Friday, September 30, 2016

Knitting Block (Still Weaving Though!)

Weaving a pie crust recipe


So I haven't actually knit anything for what seems to be a very long time. I've been working on the burgundy cardigan (top-down, raglan, v-neck, pockets) for a while and just passed the armholes, but I'm really just not feeling it, so it's going to be frogged. I just ripped out my red dress (third time is decidedly not the charm) that had been on the needles for a very long time indeed. I haven't been working on that black brioche dress either, for which I'm in the process of deciding whether to rip out and start over as a regular ribbed turtleneck tank dress or to simply continue onward as is.


Difficult colours to capture on a cloudy, cloudy day


At the very least, though, I've still been crafting away! In reality, this was something I was supposed to be working on all summer, but which in fact I've only started some couple of weeks ago and finished the first part of a couple of days ago (it's a series). So I'm counting that as a little victory.


Is it a scarf? Is it a table runner? The possibilities are endless!

I was supposed to have had this done months ago, and by this point to have had the entire series just about complete. Sadly, I didn't realize how tuckered out I was going to be after complete liberation from the educational system that is university, so I wasn't able to follow the proposed (admittedly probably a little herculean) schedule I had submitted for my grant. I got right on purchasing the right colours of yarn from colourmart more or less immediately after I got the grant, so that I could start weaving anytime, but then lost all momentum once I settled into my new job/position. It didn't help that the yellow I had ordered for the butter colour turned out to be more like a turmeric yellow (I ended up using it in my mokoshi).




I think I finally sat myself down and figured out ingredient weight ratios for some recipes (all pies, since those were what had started the series) on excel sometime around halfway through summer? And then my original plan was thwarted because Sandy, my floor loom, was too large to be set up in my room - or anywhere else in the house for that matter, apart from the basement, and there were a couple of logistics as to why not the basement. So I had all my materials, but couldn't do the twill that I had originally planned on doing, because twill! And thus completely fell out of it again.


One pick of the subtlest of all clasped wefts probably ever woven

In the end, I set up the table in my room again (since I had put it away for a good chunk of the summer months to free up some walking space) and set up Coraline, the AKL. I completely scrapped the twill idea after very briefly considering, then immediately discarding, the idea of doing a 3-shaft twill on the AKL. I figured I'd get pretty much the perfect sett if I simply used two 12.5dpi heddles to double the epi and didn't want to risk having a sparsely populated warp just so I could end up with a weft-faced twill. I'm very happy to say that I'm incredibly pleased with the way this wrap turned out! The yarn is incredibly soft, which helps a bunch, but the subtle hues and surprising amount of water content that goes into a pie crust, even if the majority of it evaporates, came out to be a pleasant surprise. I somehow expected much starker delineations between the ingredients (probably because I had originally intended them to be completely separate, one colour chunk after the other), but I quite like how randomly dispersing the ingredients turned out, both visually and as a parallel to the process of making the crust.


Well-proportioned scarf.


I'm thinking of putting the entire series into my etsy store once I complete it. For the time being though, work on that grant update in the hopes of being able to receive financial backing to complete it.

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