I bought my home in the Couserans Pyrénées in 2004 and left the UK to live here full time. After 5 years of solo adventure I met Susie and her children Jasper and Ruby. We married in 2012 and spend our time walking in the mountains, looking after our chickens and sheep, transforming their wool and other fibres into woven, knitted and felted creations and growing/foraging for our food.
After the sampling, a thousand very fine merino warp threads went on the loom and a day's weaving in linen/silk/lambswool slub single thread and the weave was over. Finishing required 55 degrees hot water to shrink the fabric to two thirds of its original width, then blocking.
The fabric has two separate almost gauze like layers joined at the squares of double density single cloth. The same single cloth at hem gives a gentle flare at the ends. It's very soft, light and drapey.
Now the winter is coming to an end works on the barn resume. The solar panels will be installed at the end of April so I ll need to hire a digger, and dig a trench the lay the connecting cables to the house, as well as the sewage and water pipes. The main electrical earth also needs to be replaced. Before that, I ve find shed the pointing downstairs and started the job I ve least been looking forward to, creating a new door through the 70 cm thick wall. The walls are built of mud and rock, no mortar so they are incredibly unstable once you start mining through them. The ground outside the barn hasn't been cleared yet, which at least makes access to the door head easier as it's about 18 inches above ground level. Some of the rocks are enormous, so it's just as well! I managed to needle through and install two lintols. Once the ground is removed (June) I can lower the opening to ground level. With so many huge rocks it's going to be difficult try and create two vertical door jambs.
More experiments with doubleweave. This is a weave whereby two layers of cloth are woven simultaneously one above the other. I designed a fabric with two layers of plain weave sandwiching free floating red threads between them. At intervals the cloths are woven together as a single cloth in a series of squares. These also trap the red threads. Between the squares the red thread is either tightbpuffing the two layers apart when it shrinks on washing, or very loose allowing it to free form.
The first sample was at two close a sett, so the red threads were only visible with back light. I widened the sett for a second sample with almost a gauze like structure.
I also wove a sample as single cloth with a wool warp, but used the double layers as squares. In the single cloth the wool is tightly held by the warp, but in the more open sett of the double layer it can shrink and create a seersucker effect.
Planning to use this knowledge on a scarf project next.
