I enjoy the selection of vendors, there are enough weaving vendors to keep it interesting. Now that I am a little more serious about spinning, knitting, and crocheting there are a lot more vendor stalls that I have to wander through.
I went this year with the intent purpose of getting some cotton sliver. I had contacted Mielke's Fiber Arts last week to make sure they would have cotton with them. It felt a little silly to be inquiring about cotton at a wool festival, but that is how it goes. They had a bag with an assortment of cotton top. It has natural colored green, cinnamon, and brown top along with white Pima easy to spin cotton. I am planning to spin this on the Lendrum once I am done with the Haunui NZ Halfbred wool that I am currently spinning. I could just take the wool off the wheel as I have enough bobbins, but I do not want to start accumulating a bunch of half done spinning projects along with all of the half done weaving projects that I have.
I had also contacted Barb at Weavers Loft and asked her to bring me a roll of texsolv cord. When I went to dress the 120cm Glimakra Standard I realized I never put all of the treadles on the loom. I did not have enough texsolv cord on hand, so I had to swipe a bunch of treadle cords from the 110cm Glimakra Standard in order to dress it. Now I will be able to replace all of those cords and have plenty left for using the various dräll pulleys that I have and want to try.
As we walk out of Barb's booth, she had a yarn tree full of cones of yarn and there were cones of Lunatic Fringe's new Tints and Tones yarns. The Burnt Umbar and the Copper are just gorgeous! All that was on the yarn tree were cones of 5/2, but I wanted the 10/2. So back into the booth I went and found a kit that had the colors I wanted plus some of the greys as well in the size and quantity that I wanted. I had not planned on buying yarn, but those colors just grabbed me and would not let go!
The meet-up was great as well. There were 9 of us and it is always fun to meet people you chat with on-line face to face. I met a couple of new people, so that was fun. We were all sitting around a picnic table talking fiber while the husbands that were there chatted under a tree.
I had sleyed the 1,632 ends on the upholstery warp and ended up finding 2 big sleying errors, one on each end. Last weekend I was so disgusted with myself over it, I just walked way from the loom before I did something stupid. I had yarn left from the cross-body bag that I had crocheted, so I made a sling for my Contigo water bottle. I liked how it came out, so when I went grocery shopping last Sunday, I stopped at Joann Fabrics and bought a skein of Lion Brand 24/7 cotton and made another sling. The purple goes better with my handwoven backpack.
I have the upholstery fabric weaving but I was getting some very bad sheds on a few of the treadles and there were a lot of skipped threads. There was much to much unweaving going on so I bit the bullet and climbed back into the loom and redid all of the tie ups. Yep, all 100 cords were taken off. I leveled the lamms, and just carefully tied everything back up. All of that work was so worth it. I have beautiful, clear sheds with a flat floor to them. Weaving is a dream now, it is going so much smoother.
I tried a number of different yarns for the weft and I settled on using a couple of cones of linen that I bought way back when I went to Midwest Weaver's in 2005. I should get the yarn balance out and check the weight of the yarn because the cones are not marked. I plied them on the Ashford E3 and am using the plied yarn as the thick pick and a natural 16/2 linen as the thin pick. I really like how this is weaving. When I am sitting at the loom it is hard to see the block changes, but when I step away, the changes can be seen. I believe that it will be a pretty slick looking fabric when it is finished.
So far I have been able to stick with trying to get some projects done. The upholstery fabric is weaving, the first half of the Haunui braid is almost spun, and the multi-directional scarf is close to being finished. It feels good seeing progress on these projects.
