gathered only slightly at her waist, too. False advertising!

Now I know I could remove the waistband, take out the side seam pockets, re-cut the fabric, and re-sew. However I also know that taking out the waistband and the pockets will cause lots of fraying. While I have enough fabric to cut a whole new waistband, that’s not true for the pockets, and in reality, even it it were true, I know myself well enough to know I wouldn’t do it, and even if I did, I’d end up hating the pants for what they put me through and never wearing them anyway.

So I pinned in some pleats on one side. Would I like that better?

It’s better, but is it enough better to make them wearable? Here’s a view of the side without the pinned in pleats.I do know this…I’m not going to make a decision and implement it in time to wear these pants for the show I’ve got this weekend. I’m also not going to blindly use the top pattern for my planned top; I may not use it at all.

I’m fed up. I’m tired from lack of sleep. I’m going to put away the sewing machine, put everything else in a bag or bin, and watch some mindless TV for a while.

What was I thinking?

Weaving was progressing smoothly and rather rapidly. I finished 1/3 of the warp on the first day, and on the next I was past 115″. All of a sudden, the light bulb went off in my head. I couldn’t make pants out of the fabric I was weaving! It was far too loose for this pants!

So I started weaving anew, now packing it much more densely. You can see from the photo that after that decision I struggled to make the weave consistent…some areas are more closely woven than others. This got better as I went along, but was a challenge throughout.

The good news is that I can most likely use the more loosely-woven fabric to make a top. The pattern I bought for the pants also has a simple top pattern.

The bad news is that I’ll have to wind another warp to make up the length I need. Sigh. The good news is that I have enough yarn to do so.

TSave

Save

Weaving for me

The baby wrap bubble is apparently going strong elsewhere, but for me it has burst. Like most things in life, that is both the bad news and the good news. The bad news is that it provided a huge income boost to me for a few years, and that’s over. The good news is that now I have time to weave things I’ve not had a chance to get to, try weave structures and other fiber-y things that call to me.

A while ago I wove curtains for my bedroom. The posts about those curtains talked about the difficulty in making the squares be square.

I thought I’d like to weave similar curtains, in all white, for my kitchen. I thought that when I did I’d do double weave – weaving two separate layers of cloth at the same time – so that my squares were identical. But when I sat down to do the planning, I realized that I didn’t have enough heddles to do so, and I didn’t really want to (a) buy more and (b) wait for them to arrive. (Despite what visitors to my booth think, I am not a patient person.) So I simply planned for the all white curtains and figured I’d again just live with some difference in the squares, knowing that those differences would be less noticeable with everything the same color.

Well, I was surprised that it was substantially easier for me to make those squares be square this time. I don’t attribute it to my experience with the bedroom curtains. Here’s what I think the difference is: I wove the bedroom curtains from (mostly) 16/2 cotton (6,720 yards per pound) sett at 24 ends per inch. I wove the kitchen curtains from (mostly 20/2 cotton (8,400 yards per pound) set at 21 ends per inch. So finer threads sett more loosely.

As you can see from the top photo, I again made myself a little jig to use while I was weaving, but it all worked better, easier for me. Maybe because I’ve woven so much lace in the past. Maybe because I felt no pressure. Maybe because the stars were lined up more auspiciously. If you look closely at that photo you’ll notice that there is a place where I had 3 threads in one dent instead of 2. I decided I didn’t really care.

I wove 6 panels, hemmed and wet finished, and hung them on a tension rod in my bay window in the kitchen.

I love the way they look. The only thing that’s not exactly what I planned is that somehow I mis-measured before I started. I wanted the curtain rod to be the same height as the ‘joint’ in my double hung windows. But somehow I thought that was 24″ finished length when it should have been 27″ finished length. Oh well. No big deal.

Now I’m getting a warp on the loom to weave fabric for a pair of pants. I so liked the cotton/linen towels I wove in April that I knew I wanted to make myself some pants. I hope I can get the 7+ yards woven in the next few days and get started on the sewing.

Much ado about nothing?

On Tuesday I realized I had no way to know if anything I did had any impact on whoever made and was using the hole in my front garden. So I placed two light but long bits of bark mulch over it. No one can go in or out without moving that.

Surprisingly, nothing has budged in the last 2 days. I don’t know what to make of that. But I did think to bring out a ruler and take some pix to give you size reference for both opening width and depth. Of course no idea how far down the hole goes beyond where my ruler fit easily.

Staying outside, I’ve had some more beautiful flower blooms. Although they were only here for a few days, the spiderwort offered intense color.

My first formal roses – such a deep, rich red. Wish their scent was as strong as the color.

I gave my daughter a striped mallow that was the same size as mine, and we planted them at the same time. Hers is now big and lush, while mine is small and almost wimpy, but my flowers are still beautiful.

Last but certainly not least, the clematis is starting to bloom. I don’t know if this is two different colors or if the dark one will ‘bleach out’ with the sun. Supposedly I got one pink (Nelly Moser) and one blue (Ramona). Neither should be this dark…which is beautiful, just not what I expected.

Weaving A Gem Of A Life

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