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My newest blankets are woven from a mix of hill and mountain wools, including: Lleyn, Black Welsh Mountain, Castlemilk Moorit, Shetland Moorit, Shetland silver, Shetland white, Hebridean, and Manx Loughtan wools.  Some of these are listed as rare by the Rare Breeds Survival Trust.

I was very much involved in the making of these blankets and managed to record many, although not quite all, of the processes undertaken to create them.

The story starts at Farfield Mill.  At this Arts and Heritage Centre on the outskirts of the Yorkshire Dales market town of Sedbergh, there is a Master Weaver named David and a young trainee weaver named Juliette.  Together they spend most weekends wrestling with a warping mill more than a century old, a Dobcross loom which dates back to the 1930s and a somewhat newer Somet loom which is still significantly older than Juliette (although slightly younger than me!)  My blankets were woven on the Somet.

There are many steps involved in weaving.  Here, for your reading delight, is my account of each of step we took in the weaving of my Mountain Blankets.

Step 1:  Splitting Cones

Cones winder in action

When yarn is wound onto cones it’s not necessarily the right length for the project.  If there’s too much yarn on the cone it needs to be split down into smaller cones prior to setting the creel.  This sounds like something akin to going fishing for lobster but watch the video to get an idea of what I am talking about.

Video: Splitting Cones

There is quite a bit of maths involved prior to splitting.  First, the cones need to be weighed to work out how much yarn is actually on them.  Then we decide how many sections are required to wind the full width of the warp.  The next step is to work out how many ends of how many different colours are needed in each section, and then figure out how long a length we need on each cone so that we won’t run out of yarn part way around the warping mill and have to tie a knot, or waste a lot of yarn.

Setting the creel

I do like a challenge, but the back breaking and mind-bending process of setting and re-setting the creel ten times, with 80 different individual cones each time, taught me a lesson as to why so many blankets are made up of geometrically repeating patterns.  It’s because for those blankets you only need to set the creel ONCE!  My Mountain Blanket is definitely not a repeating pattern but that makes it even more special and unique.

Step 2:  Winding the warp

Preparing the lease

After setting the creel, the yarn is pulled from each cone and threaded through an eyelet.  The yarn is then drawn through a short reed which allows every other thread to be lifted out of the way to create what is known as a ‘lease’.  This keeps the threads in order and assists with threading the heddles on the loom at a later stage.

Winding a section

The entire set of threads is then hooked onto the warping mill and aligned so as to butt up to the previous section but not cover it, measured to ensure the section doesn’t get too wide or too narrow, and winding begins.  One full turn around Farfield’s old warping mill equates to 7 yards.  In no time at all we had a 77 yard warp section wound and it was back to step one.

Getting the beam in

Fast forward to three days later………and…

Beaming off

Step 3:  Beaming off

Having wound the warp, it’s then time to beam it off.  Manhandling the beam into place took longer than winding the warp onto the beam!  But once the beam is back on the loom threading can begin in earnest.

Video: Beaming

Step 4:  Threading

This was, by comparison to all that had gone before, a calm and quiet process.  Once the steel heddles had been counted and moved into the right sections of the shafts, it was time to wipe oil from the hands, ask Juliette politely if she could climb into the middle of the loom (she was the only one of the three of us slim enough to fit), and begin to thread almost 1000 ends of yarn through the heddle eyes.  As Juliette separated each thread in order I passed each one through a heddle.  The order of threading determines part of the pattern in the cloth.  David finished that process and between them Master Weaver and assistant placed a drop pin onto each thread to stop the loom automatically should a warp end break during weaving.  It’s almost but not quite time to weave.

Preparing to thread

Heddles lined up for threading

Droppers in place

Pattern card punched

Step 5:  Tensioning and Adjusting

The final stage before weaving was to tie on and tension the threads.  This is not quite as simple as on a handloom but for those of you reading this who are weavers it is a similar process.  Getting the leno and selvedge threads to behave was a bit more challenging.

Then it was time to put the weft into place, test the rapiers to make sure they were picking up the weft correctly, tension the weft, punch the cards for the pattern, insert the pattern cards, and flick the switch to commence weaving.

Making sure the weft picks were correctly spaced was the last thing to test and off we went, clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety, clickety, clickety clack.

Video: Weaving on the Somet

Step 6:  Weaving

Mountain Blanket on the loom

It takes less than twenty minutes to weave a large blanket when things are running smoothly but a handful of pesky knots and lenos gave us a bit more downtime than we would have liked.  Breakages need to be fixed as the weaving progresses or they ruin the cloth.  The loom is stopped while the warp threads are unknotted and darned back into the cloth, then away we go again, constantly checking that the weft is being correctly placed.  Old looms need nursing more than modern ones and when things go wrong it’s not always a straight-forward process to mend them, but David knows his stuff and Juliette is learning fast.

After two weekends of weaving my entire woven web came off the loom and I took it home to check for errors and fix them.

Finally it was time to send the whole piece up to Schofields Finishers in Galashiels.  That oily web, rather stiff and rough in its raw state, came back three weeks later looking, feeling and smelling just beautiful.  A study in British wool if ever there was one.  I hope you will agree.

June 23rd and 24th 2017 will see thousands of wool enthusiasts heading to Cockermouth in west Cumbria for a two day extravaganza of wool.  Sheep and other woolly creatures will be on hand to show off their myriad breeds and wool types.  Weaving, knitting and dyeing events take place all over the auction mart.  Vendors tout their wares and customers eye up what’s new, what’s back in stock, and rue the day they didn’t buy it last year as it’s all gone now!

Laura’s Loom will be on stand D79-80 this year – a double stand with a bit more room for both customers and ‘staff’.  My helpers this year will include daughter Caroline and weaving friend Ali.  Neither one is entirely sure what they have let themselves in for!

For us the event has begun days in advance, getting stock ready and packed into boxes and bags.  The day before we will drive up the motorway to Penrith, turn west to Keswick and arrive at Mitchell’s Auction Mart in Cockermouth ready to set up our stand.  It’s an inspiring drive as we head towards the mountains of the Lake District National Park.  With a trusty trolley at the ready and willing arms, we tote the bags and boxes from car to stand, set up the tables, attempt to artfully arrange a few cloths, display a few baskets and hey presto…..four hours later……our stand is ready!

The fun part of these events is meeting up with vendors past and present who over the years become friends or at the very least friendly faces.  We’re all competing for a slice of the same pie, but the woolly world is a warm world where we can greet each other with a smile and catch up on news from other events, new products, new colours, and how’s the family.

At 10am the doors open and we’re ready to greet our customers as visitors from far and near stream through the doors.  Some return year on year, many are new and it’s time to tell our story once again.  It never fails to amaze me how many people are interested in wool.  That’s great news for the future of the British wool industry.  I’ve seen it grow tremendously over the last ten years.  Long may it continue.

And now for something totally different.  Not all my inspiration comes from natural landscape features.  Occasionally I am moved to create from a completely unexpected source and in this case it was penguins – not the birds but the books!  The town where I live, Sedbergh, is also known as England’s Book Town.  We are a small town with mighty ambitions and for a while we did have lots and lots of bookshops.  We still have lots of books but concentrated into fewer shops, one of which – Westwood Books – has been listed by the Guardian as one of the top 10 second-hand bookshops in the country.  If you like your books and a good coffee then come on over for some serious browsing, and you can pop in to my workshop at the same time.

But I digress.  What was it about the books you might wonder?  Well, for quite a few years I was one of several resident artists at another of our town’s attractions – Farfield Mill, an old spinning mill now transformed as an arts and heritage centre.  One year we put on a series of exhibitions taking various themes as our starting point.  In one case the theme was the book town.  Where to start?  I didn’t have a clue!  But one day, wandering  past one of the bookshops I noticed a whole shelf of old Penguin books, the ones with the classic black, white and orange spines.  And there it was, my inspiration.  I started with those colours but then remembered that Penguin did a whole range of these classic covers using different colours for different genres:  orange was for fiction, green was for crime, travel came in pink covers and essays were clad in purple.  Those covers are now iconic and instantly recognisable – talk about branding!

So here are my first clutch of Penguin scarves, on display with some classic old books and a contemporary deck chair.

The first lot were woven in lambswool and a couple in silk. 

I liked the silk ones best and now that I was getting into my stride I morphed from orange into all the colours of the Penguin rainbow and started to play around with the design. 

I was for the first time discovering the power of unbalanced twills and how you can get two sides to one piece of fabric.

Here are three in green, purple and orange:

This is Fledi, a much loved 19 year old cat.  He lived in Germany.  I never met Fledi but I have grown to love him through a textile I wove to memorialise him.  Fledi’s owner contacted me late last year to enquire if I might be able to create a textile based on the colours of the handsome cat’s beautiful blue eyes.  I replied that I would certainly give it a go and it has led to one of the most satisfyingly creative exchanges of my weaving career.   Here is the story of how we wove Fledi’s eyes into a textured throw.

Where to begin?  Colour was the key.  I took this photograph and a few others and enlarged them on my printer.  From my stash I pulled out all the colours which I could see in those remarkable eyes.  The more I looked the more I realised there was an infinity of tones and surprising hints.  I sent snippets of all these yarns to Germany.  They came back in little packets – use, don’t use, use a little, use a lot more – plus extra thoughts on sparkle and depth and possible highlights.  A few colours went out, a few more came in.  The yarns were a jumbled collection of cottons and linens, chenilles and silks and glittery metallics, plus wools to hold them all together.

I sampled.  The first two samples were not to my liking but perhaps my client might like them so off they went to Germany with a request for feedback even if it was all negative.  We needed to start somewhere on design ideas.  I had my own ideas but I could tell that this client had some of her own too.   The response was more than I could have hoped for.  The first response matched my own thoughts – the pattern was too small, the fabric was not sufficiently textured and it felt too dense and heavy when extrapolated out to a throw-sized piece.  But most rewarding was the receipt of more photos, this time of some of my client’s favourite fabrics – an old Flemish tapestry and a Japanese kimono of Itchiku Kubota.  My imagination was triggered.

The old tapestry was worn in places but retained its vivid colour in others.  The kimono showed, in the words of my client, “a fascinating synergy between a choppy area with a calm area”.  Both were hinting at what she described as “more anarchistic movement” – in other words she wasn’t after a flat fabric with no life in it!  I was reminded of an exhibition I had seen in 2015 at the Dovecot Gallery in Edinburgh of Kwang Young Chun‘s Aggregations alongside the work of Bernat Klein.  The work of both artists used vivid colours and highly textured surfaces but the entirety of their works were very carefully and thoughtfully pieced together.  Could I produce something along the same lines in a handwoven fabric?

I got to work on another set of samples and off they went to Germany.  This time I made two very different samples, using the same warp but two quite different approaches, to create one brighter more textured piece and one calmer, softer piece.  Still with the beautiful colours of Fledi’s eyes as the central theme.  Yes! was the definitive answer in return, a mix of the two would be wonderful.  Now I really had set myself a challenge!

To weave my throws requires about 12m of warp set on my loom at approximately 1.2m in width.  I create three panels which are then sewn together before the entire piece is washed as a single entity.  The overall shrinkage is around 30% – 40% in both length and width so there is a lot of weaving required in order to reach the desired finished length and width.  Where there is a pattern involved this has to be repeated in exactly the same way for each of the three panels, so that when the woven fabric comes off the loom and the three pieces are aligned the pattern will match across the seams.  It involves a lot of careful measuring as the weaving progresses.

The next challenge was finding sufficient yarn in the required colours.  My throws are an eclectic mix of mill ends and repeatable yarns.  I am a certified yarn-aholic and love nothing more than diving into my colourful stash to see what else I can use when I run out of that perfect mill end which now, of course, can’t be found for love nor money.  Many of my yarns were a bit too fine so I started winding them on bobbins as two or three strands of different colours and different mixes, such as silk and cotton.  In doing this I was able to create new subtle colours which allowed me to blend my weft colours.  I have always considered weaving to be a form of painting.   When you haven’t got exactly the right colour in your stash blending yarns like this can often provide the answer.  It became an interesting exercise to see just how many variations of blue I could create from only six or seven options.

I finally finished the weaving and set to on the sewing.  It took hours, stitching up the side seams then hemming along the top and bottom.  The whole piece was over 2.4m square before it went into the washing machine.  It tumbled off my dining room table in great heaps of fabric.  But eventually it became one single entity and the whole piece went into the washing machine followed by the tumble dryer.  It’s a heart-in-mouth moment and I always start with the gentlest wash and the shortest amount of time in the dryer.  If necessary I can wash it all again but if you overdo it the first time you’ve lost the fabric and the hours of work that went into creating it.

The finished piece is a triumph in my eyes – areas of peace, areas of calm, an agitated tension and above all it rejoices in the colours of Fledi’s eyes.  I was delighted.  My client was over the moon.  And now we’re planning another collaboration, I can’t wait!

Fledi Throw

Take a look at the most recent newsletters below:

2016 New Yarn – May 2016

A New Exhibition – May 2016

Spring Offer – March 2016

What is ‘Salted Wool’ you ask. Well, I didn’t just want to put ‘Socks’ on the label, that’s pretty obvious and giving them a name starts an interesting conversation!

I source most of my wool from within 10 miles of my home, but one year we had an idyllic holiday at Kylesmorar on Loch Nevis in the Scottish Highlands, and there we met some Black Welsh Mountain sheep who didn’t know what to do with all that fleece they grow each year. I offered to take it away and do something with it.

Black Welsh Mountain Sheep at Tarbet, Loch Nevis

The only way to reach Kylesmorar is on foot, via an amazing 9 mile hike along Loch Morar, or by ferry from Mallaig.  I didn’t relish hauling three bags of fleece along the 9 miles of footpath, beautiful as it is, even in the rain, so we put it on the ferry and along the way we hit a wave which sprayed the wool….and the name ‘Salted Wool’ was coined.  You can buy ‘salted lamb’ from sheep which live on salt marshes, so, I thought, why not ‘salted wool’!

The wool itself goes on quite a journey.  From quiet loch side it travels to a busy scouring plant in Bradford.  Then it passes through spinning machines over 100 years old in Huddersfield and eventually reaches a family hosiery business in Leicestershire that’s been knitting socks for even longer than that.  Everything is grown and processed within the British Isles. There are no added dyes or chemicals and no foreign wool – just some Bluefaced Leicester wool from farms in and around Sedbergh in the Yorkshire Dales, plus some Hebridean wool from a pedigree flock in Cumbria. We blend the three wools to arrive at a gorgeous natural shade of grey which we hope you’ll love.

Loch Nevis

Our ‘Salted Wool’ socks are 80% wool with 20% nylon added for durability and strength. They have cushioned soles for comfort and are machine washable on a gentle 30C wool cycle. Please don’t put them near a tumble dryer or they will shrink!

Wool being delivered to the ferry

Our socks are for walking or cycling, canoeing, mountaineering, farming, skiing, or simply for skipping, wearing around the house instead of slippers or for keeping your toes warm in bed…..or all of the above if you can’t bear to take them off!