CNCH recap

There's the cards, right in
the middle of a piece of twill

I took Inge Dam's class on weaving a card woven band inside a twill at CNCH last weekend... it was fabulous! Her weaving is amazing, her card weaving is amazing, her dyeing is amazing... And the class, of course, was amazing.

Inge doesn't usually do threaded in patterns for her card woven bands, and they're a pain in the ass to set up... getting the card warp on the loom was a little frustrating but the magic was in what happened once both warps were ready...

Her handouts suggest how to space the card warp in the reed; it's wider than card weaving on it's own, so the usually invisible weft showed through in spots; Inge's told us that wet finishing will solve that. The sparser set makes the hand of the card weaving closer to the hand of the background fabric.

And on the fabric side of the reed

Some notes from when I got home; this may not mean a lot to you but it's good reminders for me.

• Adjusted water in the weight bottles so that the fell line was better; ended up being about a liter for 7 cards. I weighed the filled bottles so they were all the same. AM had recommended I put less water in to fix my fell line and it did. My weaving is more even, too. 
• Keep the card warps in line off the back so they don't tangle with adjacent heddles.
• Use a extra card on the table next to you and turn it front (roll forward) or back (roll backward) to remember which way I'm going
• JN said to trim the ends every time you adjust the warps as she finds it reduces tangling. 
• I'm sure I'll think of something else to note...

I did have some issues getting Baby Mac up and running again; some of the lamms had skipped their track and gone into other tracks, and they were hard to relocate. Also, all of the jacks had fallen out of the frames. I mentioned this to a new-to-me group of weavers and one sent me her detailed how-to-pack-up-a-baby-mac instructions and one thing I think could help would be to relocate the wires at the top of the castle to their bottom position. I have no more trips in the near future, but it's good to know :)

The new weaving sequence (turn cards, treadle, throw shuttle) has started sinking in and it's going faster. Also, I'm finding it easier to detect and fix mistakes I've made with the card warp, so feeling pretty good about this!

My paper shirt made its debut at the conference as well. The bulky underarms were a little uncomfortable at first but either I got used to them or they softened a bit with wear. I feel that the shirt was well received.

Foggy Evening in Morro Bay