Tired shoulders

Yesterday was a busy, fiber filled day! Jeanne was not in class again. (By "again" I mean that she was sick Tuesday and thus class was cancelled.) So yesterday, she was still not recovered. Hopefully she'll be back to full strength soon.

We all still came in to the studio to begin work on our samplers. I'm extremely excited about all of them. We are working in pairs (except for one unfortunate soul. But we all helped him out and he still got his warp on just fine.) Anyway. The samplers are as follows:
-A skip dent sampler using 30/2 linen
-A collapse weave sampler using 20/2(?) spun silk and shetland wool.
-A canvas weave sampler using 4 ply wet spun linen
-A thick/thin sampler using noho cotton (slub cotton) and 8/2 Tencel.

My partner and I are doing the noho/tencel sampler. There are 5 blocks of Tencel each 2 inches wide which are separated by 4 ends of the noho (so 6 stripes total) The noho yarn is threaded two ends to a heddle which causes them to act as one yarn. It gives it an interesting effect.

Now that you know what's going on in class, here's what we did. My partner and I worked together winding off warp, sleying the reed and threading. We each wound off half the warp, I sleyed the reed while she threaded. It was a good system and we worked at pretty much the same speed. She had another class after weaving so she left. I decided to finish the process by tying onto the warp beam (in the back) and winding the warp on. One of the guys in the class graciously offered to help me wind on. And I then returned the favor! He has the skip dent 30/2 sampler and no partner to help him! So after we wound my warp on, he finished tying onto his warp beam and together we wound on his warp. I should mention that we also fixed his brake system that wasn't working properly. Mine wasn't either but we called maintenance to help with mine.

After assisting in dressing two looms, I sat down and wove off the rest of the waffle weave scarf (another 30 inches). And then when I got home, I decided to try tying on to a previous warp. So I had to wind off more warp for that. (only 60 ends.) All in all, the dressing time of tying back on to this warp was about...an hour. It's a HUGE time saver! I plan on weaving up a few more scarf warps at this width (6 inches) as I said in yesterday's post, I used a boucle yarn. It's a sort of honey color. I also have some red boucle that I may put on and weave up to see what it does. It makes putting on a 3 yard warp sooo worth it! Nice, quick sample. I plan on doing this same thing for other projects as well. I wish I had known about this sooner!! :) I may try putting on a longer warp to weave up more scarves if I like how the boucle turns out. It'll be a quick way to build up some inventory.
(Which I really need to do!) And since I'm not particularly fond of bumpy scarves, I (hopefully) will not form any attachment to these scarves and will have no problem selling them. :)
~JoAnna
PS: Pictures are of the boucle yarns. The honey color currently on the loom and the red that will go on next.