July updates

We’ll start with a bit of the natural world. Yesterday morning I was heading back from my walk and came upon a man who was staring up into the trees. It was clear he was watching something, so I stopped and quietly asked what was interesting. There was an adult pileated woodpecker (mama? papa?) and 2 juveniles up in the tree.

The adult was very busily working on the trunk, making a big hole and digging out bugs or larvae, and the juveniles were sort of hopping around and trying to imitate the behavior. Emphasis on trying. The adult was seen to feed one of the tasty morsels (s)h uncovered to a juvenile.

Can you see the juvenile poking around the side of the tree near mama/papa?

On to some sewing. I realize I never showed you the bead bags I made in June, so below you have 2 sets: first June’s 10 bags and then July’s. I don’t love the skull fabric, but I’m hoping they’ll appeal to some of the children in the hospital.

As for weaving, since I didn’t finish them until several days ago, I’ve decided that I’ll not call these June hugs. That boat has sailed and I have to admit that I simply missed that target. These are July’s hugs.

Personally, I prefer the bright ones – the second two – but I’m trusting the first will suit someone. These hugs are a combination of bamboo, cotton, and tencel or rayon.

Because I’ve somewhat struggled in distributing these hugs to people with dementia or their loved ones, I added another potential avenue for these. I am a member of my local BuyNothing group, a Facebook based group. As the name implies, the concept is to give away what you don’t need or want and get what you do. I’ve both given and gotten several things. I’m hoping posting in that group will reach people I haven’t yet had contact with.

So as always, do contact me if you know of someone who could use a hug – a woven one.

Now for the closing. I take an urban/soul line dance class weekly. This is an important part of my week, and never fails to raise my spirits. The group is SO positive, so encouraging, so welcoming, so great. This week, one of the core team wore a T that struck me as perfect, so I asked for her permission to photograph it and her. I love the sentiment and this woman.

July 16th, 2022 | 

This and that

Spring is absolutely my favorite season. I LOVE seeing all the new little plants poke their noses through the soil, watching the colors of the spring blooms, the cooler temperatures of spring vs. summer, and I even like doing the spring garden cleanup. Tha last item does take time, however, even when I did a bunch of garden clean up in the fall. So that’s my excuse for why I haven’t blogged in 3 weeks.

I’ve moved some plants, making a new garden area. That’s always hard work and takes time. I’ve prepared the soil and planted seeds. I’ve weeded most of the garden and areas and mulched. Here’s just one pic that I like (I should take more).

This is a silver dollar plant. Also called money plant and honesty plant. And those 3 common names are why I learned the Latin names of lots of plants. So this is a lunaria. After these lovely purple flowers it’ll make seeds, with pods that look like silver dolla and work beautifully in fall arrangements.

I had to take a photo of this house. During Monday’s wind, virtually all the blossoms on their tree blew down, carpeting their law and driveway in a vibrant pink.

I believe the tree is a double-flowered crab. And then there’s this:

For Mother’s Day my sweet and talented son made me a planting table. He’d heard me whine about how the multitude of bunnies eat all the young plants I put in the ground and decided to do something about it. This table is 2′ wide x 6′ long. And it FOLDS so I can reasonably store it in my garage over the winter!

In the pots I’ve put a summer squash and zucchini, yellow wax beans, sugar snap peas, lettuce, and my favorite sweet pepper, Carmen. Then, just for fun I put in a pot each of green and red/purple sweet potato vine and a red-orange lantana. I stuck some nasturtium seeds in with those non-food pots, too.

Back in the house, I finished what I call my happy socks. I knit these from the sock blank I dyed in March.

Don’t they make you smile?
Here’s the ball I’m using for my next socks. I didn’t dye this but like the color shifts.

As I was nearing the end of my 3rd warp of the Ukraine support towels, in my head I was planning what I’d do for the May wove hugs. But I wasn’t in any rush, as I still had 2 of the April hugs in my hands. (Only 1 left now.) That feeling – no rush – felt good.

Then, OH NO!! I remembered that I had promised to weave a shawl for the upcoming Alzheimer’s Association fundraising auction. Preferably in purple, which is their signature color. I looked up the date of the auction – May 20!!! It was already May 12 when I remembered, so there was no time to lose!

I knew I could always give them a piece I’d already woven if I had to, but it wouldn’t be purple. I went to my stash of Tencel yarn I didn’t have what I consider to be a clear/straight purple, but I had lots of red-violet, so that would be the majority of the shawl. I threw in some random stripes of yarns that I had tiny amounts of to finish up those cones/bobbins, and set to work.

Unlike my usual practice of warping for at least 3 pieces, I warped for only 1. Gotta get this onto and off of the loom quickly.

I auditioned at least 6 different wefts for this one, and was surprised at how ‘fussy’ the warp was. Few of those weft colors looke great with it. I ultimately chose a medium blue, trying to shift the overall away from the red a bit and toward the blue. Then weave, cut off the loom, twist the fringe, wash, dry, & hard press.

Someone is coming to pick it up momentarily, so I snapped some shots quickly.

And this morning I dropped off my 10 bead bags for May at the Weaving Center.

May 18th, 2022 |

Surprising myself

You know, I tell myself – and sometimes you – what I like and what I don’t. What turns me on and what leaves me cold. And the something happens and I change my mind.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? This latest work is an example of that.

Following my experience with that Fires Everywhere scarf, I wanted to do something similar but different for a shawl-width piece. After a bunch of playing around with various ideas, I decided on a black to white warp in solid colors, not gradients.

I also decided I was going to wind the warp out of 100% tencel, 8/2 sett at 24EPI, and even though 2 shuttle weaves are not my favorite, I would try out an alternating weft with tencel and rayon chenille. So I got busy winding. Here’s half of the width wound on my warping mill.

As always with tencel, the winding, beaming, and threading went smoothly. No hitches. So it was time to try the weaving. Again, everything was working well. Here’s the simple twill threading and treadling, as seen from the top while I was weaving. The warp alternates that 8/2 tencel in tabby with a fairly thick white rayon chenille, only about 800 yards per pound.

It is often the case that I like the ‘back’ side better than the ‘front’, and this was no exception. You can’t see much of it here, but think you get the idea. Little crosses inside the diamonds.

I had some company for a few days, and fringe twisting just takes time, so the pieces sat for about a week after they were cut of the loom. I finally got that all done and wet finished. This is where the surprise came in.

I had differential shrinkage. Or something similar that created strong vertical crinkles in the cloth. Which I surely didn’t expect. Here you can see the crinkly piece on the left and its fraternal twin that I’ve given a press to (needs more) on the right. Look at the width difference between these two pieces!

I honestly liked that crinkly piece, which surprised me. I sent photos of both pieces to my daughter and a friend to get their input Of course, I got two different opinions. And now that everything is totally fully dry I’m again second guessing. One piece will get mailed to The Copper Shop on the Roycroft Campus for sale, the other will go to the Weavers’ Guild Holiday Sale. I keep changing my mind and my opinion. Do I really like that crinkly piece, which is now a scarf and not a shawl? It feels so much different than the flatter, wider piece; harder/stiffer, of course, since it’s so much thicker. On the other hand, there are still so many wrinkles in the wider piece – will I be able to get them out if I use my steam press?

I need to move forward. I have one day to make a decision. Your input, dear readers?

September 8th, 2021 | 

Waddaya do?

You got all that undyed cotton. And you recently picked up a large shoebox full of dyes from another weaver/dyer. So what do you do? You dye, of course!

Before the cotton actually arrived I measured out a tencel warp for a scarf – mostly one handpainted colorway with a second, much smaller, that I’d use for warp stripes. I am very happy with these warps.

I have plenty of tencel and rayon on cones to choose from for weft.

Once the cotton got here I did some planning and measured out 3 bouts to make some yardage and a shawl. In my head I wanted to do a similar blue variation like on the Tencel above, with neutral tans for the stripes.

Well. Remember I said I’d picked up a mess of dyes from another weaver/dyer? There were 3 different blues in her box, and sill me, I thought they’d all be pretty different. But when I mixed them up they were all very similar. So I reverted to a strategy I haven’t used since I first started dyeing – I just started dumping things together. Then I added a bit of this and a bit of that from my own dye shelf. The colors all looked pretty dark when they were wet, so I wanted to make the neutral/tan bout light. I was careful with my mixes for that, since I was using all my own dyes that I’ve used before and knew what I wanted.

After the overnight batching, morning rinsing, daytime soaking, then more rinsing and finally drying, it was completely clear to m that this was NOT going to work as intended. I didn’t like the way these bouts looked together. NOT. AT. ALL.

So waddya do? If you’re me, you prepare more yarn for dyeing. This time I made 24 ounces of cotton into skeins for immersion dyeing for weft for that blue/green warp, knowing I had sufficient solid colors to use as offsetting stripes. I wanted a nice, rich, dark denim color, and think I achieved it.

I have a weave structure planned that I think will look great with these colors.

I also measured out another bout to dye just like that first bout with the golden & light chocolate splotches. I think I’ll just use undyed yarn for my stripes. Keep it simple & neutral. I checked my stash and have a variety of browns and oranges in mercerized cotton I can use for weft, but I dyed a skein of purple anyway, thinking it might make a nice contrast. I didn’t want to do a dye bath, so painted the purple dye on this skein and clearly didn’t get the solid coverage I wanted, but I’m not worried about that.

So now I have 3 distinct projects to get on the loom. I’m going to put each in a bag – with notes about length of the warp bouts and number of threads (guess who learned the hard way that her memory is unreliable on this score) – and I’ll have to decide which one I’ll do first. But for now I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished with the dyeing – and with using a bunch of that 14 pounds of cotton.

October 23rd, 2020 | 

Sunrise Sunset complete

I finished all 3 pieces on my handpainted Sunrise-Sunset warp. I’m happy with all three. Remember, this is an oddly-sized 8/3 mercerized cotton warp. There’s a bit of 5/2 cotton in between the handpainted stripes – red, yellow, red.

I’d originally sett the warp at 16EPI, but after weave a few inches and thinking about my recent experience with the silk, I unwove and resleyed to 18 EPI. First up I used a dusty rose 8/2 tencel weft, in plain weave.

The weft toned the warp down – in a good way.

Even though the cotton is semi-thick for this sett, with the tencel it retains some drape.

I auditioned various wefts...16/2 navy cotton, 8/2 lavender tencel, 10/2 sienna cotton, and others I don’t even remember. But decided I wanted to emphasize the orange, so went with 2 strands of fine mercerized cotton. I had a red-orange in 16/2 and a medium orange in 20/2. I wound them on the bobbin together and set off weaving. This time I chose a 3/1 twill to enhance the drape of the fabric.

Again, remembering my recent experience with the silk, I decided to stick with the same treadling throughout the length, no alternating faces on this. So here you can see how one side punches up the purples and blues, while the other really focuses on the oranges and reds.

The twill did, indeed, enhance the drape of this piece.

Now, I had originally planned on making a long vest with the third piece, but that was before I had to omit a bunch of planned warp. So plan #2 was a mobius wrap. For this one I wanted to punch up the red, so I used 1 strand of 16/2 red mercerized cotto and 1 strand of that 20/2 red-orange. I wove this one in plain weave as well, but felt like I wasn’t getting decent consistency in th fabric, so beat it a bit harder than the first piece.

I hoped I had enough length to get a bag or pillow out of it, too. But when I still had at least 20′′ of apparently weave-able warp length left things started getting really wonky. I’m not generally of a mind to fiddle endlessly with the end of my warp, even if I really like it as I do this one, so I cut it off.

After wet finishing I pinned the fabric into a mobi, but found that it didn’t have the kind of drape I thought such a piece needed, s once again I went back to the planning board. I ultimately decided to make it into a top – for me! I got out an old thrift-store shee I’d purchased just for the purpose of making a pattern and got to work drafting something with straight pieces, using images I’d seen online as my plan. I can’t tell you how many times I put on and took off both the pattern and the real fabric. MANY.

It took a fair amount of pattern tweaking to get it reasonably right. Since my fabric is only 16′′ wide and about 76′′ long at that point I had to play around quite a bit, but finally finished the top this morning.

I’m happy with the result, although I do wish I hadn’t beat the weft quite so hard. But hey, there’s always next time, right?

August 14th, 2020 | 

It happened again

Once more, weeks have gone by without a post from me. And this time I can’t even claim to have posted things on Facebook; I haven’t.

Some days I feel remarkably unproductive. How did I ever get things done when I had a full time job? Other days I’m totally caught up in doing lots of mundane, routine tasks. But there it is. I can’t change the past. So here’s an update on what I have done in the past few weeks.

I took an online class through our Weaving Center on deflected doubleweave. I’d done a bit of it before but had limited experience with the structure. Plus I really wanted to see how it all worked, classes on Zoom, and how the Center might be able to support more of our teachers doing more online classes. I, for one, don’t see myself taking in-person classes for the rest of this year.

The class met once/week for 3 weeks. On our meeting days, we had 3 meetings, each an hour or more. And we were to be doing things in between meetings and weeks. So I spent a lot of time on that. I learned a lot, but I’m not sure how much of it I wi use. The instructor is a big fan of collapse weave, using yarns that will shrink differently – for instance a wool and a cotton – and that’s just not my bag. But here are a few shots of my samples, showing measurements before & after wet finishing. Note that the pink warp & weft was tencel, the dusty rose, when used, was rayon. Their shrinkage differentials were surprising.

Then, since I had enough warp on the loom, I decided to weave 2 scarves with these techniques. My opinion of them? Meh. If you would like one of them let me know & I’ll give you a screaming deal.

This one is woven partly with colcolastic thread/yarn. My intent was that the plain weave sections would really ‘pouf out’ from the colcolastic sections. The effect wasn’t as dramatic as I’d wanted.

I kind of liked the ‘bubble’ effect with the wool in the sample, so I dug out some baby lace-weight alpaca I had and wove the second scarf with that. I may have over-fulled the alpaca a bit; lack of experience. In any case, here’s that scarf.

Here’s a closeup of those bubbles. And what appears to be a treadling error I didn’t see until just now.

So with all of that it was taking forever to weave the next batch of Safe At Home towels. I finally have them off the loom, but haven’t begun to press or hem yet.

Unrelated to weaving...strike when the iron is hot, right? Well, it’s berry time. A woman who lives not too far from me has a cher tree. With her permission I picked quite a lot of fruit in 2018 and made jams and more. Last year almost no cherries developed. So this year when I saw her tree and again got her permission to pick, I did so. The cherries were mostly really high, much highe than I could reach with my ladder, and not so great. I only picked about four quarts of cherries, ended up throwing out about a quart of them, and got one batch of jam. One of those jar went to the tree owner, of course.

Then my son found some wild black raspberries near his house. He’s picked, I’ve picked, and we’ve picked together. Here’s the first of three batches of black raspberry jam I’ve made.

Then my second online fiber course started. This one is on painting two warps and using them in one project. I’ve done this before, too, but again wanted the experience of the Zoom structure. Working well ahead of the course plan, here are photos of my warps just after painting, and then when they’re steamed, rinsed, dried, and chained. It’s all 20/2 silk.

The first warp is purple, orange, burgundy, and reddish-fuchsia.

I had already partially wrapped this one before I took my photo. It’s gold, avocado, blue-green, and light indigo.

I’m very happy with the results and am looking forward to getting these on the loom.

I think I’m going to go outside my personal comfort zone and do random stripes, with a simple straight twill. (Random???? For someone with my control issues?? Oh my!!!)

July 15th, 2020 |

Same but different

There’s no reason why you’d remember a post of mine from February 2019. Instead of sending you back there, I’ll just re-post one of the photos from that post. I had just finished this open-front cardigan. Dyed the tencel, wove it, sewed it.

Well, I still have that piece. I’ve had it at shows and it always attracts attention, but never sold. And I’m sort of glad, because it didn’t make me proud. I liked the dye job a lot, and was pleased with the weaving, so what’s the problem?

It’s that rolled hem on the front edge. Because the drape shows you both sides of that edge, you see both the right and wrong sides of the hem. It’s been cringe-worthy to me for almost an entire year. I’d purchased some bias tape at Joann Fabrics, but I knew if I used it I wouldn’t be happy with that, either. It would be far too stiff.

Then last month I got some private instruction from a seamstress about how I could fix it. She advised that I buy some dupioni silk and make my own bias tape. I did. Wish I’d taken some process photos of that.

I can’t tell you how much time I spent making that tape! I got the bias measured, but for the life of me couldn’t manage to fold th fabric correctly to make continuous strip bias. Eventually I cut the strips and individually pieced them.

I had one yard of 45′′-wide silk. I wanted to make double-fold tape, so knew I needed to make each strip 2′′ wide. Without using any strips shorter than about two feet, I was totally amazed at the amount of tape I got. Want to guess? No? I’ll just tell you – 20 yards! That was a lot of piecing and pressing!

Then I basted it by hand all the way around the edge of the open-front cardigan. I’d estimated that it was 4-5 yards, so was surprised when it turned out to be roughly 7 yards. (Still, I have roughly 13 yards of silk bias tape left for another project.) After that, I stitched it on my machine and then removed the basting.

The bias taped edge is still a bit stiffer than the rolled hem, but I’m definitely happier with the piece than I was before. We’ll see it sells this year.

Tangentially related, I did finally go to the doctor for the tendonitis in my thumb. “Yep,” she confirmed, “that’s what you’ve got.” What to do about it? She gave me a few options, none of which had guarantees of success. So I chose the least invasive option Rest it, treat it well. I knew that both knitting and weaving could aggravate my thumb, and haven’t done either since finishing the Christmas weaving on December 18. (I’ll be able to show you soon.)

I didn’t think the rest had made much of an improvement and was disappointed. However after doing all that basting and then removing the basting, some of which had been machine stitched over, I realized that the rest had, in fact, been a good thing, because now my thumb reminded me of what it feels like when it aches.

So what does this mean going forward? I’m not sure. But I do know I’ll have to take it easy, easier than I’d thought. Moving on...

I November I used similar colors as above – coral & turquoise – to dye some 20/2 silk for a few shawls. The colors are far less intense than the tencel, which is what I wanted. I threaded the loom for huck lace and used a salmon/coral 20/2 silk to weave th first piece. The silk is so light and airy, it’s easy to wear the piece in different ways.

I planned to make a mobius wrap for the second piece, so didn’t make fringe for it. For weft, I used a pale brown very fine silk. I’ thought it was 60/2, but it turned out to be much finer than that – I needed to use 3 strands to make a decent weight. Didn’t put i on my McMorran balance to get a weight for it.

Anyway, after it came off the loom I did make it into a mobi, but sort of hated it. The fabric is wide, and that made the point in the back WAY too long. So I took it apart and the fabric sat there for a while as I waited for it to speak to me and tell me what to make with it. It never did. So I just hemmed it for an unfringed shawl.

With the lighter weft, this piece is even more airy than the fringed shawl. Light as a feather.

After another good pressing, I’m planning to send this one to the Copper Shop Gallery on the Roycroft campus, along with a few other things, before the end of the month. They sold several of my pieces in December, and they’ll continue to have visitors throughout the season. I’m hoping Valentine’s Day will be a good time for me there.

January 22nd, 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 |