Native Big Blue

The rain last night bent over the clumps of native prairie grass, Big Bluestem. Some of us like to use the colored, segmented dried stems as wefts. It's flowering now, and the stems will continue to color into September, when we harvest it. We cut it with scissors, wrap it in bed sheets, and put it out in the sun to dry for a week. I like to use it in a plainweave linen warp on the big barn loom with traditional Scandinavian ticking stripes. With Finnish and Japanese paper yarns it has a crosscultural feeling that I like: Japanese and Finnish.

Lingonberry

The unbleached 16/2 linen inlay took almost 6 hours to do. It was hard to see, so I had to remove more than one error. My edges took a beating from reaching around the weave to hold the paper pattern up, but it was worth the trouble. The rest of the runner/window weave will take less time to finish than the inlay did. The traditional combination of half-bleached and unbleached linen in a weave is very attractive. Do it again? Yes, yes, yes!

Finish and Begin Again

The first window weave is off the loom, hemmed and ready to deliver. Now I'm moving to my next project, a spaced linen warp with rya knots made of Finnish paper yarn, Japanese paper yarn, linen, and silk ribbon. It's another in my series of All My Eggs in One Basket. I'm excited, but it is time consuming to weave it, and there is a mid June deadline. I'm happy that the loom is already warped with enough linen to do this project. The linen on the
9 silver paper pirns is to weave the tab loops to hang the finished weave.

Sweet

All the problems are fixed, the tension is right, and the linen likes the present humidity. What a pleasure to be weaving at last!

Grass Weave

Here are all the ingredients for my next grass, linen and japanese paper yarn weave. My unbleached 20/1 linen warp is finally wound on and correctly threaded, though a demon must have been in the loom this time. The 5 yard warp was days in the making. Errors kept showing, and I had to rethread it again, and again. I finally quit fighting the frustration and submitted to the process, until there were no doubled threads or two threads to a dent. Though it was just plain weave it certainly got the upper hand this time.

The yarn is paper yarn with a silk strand, from Habu, and the grass is the native midwest prairie grass called Big Bluestem. It is a sturdy stemmed, jointed grass that has a blue cast coloration when it matures in August, and is about 4 - 6 feet tall. These prairie grasses covered the Great Plains when western settlement happened in the 19th century. Gradually they were plowed down as crops were planted, but now there are many who wish to restore these native grasses and flowers to our lands. We cut bluestem grass stems with a scissors in late August,
when the grass is ripe, and let them dry in the sun before bundling and storing them to weave. I think they resemble bamboo, and remind me of Japanese design when I weave with them in Swedish linen warp.