Field trip!  We had a great trip to Nancy Ellison’s farm near Zumbrota – DESPITE the cold and drizzly day, an anomaly following several perfect spring weeks in Minnesota.  All of Nancy’s beautiful long-haired sheep were shorn on Good Friday, leaving them a bit patchy-looking.  Normally they would have been in a distant pasture eating fresh greens, so we appreciated the fact Nancy kept them in the barn for viewing.

From an earlier trip, here’s how they look in full long-fibered glory.

Veronna started off a really interesting discussion of hems and edges of textiles when she described a recent project, monksbelt runners in pearl cotton.  “Oh,” she noted when she took them off the loom, “It looks like I was drunk at one point and here at another.”  Hardly.  There’s more on that discussion on my “Bound to Weave” blog, “Showing Your Good Side.” She shared two interesting lessons from that piece.  She made color windings of the yarns, around a card, to test out combinations.  Then she made both a black-and-white photocopy and a color photocopy of the combinations.  The black-and-white helped show relative contrast of dark and light.  Also, when you weave monksbelt with the same color for the base and pattern weft, it is really two colors, because of the reflective properties of the yarn.

Veronna suggested we look at the swatch photos for patterns in Mary E. Black’s New Key to Weaving found in a new digital collection sponsored by the government of Novia Scotia.

Judy brought rouched scarves made with lace-weight yarn, silk  120 inches long, 72 inches, and Jaeger zephyr wool silk.

She made a rug in monksbelt pattern using fabric strips. She sleyed poly-cotton carpet warp at 12 epi.

Patty Kuebker Johnson talked about the color and weave study group sponsored at Color Crossing.  It’s especially useful for those who don’t do a lot of fine thread weaving.  “Unless you have a weft-faced or warp faced weave, you are always dealing with the interaction of the thread colors,” she explained.   Once it’s on the loom the study group members sign up for time slots to weave off samples.

Robin Meadow noted that a new session of the color exploration class, Stripes and Structures to Create Tantalizing Towels, was starting soon.  She’s taken it twice, and as a new weaver, found it enormously helpful each time. You work in different structures, different color palettes,  and it requires diligent production weaving.  Why take it twice? You deal with different color ways, different loom personalities, and even different weave structures from one class to the next. Patty said that she uses the towels she makes as runners until they become dishtowels.  Below is a jumble of the towels Robin wove in her last class, a bad photo of lovely items.

Melba Granlund spent a fantastic week taking the basic Swedish weaving course at Becky’s Vavstuga. “You weave like you’re crazy,” Melba said.  There were eight people in the class, two of whom had never woven before.  Her completed pieces were beautiful.

A perennial weaving problem is time, never enough time for weaving. At one point the issue was raised about weaving just a bit each day on a project. Isn’t  there a problem with a difference  in beating? Are some portions more tightly woven than others?  Patty noted that she encounters this more with with knitting than weaving.  She advised, “Warping is the hard part!  Reward yourself for each step of the way.  Today I wind the warp – that’s the assignment.  The next day, put it on the back beam.  Break it into segments and reward yourself for the completion of each.”  Meeting with our group is good for encouragement – the encouragement of example, and the encouragement of tips.

Nancy Ellison brought some handspun yarn to our September Scandinavian Weavers meeting.  “Oh!” was the feeling as she opened the bag. Everyone resisted the impulse to reach out.  We waited our turns nicely as the soft threads were passed.  The brown-to-gray strands of wool beautifully displayed the changing coat color of the sheep over the seasons.

Nancy and her sheep were recently featured on a southern MN public television program called “Off 90.”

I think we would all agree with this statement from that segment.  “You can weave your whole life and never scratch the surface in the types of weaving you can do, so it’s something you will never be bored with.”

Our Scanweavers group on Sunday, November 20, was small.  For those of you who weren’t able to meet our guest, Elizabeth Kolb, look what you missed!

Elizabeth weaves beautiful bands in her remote cabin in the Yukon Territory.  She wrote, “I use a back-strap rigid heddle, with a short slot modification, for pick-up patterns.  I make these heddles and the shuttles I use.  I have been weaving and selling some bands for parka and mukluk trim in the Northwest Territories and The Yukon Territory, and I am also teaching at The Braid Society conference in Manchester, England next summer.  There I am excited to meet people who have been tracking down patterns in various Scandinavian and Baltic museums, and weaving these warp- faced, patterned bands with other, related, techniques.”

The heddles for her backstrap loom are beautifully crafted objects with twig edges and reindeer horn heddles.  She weaves bands in pearl cotton and sells them to Inuit women, who love bright colors.  Many women gravitated to a zig-zag pattern that resembles commonly-used rick rack.

How long does it take you to weave the bands, one of our group asked.  “I could conceivably weave a meter in an hour,” she said, “but I wouldn’t be able to do anything for the rest of the day.”

She weaves narrow silk bands for bracelets, trimmed with reindeer leather and musk ox horn closures.  The narrow bands also work as a way to display a variety of patterns, so that her Inuit customers can custom order a favorite style.

Elizabeth began her textile work with nålbinding.  She loved studying the structures.  It’s an early Scandinavian technique, but practiced in other areas of the world.  She’s eager to study further.  “It’s practiced in the Middle East, too.  There could be some neat nålbinding in remote parts of Iran and Oman.”  She reconstructed horsehair boots in nålbinding.  The boots were used with wool felt shoes inside and grass for insulation.  The coarse nålbinding exterior was durable, and could also have added traction in the snow.

Elizabeth is moving fast on her path to textile mastery; her next step is floor loom weaving.  Her mother, who lives in Marine on St. Croix, bought her a used Leclerc.  It’s probably a ploy to keep her daughter for longer visits, and we hope it’s long enough for her to visit our group again.