Spinning for My Warp

Dear Fellow Weaver and/or Spinner,

Thank you for joining me on this adventure to weave with my hand spun.

It has long been a passion of mine to use what I spin in my weaving and I have done just that a number of times already. However, I have believed that my hand spun yarns should always be used in the weft. It has, however, bothered me that this was the excepted way of using hand spun.

I have always spun bumpy yarns with lots of character that works very well for my weft in many different weaving projects including my purses and bags. The yarns are what I use in the weft to weave the finished pieces for the purse as shown in the pix above.

Since this is all I have ever used my hand spun yarns for, I have never bothered to make a very fine yarn. I always felt that if I spun too fine a yarn I would not be able to use it in my weaving and therefore never tried. But then a student of mine, Rachel, and I were talking about the fact that the first weavers only had the spindle and used that yarn they created for both the weft and the warp. It therefore, stands to reason that we could also use our yarns for both purposes.

It is on this premise that I have started spinning a very fine thread of 50% silk and 50% camel. It has the advantage of wanting to be thin by nature. This I learned from listening to the very informative podcast, yarnspinners@gmail.com. Post 31 Bamboo and Tencel was all about how to spin these fibers into yarn. They also talked about silk and blends. In this podcast I learned that it is easiest to spin silk into a very fine yarn. However, I have spun it successfully into a very nice bumpy yarn, shown in the photo above. I was anxious to try their method of spinning the fiber to get a very smooth yarn that is very fine and very strong.

Here is were the connection to the warp yarns was made. I am now in the process, as I mentioned above, making a yarn that is strong enough, hopefully, to allow me to warp with it. And then weave a fine cloth. Something I have not tried, either.

Here is the yarn so far, still in the process of being spun.

This blog will be the rest of the process for the making of this cloth from this fine yarn. I will keep you posted. Fail or Succeed. You will see the progress as it happens, in real time. Keep in mind, I will not always be available to blog daily, but I will try as often as I can, so check back regularly to see how it is going and add your voice to my experiment.

Thank you for your interest,

Liana
lianasloom.com