Sheep fleece that has been washed and is drying in the sun.
Wool fleece that has now been combed into roving.
My pair of Viking combs made by Valkyrie Supply that Ive been using to prepare my fleece for spinning.
The loom that the Fiber Arts Studio has generously allowed me to check out for this project. It is a 4-shaft LeClerc Nimbus. The cardboard is to protect it from my pet rabbits.)
Slowly but steadily I spin the 4,000 yards of yarn needed for my project. I’m spinning on a Kromski Fantasia wheel.
As of the 4th week of winter quarter, I have two skeins of yarn finished that total about 950 yards. The picture on the left shows how I store them – twisted up to keep them neat and tidy. The photo on the left is the skeins untwisted to give an idea of how much yarn I’ve actually spun so far.
I couldn’t decided between red and purple stripes, so I decided to sketch it out and see what I liked best. I went with red.
In order to best estimate how much dyestuffs I needed, I had to estimate how much yarn I would need for each color and what it would weigh.
Once I had the yarn weight estimated, I could calculate how much woad, madder, and saffron I need.
There’s a good amount of math involved in creating a garment from scratch…
This is all of the yarn that I have spun in fall and winter quarter – 1,898 yards. I’ll have to buy the yarn for the warp, but I can say that the entirety of the weft will be handspun.
It’s always a good time to dye! From left to right: saffron bath, woad vat, madder bath
All of my yarn after dyeing. The purple is from an overdye of cochineal and woad.
The beginning of dressing the loom. In the left photo I’m spacing out the warp and tying it onto the back beam. On the right is what it looks like once the warp is wound on and before I start the task of threading the heddles and reed.
Finishing dressing the loom. On the left is what the loom looks like with all of the heddles threaded. On the right is after threading all of the warp strings again, but this time through the reed; once that is done, I tied it onto the front beam.
I finally started weaving! I decided to hem the edges and remove any fringe, but I hemstitched the ends of each panel anyways (right photo) so it wouldn’t unravel once I removed them from the loom.
Weaving is much quicker than spinning. I wove nearly 42 inches after about 15 hours.
Taking the first two panels off the loom. I wove two panels on a single warp; in the photo on the left you can see that I placed spacers after the first panel so I could keep weaving.
Right around when I finished the second panel, I realized that I wasn’t going to have enough weft to weave the other two panels. It turns out my textile didn’t want to be a chiton, it wanted to be a himation, which is a very long rectangular piece of fabric that would have always accompanied a chiton. I decided to dress the loom again and only weave with my blue weft until it was used up to create a middle panel. It didn’t take long – the middle panel is less than two feet.
Here I’m starting to hem the edges. I used leftover yarn as sewing thread and cut off the fringe as I went.
*** I forgot to take pictures of the himation once I sewed all of the pieces together and hemmed it. I’m so sorry!
The last step of a woven textile is finishing and fulling. At the very least, a handwoven textile should soak in water; to make it a bit more stable one should probably full it. Fulling is soaking the wool fabric in hot soapy water and agitating; you’re essentially felting it a little, but on purpose. Once the himation finished drying, all that was left was to trim all of the weft ends.
And here is the finished himation. It clocks in a bit over 11 feet long. It’s surprisingly light but very warm. Fulling also made it a bit softer, which my skin is happy about.A close-up of the himation. I feel you can really see the handmade nature of it here.
I wanted to model the himation in order to show how it would have been worn. Luckily, I had a simple chiton I made several years ago for a costume. The chiton and the himation look good together, don’t you think?
