Week 62 (Felting wadmal in a barrel and textile adventure trip)

Weaver's log, Earthdate 19052015 
Today the wadmal came out of the loom, I have about two meters of warp left but tomorrow the textile class is felting their wadmal so time is up. The first thing to do to prepare a weave for felting is to sew in all the loose threads from repairs and such as if you don't the loose threads can felt to the fabric and you can end up with some cloth origami instead of a nice roll of cloth. It's important to see what way the warp was going as if you sew it in the wrong way it will leave a hole there. I also measured it and before felting it measured 6,03m.

Weaver's log, Earthdate 20052015 
Felt day is here, it went smoothly, besides I might have wrenched my big toes from kicking the fabric. I did the felting in some of my Viking clothes to get into the right spirit as it's a Viking age tent am making. The water is just hot water, the hotter the better, its more a question how your feet like it, and then its natural sope, here in Sweden we call it Sopa, but whatever you use than wet felting wool works, just don't use too much as it will just do so you have to rinse a lot to get it all out. Every 20 minutes or so you take up the cloth from the tub and stretch it and fold it starting with the opposite side you hade last time so it gets felted evenly as the fabric in the folded roll gets felted more as there's more friction in the roll than on the outside. Then I felt I was done I let it dry hanging, but it's preferred if you can stretch it out on the ground and put some weights on it so it can dry as straight as it can, we didn't as it was raining outside. In medieval times they nailed the fabric to a huge frame so it was really stretched. The picture of the time I walked on my fabric is a bit blurry but as you can see it takes a long time, I could have done maybe two hours more if I really wanted it to be good and tight, but as the width of the fabric now measured what I Hade used then calculating everything I stopped here.

Weaver's log, Earthdate 21052015 

Each year the textile class goes on a road trip and I tagged along, today we visited a weaving convention in my hometown, a wool spinnery called Filtmakeriet and we were going to go to Vexbo Lin which is a flax weavery that used to spin and proses their own flax back in the 1800 hundreds. Ther newest machine loom is from 1910 I believe. Unfortunately, our GPS messed up so we didn't get there before closing time. So we went straight to our hostel as this was a road trip with a sleepover.

Weaver's log, Earthdate 22052015 

The second day of the road trip and today we visited Carl Larsson gården, The home of the late Carl Larsson and his late wife Karin Larsson. It is a cool house but our guide wasn't that good as she only knowe what was in their guide pamphlet and prioritised coolness after monetary worth too much but as a teen doing summer work its what you can expect. After that, we had lunch in Falund at this wonderful place called Coppar haten, the buffet was amazing. And as we were finishing our meal suddenly our museum guide we were seeing next stood at our table, we then noticed that there was an opening in the wall from the restaurant leading straight into the museum's gift shop. She had mixt us up with another school so she asked us to wait in the gift shop. The wait was all worth it, she hade look at the textile classes year schedule and picked out her favourite things that they hade worked with over the year and a box of cotton gloves for all of us. After the guided tour and we hade felt and examined the things. We started roaming the museum freely and I found their Dalahäst collection, they hade the worlds smallest one and a rug that I fell in love with many years ago when I saw it in a book. I also saw a loom from the 1500 hundreds that was cool. We did a pit stop on our way home at Sätergläntan which is another handcraft school.