Some time back, I published an online magazine, WeaveZine. When I went back to the workforce I had to shut down the business. Because I love the content, however, I’ve kept the site alive.
To make hosting it relative inexpensive and hacker-proof, I converted the site from a Drupal CMS to a flat-HTML site. In the process I lost the ability to have Search on the site.
But there’s a way you can search the site using Google. If you go to google.com and type site:weavezine.com before your search terms, it’ll search just on the WeaveZine site. For example, try the following in Google: site:weavezine 8-shaft
It’ll return all the articles that mention 8-shaft weaving.
(And yes, looking at the results, I see that I need to go in and manually change the titles to the actual author’s names so it doesn’t look like I wrote everything. That was a side-effect of my conversion process way back when.)
Anyway, this Google trick works for any site. Try, for example: site:www.interweave.com 8-shaft
The ebook version of my rigid-heddle book, Inventive Weaving, is on sale during the whole month of November for $2.99. Which is something like 90% off. Please help spread the word because I don’t want anyone who’d like to take advantage of this offer to miss out.
What’s happening is that Storey’s added my book to their Fresh Picks selection this month, along with books on cooking, solar panels, and electric fences. All of these are available in 5 different ebook formats.
If you’re new to ebooks, you don’t have to have a Kindle or iPad to read them. You can download a free app (Windows or Mac) that makes it possible to read the ebook on your computer or on other devices. For example, I buy Kindle-format books from Amazon, but usually read them on my phone or iPad.
This past Thanksgiving I had an adventure. I spent the day with my family, then bright and early on Friday, hopped in my car and drove from Seattle, WA to Mountain View, CA. A thirteen-hour, one-way road trip, by myself, in Black Friday traffic.
What would induce me to do such a crazy thing? Why a new loom of course! I was driving down to purchase Tien Chiu’s 40-shaft AVL Production Dobby Loom. She’d stopped using it since getting a Jacquard loom, so I was happy to get it out of storage and give it a new home.
Driving down was amazing. The parking lot of every mall I passed was entirely full. The only highway traffic I ran into was three lanes slowed down so much that I thought I had reached the inspection point to cross into California. Nope! All that traffic was from people trying to get into and park in an outlet mall. Yikes!
This is why I don’t shop in Black Friday sales. Though the irony that I was spending all day in the car the day after Thanksgiving to go buy something was not lost on me.
Ruth Temple and her wife Lise, generously offered me crash space for the night. I was supposed to get in around 8pm, but with one thing and another (I drive slow and sometimes get lost) I ended up there around midnight. Ruth was very kind and offered me a bed and a cup of herbal tea. I mumbled something like “You are a goddess of generosity” and passed out.
The next day, Ruth offered to help me pack and move the loom, which is a substantial gift of time and labor considering the many parts of an AVL loom. I generally have a hard time accepting help, but this time I gratefully accepted.
We dropped by Tien’s house to pick up keys to the storage facility. Right after Thanksgiving is when Tien does her massive chocolatiering for charity, which was fun to see in progress. Many hands packaging tasty things. If you ever have a chance to buy a loom from someone the same weekend that they’re finishing up creating 80 pounds worth of gourmet chocolates, do so. Tien generously gave us some samples of the goodies and they tasted as wonderful as they look on her blog.
The last question I asked about the loom was whether it had a name. Tien said that she’d named it Emmy, after Emmy Noether, a mathematician known for her landmark contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. I usually like to come up with my own names for looms, but I like this one. It may stick.
Packing the car was…interesting. The question was, can you pack a 40-shaft, full-frame loom into a mid-sized SUV? The answer was, yes, barely.
As you can see, Ruth and I were both happy that it all fit in the car. There may even have been happy dancing involved.
Then another 13+ hour car trip home! This time I stopped and spent the night in Grant’s Pass, OR, because the road was getting icy and slushy. Had a good night’s sleep and then the guys unloaded the pieces and parts into my studio.
Next step? Assembly…
That’s only part of the loom. The compu-dobby and other e-lift aren’t pictured. Good thing I like puzzles!
I’ve been mending and burling the Birthday Blanket. This means painstakingly going over the fabric looking for flaws and fixing them. Most errors, like skips and floats, are easy to fix.
The one that’s been puzzling me is sleaziness.
In places where there are two consecutive shots missing, it’s easy, simply needle-weave in two new shots of weft.
But what do you do when you only missed one shot? Needle-weaving in two shots of weft in a space only big enough for one would result in fabric that was too dense. Needle-weaving in one shot would mean doubling the thread in one pick and also stand out.
I puzzled over it last night and then went to bed.
This morning I woke up with an idea: split the two-ply weft into two single plies and needle weave both singles in separately.
The first step is to needle-weave along one of the wefts, in the same shed. To make it easy to come back the other way, I made sure that the new thread was always on top of the existing weft.
Then I came back the other way, weaving between the normal and the singles weft that are in the same shed. As you can see on the left, I’m getting good results. The fabric density with the two singles closely matches that of the rest of the cloth.
Here’s a before-and-after shot of what the sleaziness in the cloth looks like, and the repair (pointed out by the needle ).
If you look closely, you’ll see singles ends sticking out of the cloth. That’s a repair where the single ply broke while I was weaving it in. You could prevent this by adding twist to the singles after you un-ply them. In this case, I was working with a sticky wool, so I just fixed the error and continued on.
And that’s my new trick for repairing sleazy areas in cloth!
Maru got excited while I was warping the last of the blanket warp. Given half a chance, he’d run into my studio and full-on attack the warp. Grabbing paw-fulls, and raking it with his back claws.
Needless to say, he got booted. Not only for the sake of the warp, but for his own. The barbs on a cat’s tongue mean that they can’t spit out yarn. Once they get it in their mouth, they have to keep eating it. Which can lead to wads of yarn in their stomach and other intestinal woes.
So if you have kitties, keeping them away from yarn is a very good thing. Since we got Maru, my studio has been almost pathelogically clean (yarn-wise, anyway.)
I’m currently working on the mending of the blanket. It’s taking longer than I’d like, but that’s how things usually go.
Today’s weaving tip: If a warp thread breaks, fix it immediately. Don’t tell yourself that you’re close to the end and can just weave it in after the cloth is off the loom; you’re not that close to the end.
This is what 9 yards looks like, wound onto the cloth beam.
This is the third warp. I’ve woven 27 yards for this project. The next step is mending, in which I fix any errors and skips in the fabric.
There are a non-trivial number of errors, but not as many as I feared there would be. When I started this project, an experienced weaver told me that it’d be impossible to weave — that all of the different threads, with their varying sizes, fibers, and amount of stretch would create bad tension.
There were only a few threads that needed special handling, those were easily dealt with using some additional weights.
The weights I’m using there are brass weights with hooks on the top. I got them from American Science & Surplus several years ago and find all kinds of uses for them in the fiber arts.
I’m actually looking forward to the mending. It’s symbolic of forgiving and fixing my own errors and flaws.
If you want to know more about the story behind the book, give it a listen. It’s a great way to pass the time while threading a loom, which is what I was doing when I played it.
It was tremendous fun chatting with Jennifer Ackerman-Haywood on the phone, and it reminded me how much I loved talking to other artists when I was producing Weavecast.
So much so that I’ve revamped the Weavecast website, separating it out from the now-archival WeaveZine site.
I also plan to produce new episodes, not at the monthly cadence I did before. But quarterly.
In other publication news, I recently heard from my editor at Storey that Inventive Weaving is going into a second printing! That means people are finding and enjoying the book. A big thank you to everyone who’s reading the book and recommending it to friends.
After spending years weaving and writing for a book, it’s great to have that book find its audience.
I was weaving along on the Birthday Blanket at a good clip when the right treadle cable broke. This was frustrating, but I take it as a sign that I’m now a “real” weaver. Though as soon as I type that, I hear Laura Fry in my head saying, “Not until you fix it, you’re not.” Fair point, imaginary Laura, fair point.
I ordered a new cable from AVL and the following steps show how I replaced it. My loom is an Production Dobby Loom built in 1984. If your PDL was born in another year, these steps might not work for you.
First you need to loosen the set screw on the collar holding the cam shaft in place.
Then slide the shaft out. (No sniggering, I can hear you!)
Next, unscrew the three screws holding the cam on.
It is a good idea to take a pencil and mark how the cam lines up before you remove all of the screws. This makes it easy to line up later.
Remove the cam.
The plug end of the cable is held in place by a ring of metal with a slot in it. The hole in the wood is big enough to put the plug and cable through, the ring with the slot covers part of the hole, effectively making it smaller.
It is a good idea at this point to measure your replacement cable and make sure it is the same size as the broken cable. (Ask me how I know…) And yes, I am wearing a leopard-print polartec adult onesie. It’s cold in my house; don’t judge.
Using a screwdriver and a hammer, gently tap the metal ring until the slot just barely clears the hole in the wood. Do not pound it all the way out, that would make it harder to put back in place.
Now you can slide the plug end of the cable out of the hole.
Reverse the previous steps to insert the new cable into the cam and attach the cam back onto the loom.
Take the cable up and OVER the cam.
When threading the cable down to the treadle, make sure to go over the wooden pulley. If you fail to do so, the cable will rub on the metal rod the pulley rides on and break again soon.
I had a wonderful time at the Columbia Gorge Fiber Festival. It’s a new festival, I believe this was it’s fourth year. It was small and had a great vibe, reminding me quite a bit of the Madrona Winter Retreat in Tacoma.
Friday night, there was a book signing with all the teachers and authors attending the event. I had the pleasure of meeting another Storey author, Lea Redmond.
She wrote Knit the Sky, which is about applying the creative process to knitting. It’s an innovative and lovely approach. In one project you use a scarf as a weather journal, in another you track the growth of a child. My favorite was the moon cowl. Half is white, and the other black, and you adjust how you wear it to match the current phase of the moon. Here I am wearing the cowl in the half-moon position.
Judith MacKenzie, my first weaving teacher was there. It felt full circle to have her there, sharing my journey from non-weaver to author of a newly published weaving book.
Another full-circle moment was re-connecting with Sarah Anderson. Once, traveling back together on an airplane after teaching at the Golden Gate Fiber Institute, she quietly confessed, “I just sold a book to Storey.” I leaned over and whispered back, “Me, too.”
She finished her book first, but I got there in the end.
The fun and irrepressible Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (aka The Yarn Harlot) decided we needed a selfie, so this happened. I’m impressed she was able to fit us all in there.
She offered to send the photo out to anyone who had Instagram, so five minutes later I had it installed and running on my phone. If you want to follow my feed, I’ve registered as @synemitchell.
In other news, I am back on the writing wagon. Today I wrote for 30 minutes.
One of the fun things about working at Google is that you get to work with smart and creative people. The photo below was created with Cloud Spin, a demo project that shows how to use Google Cloud Platform to build services for mobile apps.
The folks running the demo at the GDG conference were bemused when I showed up with my sock and a ball of yarn.
This is my representation of juggling a craft-filled life.
It would have been even more fun if I’d had several unfinished projects to juggle, but I had to work with what I had on hand.
The way the technology works is that you have a set of mobile phones arranged in a half-circle. You jump, and each phone takes a wee bit of video. The app controlling the phones inserts an audio “beep” as a marker when you jump. Then the phones upload the videos to code running in the cloud, which extracts the frame corresponding to the audio marker from each video and compiles it into a single animated GIF.
The team that created this demo did it on a nearly nonexistent budget, in three weeks. I edited the blog posts they wrote about the project. If you’re interested in the technical details and/or building your own version check them out:
And yes, seeing this photo does make me want to eat better and get more serious about exercising regularly. But you know what, if I wait until I’m thin to do fun things, that might be a long time… and I’d miss out on adventures in the meantime.
P.S. I have totally fallen down on my NaWriDaMo pledge. Epic fail. I blame the wool fumes at the Columbia Gorge Fiber Festival.
For previous book releases, I’ve made a pilgrimage to the local bookseller to take a celebratory picture standing next to the book on the shelves.
With my time almost completely taken up with working at Google and spending time with my family, I’m not sure when I’ll have time to get to a local yarn or book store. So if you see a copy out in the wild, give it a pat for me, will you?
This book is the culmination of four years of work, research, weaving that went well, weaving that didn’t, fear, day jobs, procrastination, more work, and heroic efforts on the part of my editor.
I hope you like it.
P.S. Got my 30 minutes of novel writing in yesterday and today. By the skin of my teeth today, but done!
My new book, Inventive Weaving, is scheduled to be published tomorrow, though I know that some folks who attended Rhinebeck or pre-ordered the book on Amazon have already gotten their hands on copies.
This upcoming weekend I’ll be promoting the book at the Columbia Gorge Fiber Festival, in The Dalles, Oregon. It’s one I’ve never been to and I’m interested to explore it. There are some great teachers there. Friday afternoon, I’m taking the Knit Smart class taught by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Friday, from 4pm-7pm, I’ll be participating in a book signing with all the luminaries teaching at the festival.
Saturday, I’ll demo weaving overshot on a rigid heddle loom from 11:00-11:45, near the registration desk.
Linda Gettman, one of my former students, is teaching rigid-heddle classes at the festival . I’m so proud of her! If I teach someone to weave, and they go on to teach others, does that make me a weaving grandma?
And yes, today’s 30 minutes of novel writing are done!
