Yuletide Greeting from Me and My Studio

Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

A Little Road Trip for my Fabric

Here's what 60 yards of that 60"-wide fabric looks like, loaded up and ready for delivery to the drapery-maker.  I almost can't believe I actually did this.

Destination:  J&L Draperies.  This storefront is where they meet with customers and have sample books lining the walls.  They have a separate workshop where they actually cut and sew the products.

I also got to visit the house where these are going to be installed.  The drive and carport sort of look like a hotel or something, but this is a private residence.  The layout is a square with a courtyard with pool in the center, terra cotta brick walls, brick floors and lots of glass.

These are the old curtains which will be replaced with the fabric I wove, in the family room area.

The Home Stretch

Almost done weaving this drapery yardage!  Here is the warp for the second of two runs going onto the beam.  It's sure nice to have a tension box that's meant for the loom.  I should get the right one for my other loom.  This one from AVL has adjustable tension rods, rotating reed on the front, a yardage counter and heddles to form a cross.

VLP - Weaving !

After some adjustments I got the weaving going this week.  I immediately determined that it is physically impossible to throw by hand through a 60" shed on this loom.  There's just not the leverage to impart the velocity needed to get the shuttle to the other side.  So I learned how to use the fly shuttle and about adjusting the drop boxes which is critical.  If the box is lower than the shuttlerace, the shuttle launches over the fabric and ends up on the floor at the other side of the loom.  Quite exciting.
The dobby is working great.  It's nice to not have to worry about treadling with a 100+ pick sequence.  The weaving is not as fast as I'd hoped, but acceptable.  I am so fortunate to have got connected with this loom when I did.  There's no way I could have accomplished this on the Macomber; I would have been crying.

VLP Update

Beaming went fairly smoothly, though it took a day.  There were a couple warp ends that somehow didn't make it into the section bundle, so I had to add some weighted ends, and a couple ends which caught on the pegs where I will have to deal with them being loose when I get to where the extra length is.  Threading the 1200 ends was another day.

Very Large Project Start

Spools of warp for the VLP.  20 spools each of 20/2 and 5/2 cotton.  Just the scale of this thing brings up a different set of problems to solve, like how much yarn fits onto my spools.  The spools with the thin warp have enough on them for half the entire project.  The thick yarn would not fit even that much on a spool.  What I have here is enough for 1/3 of the sections for half the project, or 1/6 the total amount I'll need.  For the second half of the project I'll try to get half the sections onto a spool.  I think by the time I'm through I will regret not having invested in an electric winder for bobbins and spools.