AGWSD Open Day

Well, the guild of weavers, spinners and dyers runs a biennial summer school that runs all week. This time it happened to be at Moreton Morrell college, which is about a 30 minute drive for me. So I thought I'd pop in and have a look! As per usual, I completely failed to get my camera out (but there are some smashing photos on their twitter feed)... I had a quick go on a Saori loom, which is a very simple two shaft loom... oh, I want a floor loom that compact! I was quite taken with it. As I understand it, Saori is very simple freestyle weaving, where you just add bits and bobs and do manual pick up patterns as you feel like it. Another stallholder (Don Porritt I think) had lots of lovely shuttles and an ingenious raddle that would fit my Louet loom - not awfully enamoured of the built-in one yet, although to be fair the warp spaghetti I produced was my fault - maybe it'll grow on me (the raddle, not the spaghetti!). He also had a foot-powered tapestry loom - very ingenious! There were some gorgeous handwoven garments for sale.

There was also a display of projects for the Certificate of Achievement - there were three or four I think. I thought there might have been more, but having picked up the syllabus for weaving it's quite a longterm thing. Maybe something to think about in the future. There was a gorgeous woven scarf in summery colours and some tapestry weaving.

After lunch the workshops were open for all to take a look. Dawn Willey was teaching a rigid heddle class - it's amazing the things you can do on a RH loom, it's not just tabby. There was a class where they'd been making flat braids, a knitting class, a wet felting class and a shibori dyeing class. Lots of amazing work.

Then I attended a short talk about the online guild - alas I didn't realise my watch was 5 minutes slow so I missed the first bit! Might be an option for me - although there's one in Coventry it clashes with my MK meeting, and it seems to mostly be spinners. Plus I can't always guarantee I'll make that saturday anyway.

I have had some financial problems this month - hassles with losing passwords for one bank, and because of the St Malo trip the current account with another bank is VERY empty at the moment - so I resisted buying anything. I've since managed to top up my current account (had to go into the bank and reset the passwords AGAIN) because £30 isn't enough to fill up the petrol tank these days. When I got home from the bank, I discovered my current account card had been compromised - nothing had been taken, but I can only use my card for in person transactions. Talk about things all coming together at the same time! I'd say bad things happen in threes, only I don't have an account with a third bank so it can't possibly...

Having taken some advice from the expert weavers on Ravelry, I've decided to cut the weaving off the loom and resley with a few different epis. I'm trying 40 - 36 - 32. There's enough on there that I can play about with that and see the effect it has. The tabby wasn't quite right, and the general opinion is that the epi I chose wasn't tight enough. Hopefully I'll finish resleying tonight.

Work is very busy again at the moment, so the brain is somewhat distracted at the moment. I managed to machine knit a project for the Dream Week on Saturday afternoon - it won't win, but at least it's funny! I'm trying to add a nice crocheted border to the machine knit shawl, but the one I picked, I couldn't figure out the instructions. Hopefully the brainpower will return soon!

Current mood: tired