More creating

I have no idea how a whole month has gone by without me posting. It’s not been for lack of doing things, some with photograph some not.

Let’s start with the not. I’ve used my Macomber pretty exclusively for a long time. Knowing that for the past (?)three(?) years the only thing I’d used my counterbalance loom for was holding fabric, I decided it was time to move it on. I thought about the best way to do that, and decided that I was going to gift it to a new weaver. I worked with one of the instructors from our Weaving & Fiber Arts Center and quickly had a taker. She and her husband picked it up a few weeks ago, and it happily fit in their van. I a thrilled with all the space created in my studio, and have used it for sewing, weaving, exercising, and card playing so far. It’s suc a pleasant space, I’m sure I’ll continue to enjoy it. And the new owner will hopefully enjoy the loom. She lives nearby, and I’ve encouraged her to call me if she needs help with it, so I’m betting I get to see it.

Next up, I did do a third round of geode dyeing, this time the final Tshirts for my grandson for his birthday. I used rubber bands fo some of the ties, till I ran out of rubber bands of an appropriate size, then re-using the artificial sinew with a slightly different strategy. I’m happy with them.

Still, when my daughter asked (jokingly, I’m sure) if I was willing to make them for all of my grandson’s friends who admired them, for a fee, of course, I immediately replied, “NO!” I learned a lot, but this was not worth my time and effort to make them to sell.

Sticking with my grands for a moment, we assume that they will both be wearing masks all day at school. So they picked out a bunch of fabrics, and today I cut out 3D masks, their favorite style. 14 for the 10-year old, 18 for the 5-year old.

I’m taking bets – which child will lose more masks more quickly, the 5th grader or the kindergartener?

Back to dyeing, Rebecca over at ChemKnits has LOTS of great YouTube tutorials about dyeing sock yarn and other wool-base yarns. She uses a WIDE variety of things to provide the color on her yarns: acid dyes, fiber reactive dyes, food dyes, Skittles, and many more unusual items. She makes everything accessible and fun. So I dyed another sock blank with my fiber reactive dyes, this time hand painting it.

Again, I learned things, this time mostly about how much dye I needed (way less than I mixed up) and the difference needed

between dark and light values of the same color (more than 50% difference). I’m really liking the chartreuse a lot, but wish there’d been more visual difference between the blue and the purple, and between the values, especially of those last 2 colors.

Still, I’m enjoying the process both of dyeing and of knitting with this yarn, and expect I’ll have to buy more sock blanks to dye.

On the weaving front, Elizabeth Tritthart did some amazingly beautiful pickup using vintage embroidery patterns. She inspired me. And since I’m not pressing to produce for selling, now is the time for me to try different things.

We are rapidly approaching the Weavers’ Guild’s 75th anniversary – the diamond anniversary. Some Guild members are planning for a great exhibition in honor of this event, one part of which will feature diamonds in weaving. So I decided to do som pickup. I threaded my rigid heddle, an appropriate and easily moveable loom for this. Then I did some sampling, trying various yarns, weights, and designs.

I decided I liked the relatively simple diamond-shaped designs, so did some really careful planning that had to include how my finished work would be displayed, since the back of these pieces have really long and ugly floats. I got my act together and slowly wove 4 sections and bought a frame to display them. I absolutely used the carpenter’s rule: measure twice and cut once. sewed a machine stitch, using both straight and zigzag stitches to secure the ends. Then cut the 4 pieces out. D*%#! I only measured the first piece, red to orange and counted the rows on that! Clearly my gauge isn’t identical on all 4 pieces. Only the first one is appropriately sized for the frame. The others are all too stitched and cut too small. They will have to be re-woven. Bu here you get the concept anyway.

And fortunately I have plenty of time to re-weave, as the exhibit isn’t until the spring of 2022. So first I will sew all those masks, then I have to get some rayon chenille woven for a gallery that sells a bit of my work. Maybe the rigid heddle will come back out after that; maybe I’ll need more time to get back to it. The good news is that I used readily available embroidery thread for the pickup, so at least that won’t be a problem.

August 4th, 2021 | 

Trees, plants, and rocks

 So no weaving to show, but...read to the end and you’ll find out where I’m at with that. Meanwhile, more about nature – real and attempted recreations.

The oak trees in my neighborhood were HEAVY with pollen this year. Yellow sidewalks were the norm. Then I thought that issue was over, only to have oak droppings (aka male pollen structures) SO thick that I literally could have shoveled them. Of course they were light and easy to pick up by hand, but SO much of it!

In my last post I shared a photo of some steps that had been painted. Here’s another way someone adorned their front steps, this time with potted plants. Isn’t that beautiful? Far more costly and short-lived than the painting, but so lovely!

In my garden...last year I planted a pink peony. I was pleased to see that I’d actually get flowers this year. And it is beautiful. BUT....

And this is a big but...this peony has virtually no fragrance! WHAT?!?! Since when have they been developing peonies with no fragrance? And WHY? I have 2 rose bushes that came with the house, and they produce lovely looking roses, but no fragrance. And now a peony with no fragrance? That’s NUTS!!! I’ve even considered pulling out those roses and replacing them with roses that smell like roses, but never even considered the possibility that peonies wouldn’t smell!

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Now for the attempted nature recreation. My daughter informed me that her son is enthralled with geode-dyed Tshirts, and she thought he’d like to make one with me for a project. I looked at some YouTube videos on them, and was clear that this was mos definitely not a project he would enjoy doing. So perhaps I’d make him a geode T for his birthday? Sure, I said, why not?

Hah! Why not, indeed! I knew I’d have to do some testing before I ready to do a T for the boy. So I tied up a few face masks, a piece of fabric, and an old blouse from my closet. Unlike most dyeing, the fabric has to dry completely before applying the dye.

Then I applied the dye – which was NOT easy – and the ice. I was not at all confident that the dye I’d put directly onto the fabric was where it needed to be, so I applied more dye on top of the ice.

Wait overnight for the ice to melt. I could clearly see that I’d used WAY too much dye. Wait 24 hours for the dye to set. Untie, rinse, hang to dry. Epic fail. While the fabric looks sort of like a typical tie dye, the masks and blouse were ugly and awful.

Of course, I’m not one to give up so easily. I did learn things in that attempt. One being that it’s important to use sinew to tie, not string, another being to use less dye powder, a third that a blouse is nothing like a Tshirt in terms of fabric softness or thickness. And I watched another YouTube video by a different person with a few helpful hints.

So today I tied up a Tshirt of mine for geode attempt #2.

It’s drying now. Tomorrow I’ll buy another bag of ice and dye it. Then Saturday it’ll sit for a day. Sunday I’ll untie it and rinse it and see how it looks. Depending on these results, I’ll decide if I need another trial, if I can go directly to dyeing a shirt for the child, o if I’m done with this whole thing.

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So. Weaving. Although it is true that I certainly don’t need any more clothes, I remain intrigued about weaving and then sewing garments. I bit the bullet and ordered some patterns from Sarah Howard at GetWeaving. Sarah specializes in making sewing patterns for handwoven fabric. Her patterns are generally simple and use narrow widths of plain weave fabrics, focusing more o color and texture than weave structure. And she’s been remarkably helpful and responsive to my emails.

That excited me. So I’m planning a cotton warp for lightweight crop pants. Yay! Time will tell, of course, how this will all work. I never claimed to be a seamstress. But at least I’m happy to be planning again, and using up some of my lightweight, mercerized cotton stash.

June 11th, 2021 | 

Comfort at home

We all need to do things that bring us comfort while we’re staying home. For me, too often that’s baking. Here’s today effort – a luscious lemon cornmeal pound cake. Made with 1 bowl.

I ate a few slices, then sliced up the rest and put it in the freezer. Safer there.

On the weaving front, this is my next batch of towels. I’m calling them Comfort At Home. Why? Because these towels are so oatmeal-like. And what’s more comforting than oatmeal? (Readers of a certain age will remember the Wilford Brimley commercials.) Add the soft wave structure, and you’ve got a comforting towel.

In fact, although the warp of 7 towels is called Comfort At Home, each towel (or pair of towels) has an oatmeal name. Here you go, along with the info about each weft. The warp is a softly plied 8/2 barber pole cotton.

The first two towels below are Oatmeal & Brown Sugar. The weft is a 3/2 organic colorgrown FoxFibre in khaki. Since this is a fairly heavy and loosely plied weft, the towels are a bit thicker and rougher than some of the others below. If you look closely, yo can see that my hemming has shown one towel ‘right side up’ and the other ‘upside down.’ It’s not uncommon that I can’t decide which side should be up when I hem.

The next towels, Plain Oatmeal, are also 3/2 organic colorgrown FoxFibre cotton, this time in oatmeal. (How fitting a yarn color name!)

Next up are Oatmeal & Honey. This is an 8/2 Brassard cotton, color name...you guessed it...honey. It adds a soft golden glow to the towels.

The last towel, Oatmeal & Cream, has an undyed 7/2 hemp-cotton weft. The yarn is 55% hemp, 45% organic cotton. An unusua size, it’s really not noticeably different from 8/2. Only one of these.

This is an 8-shaft draft. I originally got it from Handweaving.net, but it wasn’t quite symmetrical so I made some adjustments to both threading and treadling. Then I centered it for the width of my towels.

I’m going to post these on Facebook tomorrow. The last batch of towels I posted sold in a few days, so if you want one of these, contact me and we’ll arrange payment and shipping.

I also did a bit of dyeing. Back in February of 2019 I snow dyed some cotton leggings. But I got carried away with colors and the ended up like a cross between the 1960s and a clown.

I knew I wouldn’t wear them like that, so I overdyed, again a snow dye technique, with just red.

They were much better, but I only wore them a few times as they were still too flashy for me.

Yesterday I put them on and said, “Nope.” Even though I’m not going anywhere, I wasn’t happy with them. It was time to do something about that. Overdye again, this time in a dark color and immersion dyeing.

Yes. I can wear these out in public without attracting stares of disbelief.
I have another warp of towels on the loom now, but I’m going to take a few days off weaving to make face masks to donate.

April 20th, 2020 | 

From start to not-quite-done

After the Elmwood show, at which I had a great time and swell sales, I went on a dyeing jag. I had intended to show you the process from dyeing to completion, but time’s passing by, so I decided to show you what I’ve accomplished so far. With just the first yarn I dyed. (I dyed yarn for 2 additional projects as well.)

The first thing I dyed was some 8/2 tencel. I wound warp lengths for 3 handpainted bouts of 132 ends each, then I wound skeins for 2 more similar-sized bouts, planning to return to my warp vs. skein concept. Here’s what the finished warp chains and skeins looked like. I’m definitely happy with the dyeing, even though they weren’t the colors I had initially envisioned.

Then I measured out those skeins and beamed the yarn, with some black tencel to divide the sections.

Once beamed I sat down at my computer to determine what weave structure and pattern I wanted to use for these two lengths, both planned to be mobi shawls. I decided on an extended Ms and Ws threading and treadling, and used black tencel as weft fo the first piece.

I wanted to change it up a bit for the second length, and after trying a few blues for weft, settled on a royal purple. I only had 20/ in this color, so doubled it for the weft.

At this point I really like both the black and the purple. We’ll see if I have a favorite when they are all done.

I may have some time tomorrow to sew the straight lines to secure the edges before wet finishing these two pieces. I doubt I’ll get much further than that in the process.

Oh yeah, I also made some yummy pear jam with some free pears, thanks to a generous person in my neighborhood. Never made pear jam before, and it is DELICIOUS! I brought a little half-pint jar to the person with the pear trees.

And I gave Jack a haircut with a pair of scissors. Some trimming/cleaning up has happened since this photo, but it’s still definite done with scissors, not a hair trimmer thingy.

September 12th, 2019 | 

Telling more stories

I’m going to start this post without a story, just showing you a few pieces I forgot to post when I finished them in February. This is a mixed warp – cotton, bamboo, and rayon chenille. The weft is all rayon chenille. I particularly like this first piece, a long open vest with side slits, although it’s a tad small for me.

I intended this second piece to be a regular shawl with fringe. I twisted the fringe, and the combination of fibers turned into a rea mess during wet finishing. I untwisted and untied it all, and the piece sat there for a while waiting for me to decide if I would twist again, hem, or turn it into a mobi. Finally I decided to just hem it as is.

Okay, that turned into a story, but just a tiny one. Here’s a long one.

I wanted to do some dyeing, so went to my Pinterest page and looked at my Dyeing Inspiration board. Design Seeds is a marvelous place for color, and I was moved by their Color Spice combo.

I measured out 3 wide and 2 narrow bouts of 8/2 mercerized cotton and went down to the basement. The wide bouts were going to be the spicy colors, and the narrow a bit of turquoise to complement. I dyed the first wide bout, using a few new dyes I’d purchased, actual ‘professionally created’ colors instead of my own blended creations: golden oak, chocolate brown, and my ow terracotta blend.

I decided I needed more red in the mix, so added ‘some’ (not measured) red to my terracotta for the other 2 bouts. Then I dyed the skinny turquoise bouts. After batching and drying, it was clear that I’d been too stingy with the dyes – I had some undyed spots on my yarns. Nothing I can do about it now. So I beamed the lot.

As I was beaming I decided I wanted to use chocolate for weft for the first piece. Of course I didn’t have any yarn in anything faintly resembling that color, so I had to dye it. No sweat.

Except that in my ‘must use stash’ head I wanted to use some 8/3 mercerized cotton I’d picked up in a weaver’s sale. An odd size to be sure, but it looked nice and would work for weft. In winding it from cones to skeins for dyeing, problems arise. One of the cones looks okay, but is actually lots of shortish pieces. If I’d been planning to use it as warp I’d have thrown it away. However as weft, each of those short pieces was roughly the amount that would fit on a bobbin, so it made sense (at the time) t use it. I ended up with something like 25 mini skeins and 3 normal sized ones.

Mix up the dye bath, do the dyeing, and batching, get them out to dry. Uh oh. All those skeins ended up in a real mess! Granted don’t dye in skeins much and so probably didn’t tie them correctly, but I wanted to be sure I didn’t have white/undyed spots on this dark weft. It took me LOTS of time to untangle them and wind them into balls after everything was dry. But the color was just what I wanted.

Now to weave. Then machine sew. Then hand stitch. Here’s what I ended up with. I’m quite happy with all 3 pieces, and very pleased that I actually succeeded in creating pieces in the colors originally planned.

First up is an open front cardigan, using that chocolate weft 8/3 cotton weft. I didn’t make it as wide as my first two, and like the way this one hangs better on the body. (Neither Lady Jane nor the mannequin showed it as well as a real human does.) No nee to round the corners.

Next I used an 8/2 tencel in cayenne to weave a simple jacket. Really brightened up the look.

I finished off the warp with a sienna 8/2 tencel for a wide cowl.

Now I MUST get dressed and go walk Jack!

March 29th, 2019 | 

Bungees and dyeing

Bungee cords and dyeing are not related to each other. At least not in my life, not right now. In the future – who knows? Strange things have probably happened. To me.

Let’s start with the bungees. We had A LOT of wind earlier this week. A LOT. Like consistent 30-40 mph with 70 mph gusts. On Monday morning my little dog Jack woke me up at 4AM. Howling wind is not his favorite thing. So I decided to go lay down on the couch so he could be closer to me. Well. The wind was making the awning over my front door bang repeatedly, threatening rip off the house and surely cause damage in the process. So there I was at 4AM, in my pajamas and bathrobe, on a step stool on my tiny front porch, attaching bungee cords between the awning and the wrought iron railings. Two on each side. Adds some real class to my house, don’t you think? Anyway, this worked for the duration of the storm. I’ll have someone come and determine a permanent solution soon.

Weather related, in early February the temperatures were perfect for creating ice on the sidewalks. One morning I fell twice before I ever left the corner my house sits on. The very next morning I was walking on a nearby slanted piece of grass to avoid the icy sidewalk. Down I went, in the mud this time. Nothing beyond my pride was particularly hurt in any of those falls. A few days later I fell on the ice again. Again I wasn’t even bruised.

But a few days after that my right leg – the side I’d landed on each time – started hurting. I couldn’t figure out what it was, and didn’t connect it to the falls since it didn’t start immediately. So I continued to do my regular activities: daily walking and assorted gym classes at least 3 days/week.

When things were getting worse, not better, I decided I’d pulled a ligament behind my knee. All those activities were only aggravating the injury. And since I was walking and moving funny, I subsequently involved my sciatic nerve and piriformis muscle, and probably more. So weaving hasn’t been great on my leg. I have a chiropractor appointment on Tuesday, but meanwhile haven’t been able to weave much – only for short spurts and not a lot of those in one day. Instead I’ve been dyeing.

I started by dyeing some weft yarn to coordinate with warps I’d dyed and put on the loom.

The warp was handpainted, the weft was immersion dyed: some 8/2 tencel and some 10/2 cotton. I found it interesting that the tencel was noticeably darker in the dye bath. After drying the colors are almost identical..

Then, since we had a major snowfall, I figured I’d take advantage of the snow and did a bunch of snow dyeing. Socks and scarves, assuming I’ll get accepted into that show this summer where they will be appropriate. Here are process photos; I haven’t taken any of the finished pieces yet.

March 2nd, 2019 | 

3rd time isn't the charm

I’m working with a friend from my book club to hold a little pop up shop between now and Christmas. We’re not sure how this wi work, how many customers we’ll get, but I know I won’t sell a thing while it’s sitting in bins in my closet, so I’m committed to tryin it. If you’re on one of my email lists, look for an email with details later today or tomorrow.

I think it’s really important for this type of thing to have a broad range of price points, so decided to (a) weave a bunch more towels (more on that in another post), and (b) do some dyeing.

First I dyed 6 pair of bamboo socks. I used some empty plastic yarn cones that had provided the best results last year, scrunching and tying the socks shibori style. I’m very happy with all the results, and am hopeful that they’ll sell.

Then I ice-dyed 6 onesies. Well. This wasn’t as successful. For the first round I was quite disappointed in how poorly the dye took on the onesies. After some time pondering this I realized I had neglected an important step – soaking the onesies in a soda ash bath. So I did that, bought more ice, and tried again. One I really liked, 3 were just ok, and 2 were unacceptable. So I soake those 2 in another soda ash bath and tried a third time. Still just ok. Don’t know if these will sell or not.

I wanted to use colors that were not obviously ‘boy baby’ or ‘girl baby.’ So greens, yellows, and reds were high on my list. The greens were the hardest to get what I wanted. In fact I still didn’t get anything close to what I wanted. Sigh.

This next photo are the ones I like better, with just 1 that sings to me – that red/dark orange onesie on the left side of the photo. am more hopeful these will sell.

I have 6 more onesies. I think I’ll try wrapping and shibori dyeing 1 or 2 and see how that works.

On the weaving front, I realize I’ve already taken one of the newer shrugs to the pop up shop, and hadn’t photographed it. Mayb I’ll snap it while I’m there this weekend.

This morning I took some shots of the other piece, although it would have been better if Dolly was still here; she’s also at the po up shop. This one isn’t a shrug, isn’t a shawl, it’s a...well, I don’t know what to call it. Your input will be appreciated.

So here it is from the front.

I used 3 buttons that I’d made last year from polymer clay. This wrap is mostly cotton with a bit of linen in the colored stripes. It i pretty heavy and warm, and therefore not as drape-able as most of my work. This looks pretty old-fashioned to me, but it is comfortable. Except that it doesn’t cover much of the back.

My daughter, who has always been infinitely more fashionable than I, particularly liked it when it was put on sideways, with the buttons roughly on one shoulder. She thought this look was fashion-forward. This is the one I could have shown it much better o Dolly.

Wearing it this way covers similar amounts of the front and back of the body.

I have to get back to work now. Busy, busy.

September 27th, 2018 |