Food for Thought or Why So Many Pouches

This is a food for thought post for people who wonder why I recommend obsessively making many small things when learning a new string related skill.

It all started with a comment that reminded me of the pottery school story.

Students in a pottery school were graded one of two ways. One group was graded on how many pots they finished, by weight, and the other group was graded on the best pot they produced.

To many people’s surprise, the first group produced, on average, much better pots.

I’m seeing a similar metric play out in my tiny knitting. I’m just knitting little pouches. Each is small enough that I *will* finish it, even if its imperfect. Some mistakes are being repeatedly, until I eventually cut that out. Others are design features.

Even when I can’t visually spot the improvement, I can *feel* it. The fingers move more easily, the yarn tangles less, there is less need for coffee …

And there’s a similar effect in pattern designing. As I’m designing more little patterns, and then knitting them, I’m getting a better feel for how the knitting will look. I’m currently on my 19th or 20th pouch, I think. (I stopped counting, mostly.)

The patterns I’m knitting are all 2-stranded, so usually 2 colours at a time. That means the pattern graphs are simple grids. Usually 32 stitches (or 2 needles) wide, because when I’m making tiny pouches, they’re usually 74 stitches in the round. (I’m a computer geek: 8 stitches = 1 byte, so these are 8 byte pouches.)

  • Knitted Version of Celtic Circles 2
  • Second Celtic Circle variant
  • Greek Key Variant 1
Recent work on knitted pouches and patterns

Knitting in Two Colours

So lately I’ve been on a kick knitting little pouches in 2 colours. The pouches are usually 64 stitches in the round, knitted with 5 needles, so each needle (except the active one) has 16 stitches on it. They’re small enough that they knit up quickly and I can play with patterns. The last few pouches, I’ve been playing with interlaced patterns. These pouches are all knitted with 2/18 merino wool, on size 0 needles and are large enough to hold some coins, or a medallion, or some such.

Based on medieval (but much larger) pouches, they’re knitted top down, with holes near the top edge for the eventual drawstring, and finished on the bottom with a 3 needle bindoff. Basically, transfer the stitches onto 2 needles in parallel, and then on each stitch go through a stitch from each needle together. This sounds more awkward than it should.

While I think about it, the holes are made by knitting together, on each of the four needles, stitches 3&4, 5&6, 11&12, and 13&14. Then on the next row after the 3rd and 9th stitches, add 2 stitches back in using yarnovers.

  • First Attempt
  • Second Attempt
  • Doublesided
  • Still Doublesided
Experiments in Interweaving

So the red and grey was my first attempt at interlacing. While technically interlaced, the diagonal bars were two close together so you can’t really see what’s going on.

After that I started playing with the magenta, which worked better. What you can’t see in these pouches of course is the crossing point at one edge where everything looks just a little wonky because you’re knitting in the round.

Which brought me to the current attempt in green and vanilla, where the two sides of the pouch are mirror images. That way the pattern extends exactly to the edge, but no further.

Pattern for Interweaving – 32 stitches wide

The pattern here is for one side of the pouch – 2 needles wide. The light green line marks the boundary between the two needles.

Playing with Esme, the 12 harness loom and 12 harness patterns

Note: this is a picture heavy post. And I’m learning about wordpress’s new block editor, which is its own brand of fun. So layout is a trifle simplistic.


In the summer of 2019 I purchased a 12 harness tableloom from Egypt; it came packed in a lovely box, some assembly required. Which also allowed me to learn a lot baout how the whole loom was constructed. Here is what she looks like as I’ve assembled the castle – the structure that houses the 12 harnesses – and am about to tie the harnesses up to the levers that control them.

Esme’s Castle is assembled …

Since then she was assembled, I warped her up, I started weaving, I had shoulder surgery, covid hit, cancer hit, and … just recently I started weaving again. And I’ve been playing with weaving patterns that use 12 harnesses. I’ve been posting quick pics on facebook, but realistically, I would like to start collecting the patterns in a logical place. Like, uh, here …

The first placemat on Esme

So this first placemat wasn’t too complicated, because it was a modification of twill, and I could follow along with my pattern so I knew where I was. Also, I finished this first placemat before the shoulder surgery. And then I started the second placemat …

2nd placemat on Esme

And then I made the colossal mistake of stopping for 2 years … and not marking my spot in the pattern. (So the restart had … issues. And then I made a weaving mistake. And then … yeah. We’ll weave this one off and hide the bad bits.)

But meanwhile as I’m weaving I’m fantasizing about new patterns. Preferably ones that are less fiddly than this one because the fiddly doesn’t work as well as I would like because I’m working with fairly fine thread (10/2 cotton) so that the individual details fade out over any kind of distance. So after some inspirations from handweaving.net (where I had oodles of fun searching for other patterns with the same threading) the next two patterns I want to try are below. The difference is that these patterns are easier on the brain, because the changes are very predictable. Well, at least the first one.

New pattern to try

In contrast this pattern below is very different from the previous patterns, in that it has much longer floats. Now if I was weaving in wool the floats wouldn’t worry me in the slightest, because in the wet finishing the wool always felts to itself at least a little. But the current warp is cotton, which will shrink but not felt. On the other hand, this warp is set at 30 epi (ends per inch) so a 5 thread float is one sixth of an inch long. That’s about 4mm. It may be manageable. Especially if I end up throwing these into the feast kit for placemats.

2nd new pattern to try

Not dead yet …

It’s been a rough 2020, especially after the breast cancer diagnosis June 1st.  Surgery June 4th, extra surgery June 27th or so to remove the infected bits, then one more surgery to install the port just in time for chemo.

We’re on radiation now.

Today I noticed the site had been hacked, for which I apologize: it has been cleaned up with malice etc.

Weaving posts should resume in 2021, when I have the energy to do some weaving.  It may be the most basic of weaving, but at some point I will weave again.

 

Backstrap Weaving – Making Heddles

Backstrap weaving using the minimum required while making fabric, and can be improvised anywhere you can acquire stick like objects.

I’ve been diving into youtube looking for helpful videos on how to set up and weave, and this is an unordered collection of links to videos and sites that intrigued me:

I am intrigued by the variety of heddles and how tightly they are attached to the heddle stick, because these three offer three separate options.  If you want to weave using more than 2 sheds, you can add additional heddle sticks to accomplish that.  The biggest challenge seems to be keeping the length of the heddles consistent: this is less of a problem with the first two methods, where the loops aren’t tied in place.

Playing with Colours

Consider the following two patterns: they look very, very different.  The first one is basically a broken diamond twill with 12×12 squares, and I’ve been weaving various sizes of those for a while now.

But the second looks drastically different.  There’s a spiral effect, and this is highly reminiscent of greek key patterns.  Again graphed with 2 pattern repeats.

But what absolutely fascinates me is how similar the two patterns are, structurally.  If you look carefully at the warping and treadling setups, you may notice that the two patterns differ in only one way.  In the first pattern, all the warp is white and all the weft is blue.  In the second pattern both the weft and the warp alternate blue and white.

I foresee some experimentation coming up.

Class Notes for Geometric Drawing

So next week Saturday I’m going to be teaching a class on geometric drawing, using only a compass and a straight edge.  Thought I’d better get some course notes together.  So here they are.

Geometric Drawing 01 Handout

Students, you will need a ruler aka straight edge, a compass, a pencil and quality eraser, and probably one or more pens.  Paper would be really really useful too.

 

Playing with 12 harness patterns

So while I’ve been quiet here, I’ve finally been weaving on the 12 harness Leclerc.  The design of the loom, it turns out, has some major, and annoying, flaws. Worst is the way I can’t adjust the harnesses so that the string, traveling from back to front beam, lies flat.  Since the heddle eyes are below this level, the strings all come off the backbeam, slant down, go through the heddle, and then slant back up.  There’s enough distance between the first and twelfth harness that when all the harnesses are down there’s a visible deformation … And there’s tension issues, too.  Between that, and getting the loom warped, and then trying to fix it, it took a little longer to get weaving than I had hoped.

But as long as I’m weaving relatively narrow ware, and am careful, I can make it work. So I’ve been working on the rug mugs. In this picture you can see the pattern below, as well as previous pattern. The warp’s path was particularly problematical when the higher-numbered harnesses were down. The edges are not ideal (I keep meaning to weight those two edges, and then I keep forgetting, but …)

 


The pattern I used for the latest rug mug is an earlier variation of the one on the left.  The other challenge of that pattern is that in some places there are floats over 5 strings.

So the next two mug rugs are going to be a) the left pattern, and then b) the right pattern.

And I’m still playing with the same warp so I haven’t changed the threading through the heddles on the harnesses at all.  There is still so much room to play here …

Planning the First Voyageur Mug Rugs

So last night my new 12 shaft Voyageur Leclerc table loom arrived.  Unpacking her was an adventure; she was packed in a wood shipping crate in a cardboard box, with much tape.  Pity the customs inspector who had to open her up.  (Although I don’t think anyone did, actually.  She arrived ship shape and bristol clean, as it were.)

So my first project is going to be a series of mug rugs.  My goal is to experiment with the weave structures, so I’ve measure up about 5 yards, give or take, of 4/8 superwash wool (which is heat resistant and flame resistant).  79 ends, which I will be using at 12 ends per inch.  One copy of the pattern is 22 threads, so this gives me enough room for 3 repeats, with about 5 threads on each end.

So patterns.  Turns out you can do a lot with 12 harnesses … The following are just a small collection of possible patterns, all warped identically.  It’s how the harnesses are lifted and in what order that makes all the difference …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So much twill …