January Progress

 Yes, I know it’s almost the end of February.  We shall ignore that.

January was a surprisingly good time.  I did a bunch of things I wasn’t expecting to do, but nevertheless enjoyed getting done immensely.

• Words written: 4,865
• Weaving time (goal 10 h): 12 hours, 1 minute
• WIPs finished: 3(!)
• Items mended: 7

Word count and weaving time are self explanatory, I think. Let’s look at the other two instead.

WIPs Finished: 3

In a happy turn of events, I finished three times as many things as I was aiming for. 

The  Ranger Cowl

This thing had been sitting, 98% completed, for months.  It literally just needed to be sewn up.  It took less than half an hour.

One day I will work out why I procrastinate so badly about finishing things.  And then I will sell the secret, and be rich.

Tablet band

This tablet band is based off of a find from the Oseberg ship burial.  The threading can be found here.  I managed to get a few different patterns out of the same warp, using different numbers of forwards/backwards rotations.  All the tablets were turned as a single pack; I’m sure you could have even more patterns if you divided the cards into several packs and turned them different ways.

The original Oseberg pattern, turned all forwards, then all backwards to unwind the twist.

Turning the cards 4F/4B.

 

I believe this pattern was 8F/8B, but I forgot to write it down.

It came out about 5mm wide, just less than half the original band’s width.  I’ll probably use it for hanging loops on tea towels and such, since the threads are 100% cotton.  There are more photos on my Tumblr here.

Eri silk sample

After much, much, much procrastination, I finally wet-finished a little sample of silk I spindle spun *mumbles* time ago.  Wet finishing is not particularly difficult, but it’s one of the (many) finishing tasks I procrastinate on horribly.  It’s much more fun to pick up another spindle and keep spinning, than it is to muck about with soap and water and fibre.

I spun this firstly, to test how I like spinning silk, and secondly, to see how easy I found spinning fine with it. The answers are “lovely to work with” and “much easier than I expected, but Dog have mercy on your soul if you break the thread and need to rejoin it”.

It came out at 22.4 m long, ~36 WPI, plied 2sZ.  That’s two lengths of yarn spun anticlockwise, and then plied together clockwise, for those that don’t speak spinner.  I can’t tell you the weight; my scales aren’t accurate enough.  I just pulled a small chunk of fluff off the end of the silk top and set to spinning.

I think the next thing to do with it, is test it out as a sewing or embroidery thread. My spinning still isn’t terribly consistent, so I don’t think it would hold up to tablet weaving just yet (and 22m isn’t enough to test that). My joins in particular leave much to be desired. Luckily I still have 50 g of top to practice with (though some of that will be blended with other fibres before it’s spun). 

Eventually I want to be able to produce my own silk thread for using on historical re-enactment kit - it was a common use for silk thread in our time period (1350-1450 Europe), particularly for higher-class people.

Although, historically, silk sewing thread was produced from reeled cocoons. Reeled silk is stronger than spun, because it’s all one length of thread. It’s also hellishly expensive and requires the silkworm larvae to be boiled alive, a practice I vehemently disagree with. So I buy Eri silk instead. Also called “peace silk”, it’s produced by allowing the silkworm larvae to complete their full life cycle and emerge from the cocoon as moths. (Some tussah, or wild, silks also allow the larvae to survive. Unfortunately it’s very difficult to find out for sure whether that’s the case from suppliers.)

Items Mended: 7

I wasn’t expecting to get this much mending done this month. Except you see, one of my favourite YouTubers issued a small challenge. And I happily climbed on board. I even made a slightly terrible YouTube video myself, outlining my Pile o’ Doom and my plans to get through it.

I had thought about doing another “this is where I finished” type video, but 1) the weather decided filming outside was not going to happen 2) my house is basically the worst-lit goblin den in existence 3) I didn’t want to bore my non-existent audience with my inane ramblings and appalling editing skills. (I figure I have at least another 10 or so videos to make before my editing upgrades from “appalling” to merely “bad”. The inane ramblings shall continue unabated.)

However, there is a substantial decrease in the mending pile, which always makes me happy. (It was almost immediately filled by a bunch of t-shirts that decided their topstitching was due to break, all at the same time. I did not buy these t-shirts at the same time. There’s easily two years between the oldest and newest in the pile. To say I am Annoyed is an understatement.)

Hopefully I won’t be a month late on my next one of these. Hopefully I’ll blog about literally anything else in between - I have several finished objects to brag about, and The Key to Weaving isn’t going to explain itself. (Unless you have the book, I suppose…)

Til next time, friends!