A Cold Start...

Beginning the large 3-piece rug; first panel (will be 15"x5' when completed)

Hello lovely people.

Rosemarie-Flavored Popsicle (eww...)

It is brutally COLD.  If using all capital letter is not dramatic enough to indicate the current temperature, my picture should act as testament as to how cold it is outside.  My eyelashes and hair are frozen, and I even have a frost mustache!  I love the winter weather, but there is not much one can do outside in such frigid conditions, other than stay warm inside and weave away.

I have begun weaving the first panel of my upcoming 4'x5' rug, and so far it is going swimmingly.  I have about 2' woven already, and I hope to have this first panel completed by the end of the week.  I had put so much careful planning into the warp size and each individual color (of which there are 12), that I was nervous to get started; I was afraid that I would make some terrible mistake, and the entire thing would be ruined.  Overreaction?  Quite.  But I wanted to make sure that this piece is perfect, as it will be featured in my senior show in the fall.

For any weavers out there, I have also included an image below of the shaft-switching technique that I use.  If, however, you are not a weaver, you can either try and figure out what I am talking about or skip this next paragraph altogether.

Shaft-switching, using beads on the warps to change harnesses

Shaft-switching is a weaving technique in which the weaver can change the harnesses in which a warp (the white string, in my case) is bound to during the weaving process; normally, everything is threaded before-hand, and changing the pattern is impossible.  I had originally used safety pins through the eye of the heddles, clipping the heddle to the warp strings.  Proving useful but inefficient as the safety pins would always fly off of the loom, I switched to using beads with string tied around them.  The warp is threaded through the string with the bead attached while threading the entire warp through the heddles; using flexible, string heddles on the first two harnesses, the two that I can "switch," I am able to take the bead attached to the warp string and push it through the eye of the string heddles.  So far, the weaving process has been smooth and the beads and string heddles have proved themselves very easy to hook-up and use; they have become good friends to me in my time of need.

Ski shuttles

Ski shuttles, complements of my professor, Morgan Clifford, are also a good friend of mine.  A shuttle acts as a little "vehicle" in which you wind your weft (the dyed wool yarn, in this instance); it carries the weft back and forth through the shed (the space created when lifting each harness).  These "ski shuttles" are super special, not only because they look cool, but also because they glide easily when weaving (which is incredibly helpful when one is weaving rugs).

And on that note, my friends, I bid you ado.  As always, thanks for reading and have yourselves a lovely, cold day.

P.S.  The more I use weaving terminology, the more I realize that anyone that has not woven before probably has no idea what I am talking about, and for that, I apologize.  Perhaps I shall have to include a blog post purely on "weaving explained," should the interest be there...