23/04/2015

Now what?


The fan fabric is done: inspected (several mistakes... some mis-sleying, some treadling mistakes, some must-have-been-a-bad-shed, one end not caught for long stretches), some repairs (only broken ends, the mistakes were too difficult); washed; mangled.
(I'm hoping I can get at least one shirt without glaring mistakes - perhaps it was A Good Thing I used such a busy/uneven pattern?)

So what have I learned? I think the most important thing is not to sley three per dent, because 1) it is very difficult to get it correct and 2) all too often the three ends did not separate when crowded.

I would have used a temple, had I but planned better: just five centimetres wider, and my biggest temple would have worked. Or: just 10 cms narrower, and one of the shorter temples would have been enough.

I also have learned to look better at the yarns when doing fairly dense setts - some of the spools had twisted-together ends, when they might have been knotted for better strength. I might have seen the knots, but the twists just separated.


Perhaps also it would have been better with fewer shafts? The more shafts, the more difficult to optimize the sheds. Here I had 8 shafts, and after too much fiddling I decided the top of the sheds were "good enough"... wrong decision, obviously.

It was "interesting" to mangle a fan fabric. As you have seen, there are small bumps in the cloth when weaving. They are not all gone when washed, and even knowing the trick of only smoothing to the sides (never along the warp) when rolling, some bumps wanted to stay.

No matter how tight one tries to make the roll, after a couple of passes it has loosened - partly because of the back-and-forth motion of the mangle, partly because the cloth flattens. Because of the persistent bumps, I re-rolled several more times than I normally do. The result is ok, though.
(But I "cheated" and pressed after mangling, also to help with the after-drying...)

Some pics:



Now to decide what kind of shirt to make, to go with the sort-of-diagonal-ish pattern.
One of the obvious choices is a not-really-shaped top, but there are five metres of fabric...
Perhaps some kind of kimono (or do I mean bat-wing?) "over-shirt", perhaps? I'm not sure about set-in sleeves with a fabric like this - thinking that probably they have to be matched in some way.

For now, the fabric sits on a roll on top of the fabric shelves.

1 comment:

Laura Fry said...

That turned out really well. Looking forward to seeing what you sew. :)

And I think you had a birthday recently? Hope it was a happy one and best wishes for the coming year. :)

cheers,
Laura