Down the rabbit hole

I've been threatening to make a blog or website to document my adventures with fiber for years, and now that I've finally started one, I discover that all the white space rather robs me of anything to say.

So, introductions. Hi, I'm Saraidh. My major hobby is the Society for Creative Anachronism (the SCA), and within that, I'm interested in all things textile. Well, mostly. I have yet to get into tablet weaving, no matter how period it is for me, and I'm sure there are a couple more fibery things out there that I shun, if only I could remember which. But the range of things I do do, or at least have dabbled in enough to get the concept, is pretty large. Things I consider my primary textile activities: weaving, spinning, knitting, fiber prep, hand sewing, costuming, embroidery, reseaching historical textiles. Things I've at least tried: silk reeling, making silk hankies, dyeing, bobbin lace, nalbinding, wet felting, needle felting. I'm sure there are more, but that'll do for a start. It may not look like all that much, but there are a whole lot of sub-disciplines under there. I have minimal interest in crochet and tatting because I don't like the look of the results, but they're mostly post period for me so I don't worry about it. I continue to find tablet weaving fussy, so it's still not a technique I'm dying to pick up, though I probably will one day. Otherwise? I'll give just about any textile technique a try.

At heart, I consider myself primarily a weaver, and I'm a major aficionado of structures. Mastering Weave Structures has often been my bedtime reading - I've been known to fall asleep to tales of fabrics I could make. The related passion is coming up with examples of all the sorts of weaves that people tend to assume didn't exist during the Middle Ages. "They" are almost always wrong. The textiles weren't necessarily for clothing, which is the sort of cloth the SCA is interested in almost exclusively, but I'm coming to the opinion that anything we can do with a floor loom, they at least tried.

For example - most weavers think of overshot as primarily a colonial American weave, but I can document it in period in Scandinavia. (I [heart] Agnes Geijer.) I don't think it's coincidental that in both cases it was mainly practiced in remote areas - it's a weave that allows for complex looking results with pretty simple equipment. The general rule of thumb is that you can do complex things relatively easily with complex equipment, or extremely laboriously with simple equipment. The deal with overshot is that the warp and alternating weft are made of fine yarns, which create the ground fabric, with bigger yarns making a pattern overtop, and since it's pattern weft, it doesn't need a complex loom - just a 4 harness loom makes very interesting looking things.

(Side note: I found this while looking for an overshot link - This is a totally, totally geeky brush with a deeply obscure sort of fame, but I know her! I took a class on how to weave velvet with Peggy Ostercamp! I SO need that book. Not that I'm a beginner, but the reviewer is not kidding when she says Peggy's other books are dense, so I'm completely confident that it will have information I would find new and useful.)

So that's me. In the future, I'm likely to talk more about my projects, past, present and planned, likely including my recent day of silk reeling, and how to weave velvet "on the frontier".