These early 10th century Magyar earrings can be made quickly and easily using commercially available findings or you can fashion your own findings from raw materials. Supplies you’ll need: 8 – 5mm silver beads 2 ft – 20 gauge brass wire -or- 8 gold-colored coiled wire beads 2 hoop earwires 2 – 3 inch headpins For a more period approach, skip the earwires and headpins. Instead purchase: 1 ft – 20 gauge silver wire gold leaf (optional) gold…
Edited to add: The door described in this post is now mounted on the wall of my sewing room. After eight years, we built a new, new door in 2012. Tourney season is coming up and I really need to stop procrastinating. You see, in September of 2001, as we were coming back from a crown event, my jurta door, which was bungied to the roof rack of my SUV, came loose and went flying.…
This article was written around 2003. I’ve had my jurta for 13 years now. I’ve replaced the door a couple of times, the roof ring once and last year we redid the leather ties that bind the wall together for the first time. For a look at how my jurta looks now, go here. Being inside a yurt for the first time was a life altering experience for me. Previously, my husband and I had…
Weaving the kaftan cloth turned out to be so much more challenging than I anticipated due to underestimating how much time I would need to complete the project, but I also underestimated the physical toll that sitting at the loom for so many hours/days would take on me. There are so many “firsts” for me, though,and I learned so much, that I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. First time skeining yarn from a cone.…
I am ready to start weaving the kaftan cloth. I am excited to see the pattern emerge and to see if the reality was going to match my vision. I always weave a few picks in the header with toilet paper to set the distance between the threads. Then I wove several repeats of the pattern with commercially dyed yarn so as to not waste any of the hand dyed thread. The yarn was slightly…
Because this project is on a fairly tight timeline, I am lucky enough to have several friends volunteer to help me out with the time consuming aspects of preparing the loom for weaving. Here is a gallery of photos to enjoy showing some of the steps involved in dressing the loom for the kaftan cloth.
Now that I know the sett of the kaftan cloth based on my sampling, in order to start winding the warp and to figure out how much dyed yarn the project will require, its time to recalculate my yarn needs. To see my previous estimate, go here. I’ve chosen wool as the fiber for the Kaftan fabric, and the yarn I have selected is a 20/2 lace weight worsted wool made by Jaggerspun called Maine…
Since I last posted, I did several samples for the kaftan cloth and I think I’ve settled on a sett. (Hur, hur. Weaving humor at its finest.) The winner is at the top in the picture at right. Its a pretty balanced weave. 30 ends per inch. From the bottom – the samples: 24 ends per inch, single weft with a solid beat. In the middle, same epi, but with a doubled weft. above that…
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The first step in preparing the yarn for dyeing is to wind it off the cones and into skeins. Dear friends gifted me with a skein winder making this whole process much easier. I divided the one pound cones into four skeins of roughly the same size. This was purely guess factor on my part. I could have gotten much closer to 1/4 pound skeins if I had set the cone on a scale. Don’t…
