Making decisions

 

As Ben Franklin once said, the only things that are certain in life are death and taxes. Like everyone else, I much prefer the changes I choose to those that are thrust upon me. Still, I have to deal with those, too. And since I’m not a woman who believes in letting life simply happen to me, that means I have to do something.

Just one short paragraph on the election. I am very concerned about the election of Donald Trump, about what it will mean for people he has stated hatred for in one form or another. About what it will mean for us as a country. So I am hoping to set a few things in motion. I have sent out emails to encourage a few people to join together and send Reiki to Trump and Pence, with the intention of opening their hearts. The same thing could be done with Bohdichitta or probably a specific type of prayer circle or other practice. I also intend to start actually having regular communication with all of the people elected to represent me, something I’ve only done very sporadically in the past.

Moving on to the personal...being a micro-business owner is a challenge. As a weaver, selling my work is what it’s all about. Never easy, it’s getting harder. Fewer people go to and spend money at art shows than they used to. I get it. I, too, buy way mor things online than I used to. And I, too, have made conscious decisions to reduce my unnecessary consumption and ownership So what to do?

I’ve made three decisions, things that I didn’t think I’d do.

I’ve reactivated my old Etsy page, which I started before I ever had a website and let go years ago. When I redid my website last year, for a variety of reasons I made a conscious decision to make it be more gallery oriented than sales oriented, and I now think Etsy is a better alternative for actual sales for me. With only 3 items up at the moment, I’m goin to spend time taking photos and getting posts up over the next few weeks.

I’m going to approach a few carefully chosen stores to place a few of my best pieces in them...the Copper Shop on the Roycroft campus and one or two more.
I’m biting the bullet and joining Facebook. I’d like to have just a page for the business, but it appears that I need to have personal page – or at least a personal profile – in order to have a business page. I know that there is at least one Facebook group that deals with my baby wraps, and I need to have a presence there in order to sell more of them.

I’m putting a link to my Etsy page up in the header of my blog today, and as soon as I get myself established on Facebook I’ll pu that link up, too. Only time will tell if these decisions work well for me.

The above scarf is a weaverly long-distance collaboration. A while ago, Susan over at Iowaweaver posted a draft of a weave pattern she’d developed to weave circles. Because warp and weft threads intersect at right angles, this is not an easy task unless you have lots of shafts. Susan’s draft was for only 8 shafts. I wanted to try it and painstakingly copied her draft to my weaving software. But found out that there were REALLY long floats on the back side of the weaving. So I modified the tie up and treadling and came up with the above. There are 4-end floats, which I find to be acceptable in a scarf but might not be in a towel. Susan’s other readers have further modified it to have shorter floats, but then the circles are less round.

In any case, being someone who does not sample (I know, I know!), I set my loom up for 2 scarves with 8/2 rayon. Wove the firs scarf at 21 EPI, the second at 24 EPI. If I do it again, I’ll sett even closer. And I’ll pay more attention. Do you see that the circles at the beginning of the scarf are not the same as the circles at the end? Apparently I forgot to treadle part of the sequence. And on the first scarf I apparently forgot the thread part of a sequence so my middle circle is actually an oval. I haven’t decided if I’ll put either out for sale yet; if I do they won’t be at my regular prices.

November 10th, 2016 |

Dyeing experiments

I’ve heard about dyeing with koolaid but hadn’t tried it. Then I read Karen’s post about speckle dyeing, and figured I’d try it on something small first. I’d recently finished knitting these socks. Very nice, but all white.

So I read a bunch of online how-tos, then went to the store and got 3 packages of koolaid. Sprinkled it on from a spoon.

Wasn’t crazy about how it looked in the pan, but had hopes I’d like them when it was all done. At least one of the sites I read sa that it had to sit for 2 days. So in the meantime I read more directions about speckle dyeing yarn and measured out a cotton warp for 3 scarves. Learned my lesson about dyeing outside so am set up in my basement.

Meanwhile I spoke to my dyeing teacher who strongly recommended I not do it with the dye powder for safety reasons, so I use the eye dropper technique I’d seen here. As suggested, I left plenty of white areas.

Then it’s a 2 day process from here, too. Batching overnight till the next day, then sitting in water for another day.

So I figured I’d do some immersion dyeing of weft yarns for the speckle-dyed warp. First time I’ve done this, too, except for with Rit dyes. Here are the 3 skeins in their individual dye vats.

They only had to sit in the dye bath for about an hour, than overnight in water. Here they are at the end of that overnight sit.

And an unlovely picture of some really lovely yarns. Very solid colors, lots of depth of color – much more than I’d intended, actually, but I love each of them.

By now I could go back to the socks. Ugh. I didn’t like them at all. Looks like something from a horror movie.

So I figured I’d overdye them with the blue koolaid. Even worse! Now they look ugly and dirty!

Back online I went. The ‘real’ dyes I have are meant for plant-based fibers (cotton, rayon, silk), not protein based fibers like my wool socks. But I read how to dye wool with these dyes, and figured nothing could make them any uglier. Again into blue, this time real dye and a relatively dark blue.

Here’s an unlovely picture of beautiful socks (ok, sock-singular)! You can barely see the koolaid splotches, which is just fine with me.

Now back to the speckle dyed warp. Oh no! There are no longer ANY undyed areas. Everything that was white is now pinky- lavender.

Not what I had in mind at all. Sigh. Would I overdye this yarn? After thinking about it for a few days I decided I’d warp it. If I hate it when it went on the loom, I could always take it off dye it then. Or I could cut my losses and just toss it out. Or give it to someone as a prepared warp. So here it is going on the loom.

I don’t hate it anywhere near as much as I did in the skein, so decided I’d try weaving with it. Instead of using my beautiful immersion-dyed skeins, though, I chose a lavender cotton that would almost match the lavender in the warp, hoping it would mute everything out a bit.

And it does. Looks like it’d make a nice baby wrap. Will it make a scarf anyone likes? I can’t tell yet. But I can always choose to overdye it after it’s woven, now, can’t I?

October 18th, 2016 | 

FIFI

The Buffalo Weavers’ Guild, of which I am an out-of-town member, has a regular program called FIFI – Find It, Finish It. A grea concept.

Although I didn’t need to find these things, I did manage to finish a few things recently. First the unexciting but necessary.

Of those 12 casement windows in my weaving studio, several had issues. The frames had apparently been painted with the wrong type of paint, or painted at the wrong time of year, or not allowed to dry thoroughly before being closed, or something. When I opened those windows in the spring, paint remained on the inside of the frame, leaving the wood on the windows bare in spots. I did my research on the type of paint I should use, sanded the frames for the 5 worst windows, taped up the glass, and set to painting them. I used Snap Dry from Sherwin Williams. Pricey stuff! Sure glad I had a 30% off coupon. But what was I thinking when I bought a whole gallon?

Anyway, I put 3 coats of the paint on over the course of 2 dry days on the 5 frames, left the windows open for a few days of warm, dry weather, and then shut them a few days ago when the temps dropped dramatically. I’ve opened them a few times to see what’s going on, and so far, so good. The truth will be what happens in the spring after they’ve been shut and locked for months.

I do have to say that I was less than enthusiastic about the blue tape. As the directions said, I removed the tape as soon as I was done painting. I got a bunch of areas like this, where tape remnants had to be carefully removed with a razor blade. (Sorry for the fuzzy photo.)

The other 7 windows weren’t in bad shape, and I decided I’d see how those 5 were in the spring before I tackled the rest. But here’s the finished AND exciting part. Look!

My pants are done! They are not perfect, and I’d make changes to the pattern for the next time, but I am reasonably happy with the pants.

Before I tell you about the process, I first want to send a HUGE thank you shout out to Theresa over at Runamuck Weaving. She’s an INCREDIBLY kind and helpful woman, and I sure hope that one day one of us will travel to the opposite coast so we can meet in person. Right now Theresa can use lots of our positive energy due to some difficult times she’s facing, so send her your kind thoughts.

Anyway, to start, I had to spend many evenings very carefully taking apart those horrid failed pants. Then I got myself some 830 Pellon to use for making my pattern from the pants I really like. Cut that pattern out of muslin, sewed them together, and the pants weren’t right. Thigh, waist, and crotch all too tight. Theresa offered her long-distance suggestions on how to improve the pattern.

I didn’t have enough muslin to move forward, so had to make another trip to the store. Then I revised the pattern and repeated the process. This time the crotch and thigh seemed right, but the waist was way too big. Back to Theresa, who offered advice on improvement.

Modify the pattern and the pants again. I have photos of those steps, but I’m not going to bore you with them. It seemed really close, and the reality is that every fabric works a bit differently, so I opted not to make another pair of muslin pants, but to move forward with my handwoven.

Theresa and a woman from my Guild who sews with her handwoven fabric both strongly recommended that I use the lightweight iron-on adhesive (Heat & Bond) on my seams and cut edges. (NOTE: In hindsight, I think I got the wrong stuff. I thin I was supposed to use light iron-on interfacing, not adhesive. Oops!) I couldn’t find it in strips, so had to start by cutting long strips of the stuff, then ironing it on every edge of every piece. Time consuming, but not hard.

After this, however, apparently my brain left my body for a while. I pulled the paper (the white that you see) off the all the leg pieces of those pants before I started to pin them together and sew. It made quite a mess on the floor, so I crumpled it all up and put it in the recycle bin. BAD MOVE! The sewing machine would not move the fabric forward with the resistance of that iron-on stuff. I had to pull it out of the garbage and use a combination of that and tissue paper, pin it to every seam, and then commence sewing. I must say, pulling either the paper or the tissue off after sewing the seam was one more time consuming step, with varying degrees of difficulty. I am positive that I’ll have some paper bits in those pants for a long time. Much like the blue tape residue on my windows.

So I sewed. I had a few issues, one being that I couldn’t save the first waistband, and didn’t have enough fabric to cut a new on in one piece, so had to fart around a bit and design a new one in two pieces, with side seams. I was smart enough to not remov the paper liner from those pieces till after they were sewn!

Next, and I knew this would be a problem, when I cut those pants the first time I didn’t make them as long as I should have. Since I wanted long pants, not crops, I knew I’d have to make a tiny hem. I ended up deciding to fold once, very small, and pres that adhesive together, then machine stitch. Never would have done this otherwise.

I also decided that with that iron-on adhesive, I would not also take the time to otherwise protect each raw edge with zigzag stitch. This may prove to be a real mistake, but I don’t think these pants will last forever regardless, and they don’t fit exactly like want, so I’m okay with that.

I’m going to happily wear my new pants, sewn with my own handwoven cotton & linen fabric, when I do my demo at the Library on Saturday!

September 27th, 2016 | 

New Techniques

Warning: this is a long post with lots of process photos. Proceed at your own risk.

Before I wove those great color block towels I had purchased 2 large cones of Georgia-grown and processed cotton. I hadn’t realized just how large they would be till they arrived. Here they are with two of my ‘regular’ cones of cotton, each around 1/2 pound, for comparison.

I bought the cotton for 2 reasons: I loved the fact that it was grown and processed right here in the United States, and I wanted t do some more hand painting with a fiber that would be more affordable to potential customers than the silk.

First up was trying a new-to-me technique – dyeing the warp for a cotton shawl in the same colors, but with sections offset partly or in whole. Of course I had to be begin by measuring out the sections of warp, scouring it, and soaking it in the dye activator before I could start dyeing.

Let me say right off that the bed risers did, in fact, raise my table to the perfect height for me to work on. HOWEVER, I have learned my lesson with this job. I will NEVER AGAIN do my dyeing outside for this type of dye job. (It was relatively simple when I was dyeing one warp at a time for the scarves.) It takes only the faintest breeze to make handling plastic wrap insanely challenging, and it felt like I needed to use miles of the stuff for this job. For each time I covered the length of the table, which I think was six times, I needed four widths of the plastic wrap. So lay down a length of wrap the 6′ of the table, attempt to hold it in place while I laid the next length next to it, and so on. Needless to say, by the time I’d gotten to the 4th length nothing was straight and even any more. I was frustrated for sure. Wishing I had octopus arms and hands with lots of fine-motor control and patience.

Here’s the first length of the 6′ table when things were relatively in control. Seven sections of cotton – needed for the width of th shawl – laid out and painted.

After each 6′ length was painted I had to roll it up the length of the table, again cover the table with the plastic wrap (grrr), then l the already-painted roll up over the newly-covered table for the next 6′. So in addition to the wind, as you can imagine it became increasingly difficult to lift the already-painted roll up over the newly-covered table as it became heavier and heavier. Again wished I had octopus arms and hands, this time strong ones.

After I had it all painted and rolled up, I set the whole thing in a tub to batch – or set in warmth to get that dye to bond with the cotton fibers. Since I could certainly not fit this into my steamer, I decided to leave the tub in my garage, with the door closed to really build up the heat, for two days. I thought it looked like a caterpillar, one that might even be recognizable.

After two hot days I carefully unwound the big roll, dividing it into three tubs to keep the lengths from getting irretrievably twisted

Then I draped it across my clothesline to dry. It took almost 40′ to spread it all out.

Here’s a tub full of the dried yarn. You can see how much lighter it is dried than it was wet. I still have to get used to this in choosing my dye colors.

Finally I could start getting this warp on my loom so I could get some real idea of how it looked. I decided to do about 1/2′′ on each selvedge with some solid color cotton I had so I didn’t have to worry about selvedge breakage like I did for those towels.

Once on the loom I auditioned several wefts. It seemed like I had plenty of choices.

I decided on a lavender cotton for the first shawl. I am loving the way the colors gently bled along the length of the cotton for such nice transitions.

Enough of the process. I wove all three shawls, fringed, washed, and dried. I still have to do the hard press, but the conditions were right to get some photos so that had to wait. First up is the shawl with lavender weft.

Woven next was a shawl with a dark purple weft.

And finally I used that lovely undyed cotton for weft.

My daughter says the shawls, especially the dark one, remind her of a long-standing Rochester event, the Lilac Festival. I think I’ll use that for their name.

Just quickly, while I was waiting for the dye to batch and then set, I wove four rayon chenille scarves. That was before I knew that it would be warm the weekend of the Clothesline Festival.

So I’ve ended up with 9 new shawls and 15 new scarves. Not bad. We’ll see how the show goes. Parting shot: one of Jack’s favorite positions when the temperatures are in the 70s.

September 7th, 2016 | 

Fiesta to Sherbet

That yarn that I thought looked overwhelmingly bright, like a Mexican fiesta, turned into a lovely rainbow sherbet when I wove it in twill blocks with an undyed weft. The colors are a bunch more muted in real life than they appear in the photo.

I wish I’d woven both with that weft. Instead I wove the second with a periwinkle weft. Jack couldn’t resist photo bombing this one.

Here’s how I decided to finish the fringe on that leno pima cotton scarf. I think it added a nice touch to a nice scarf.

Although I don’t have a photo of it, I decided to turn that rayon scarf with the problem fringe that turned yellow at the end into an infinity scarf. That way no yellow will show.

I’ve said it before about other towels and I’ll probably say it again about new ones, but I think these are my favorite ever kitchen towels.

I love their colorfulness. Is that a word? They make me smile just to look at them. I wish they’d made me smile to weave them. The natural cotton is soooo soft that it kept breaking warp threads near the selvedges. I wove 3, cut them off, and re-tied, thinking that might help. Then I wove the other 3. Still problematic. I am decidedly not proud of the selvedges on these towels, but I think they’ll be really thirsty. And I’m betting they sell regardless of their less-than-beautiful selvedges. But we all know wha happens when I say that.

Gotta get back to the loom now. Still cranking out work.

August 30th, 2016 | 

Where does it go?

Time, that is. The days, weeks, and months just fly by. Two weeks from today I’ll be at my next show. YIKES!!! Do I feel prepared? Um, no. Will it be fine? I’m sure. I’ve not done the Clothesline Festival before, and have heard such wildly mixed reviews from others that I have no idea what to expect from it. But I know what I expected from myself, and that was to at least mostly replenish my stock with the number of scarves, shawls, and other items I’d sold in July. I had two whole months!

Well, I’m not too close and now I have just two weeks. My goal was 9 shawls, 21 scarves, and several little items. Plus I’m completely out of my packing bags, which I sew from pillowcases.

So far I have 6 shawls, 7 good scarves and 3 not-good ones, and no little items. I don’t think I’ve done great planning. Maybe I shouldn’t have spent so much time dyeing yarn. Or making pants. Or taking photos, or blogging or figuring out why the contact emails on my website weren’t getting to me, or....what are those other things that eat up my hours?

I’ve already made some other decisions that may not have been the best, too, decisions that I’m too far into to change. I just keep telling myself that it will be fine. Maybe I can start to believe it.

So the photos in this post, from the top down – all warps are hand painted 30/2 silk:

snowflakes with royal purple rayon weft, same weight as the silk so the motifs are square, unlike the next two snowflakes with 20/2 lavender silk weft
snowflakes with 20/2 red-violet silk weft
watery silk with 20/2 ice-blue silk weft

watery silk with very fine (same weight as the warp) slate blue cashmere silk weft

August 27th, 2016 | 

Lather. Rinse. Repeat

That’s what my weaving life has been like today. Weave. Unweave. Repeat.

Last evening I wove about 4′′ of the watery silk warp with the green weft. Then I remembered that I already have an undulating twill silk scarf with this green weft. Plus the beginning selvedges were nasty. Plus 3 of my trusted commenters liked another weft.  So unweave all that.

I started again with the silvery blue weft. Much nicer. Got 4-5′′ woven and thought, since it was to have some vague representation of water, I’d try randomly varying the treadling, giving the whole thing some movement like water in a creek. Wov another 3+” and decided I hated that, so unweave.

Then I had to take a lay-down break. Some time yesterday I somehow pinched a nerve in my upper back. I’d taken some ibuprophen a few times, and it just needed to rest and be iced. So I did that.

Still, I got a little over half of the first scarf woven today. I am LOVING it!

Joelle asked for the weaving draft, so here it is for all.

August 12th, 2016 | 

Auditioning watery wefts

The watery hand painted silk is on the loom, and I’m trying out various wefts. The warp is 30/2 silk, with roughly 7,440 yards per pound (ypp). As a general rule I like my weft threads to be similarly sized to the warp. I don’t have much (any?) colored 30/2 silk so I tried a number of options.

From the bottom:

A rough tussah silk singles yarn in pale green with lots of nubblies, at 7,425 ypp . You probably can’t see anything but th nubs. I’ve had this yarn for almost 4 years now and have yet to find the right place for this yarn...this isn’t it.
Next up is a silk frise in navy. 7,425 ypp, but again, not the right place for it.
3rd trial is a silk-linen blend, in medium blue, but only 2,400 ypp. The color is ok, but I don’t like the size and the linen in 4th is 30/2 silk, at 4,900 ypp, in an interesting olive-y celery-ish green. I like it.

5th is 30/2 silk in a silvery-blue. A beautiful yarn, but too pale, I think.
6th is 30/2 silk in darker blue. This might be nice. Or it might be too dark.

Note that none of those wefts is packed/beat correctly. It’s hard to do that when there’s nothing solid to weave against. And I w fix the oddness on the left selvedge before I start weaving.

I’m going to stop auditioning here and weave the first scarf with the green. Once I see a bunch of it I’ll have a better idea how to silvery-blue and the darker blue might look, and if I need to try out other options.

We’re off!
P.S. If you’re a night owl, be sure to check out the sky tonight – the peak of the Perseids meteor shower.

August 11th, 2016 |