Late July, 2023

 I’ve accomplished a lot in the last few weeks. First up, I wove and finished 8 Fun Stripe towels. I just posted them in my Etsy shop. I saw some towels that used a draft called Dianne’s Awesome Rainbows and posted in Blazing Shuttles Chatter Faceboo group by Jean Eldridge Flores. It called to me. I made just the tiniest modification, changing to blocks of 4 instead of blocks of 3 and went to town! Every block of 4 stripes in both warp and weft is a different color, so these towels took much longer to make than is typical for me. That would usually make me not like them so much, but not these towels. I really like them. A lot. I know that my newest creation is often my favorite, so I am trying to remember that.

Look how totally SMASHING this would look with black as the primary color instead of natural! I may have to do that sometime, but probably not for kitchen towels. Maybe as shawls?

I also finished that second jacket, with some lovely, nubbly, undyed yarn. This one will be for sale...hopefully it will speak to someone.

I spent A TON of time on the finishing of my red jacket, deciding on and then making the closures, and couldn’t do that for this one that’s for sale. So I opted for a magnetic closure with a simple button for looks, one that’d I’d made from polymer clay some years ago. I’m happy with it.

I didn’t plan how the various weft options would fall, it just happened. If I think about it, I may try to do that on my next jacket. I’m kind of sorry that the stripes are mostly on the front and the individual inlays are mostly on the back. Although they take the mos time, they are my favorite look and I wish there was a bit more of them on the front. You can just see tiny bits of them on the collar/flaps on the front. C’est la vie.

I have quite a length left over. Will I finish it for a regular shawl? A mobius? Something else? I don’t yet know, and would welcome your input.

I also sewed bead bags for July. All this batch needs is the ribbon threaded through the top casing.

Then, because I apparently don’t have enough commitments (LOL), I decided to take a 3-session beginning embroidery class a the Weaving & Fiber Arts Center. It’s the first time it’s been offered, and I do like this teacher. I knew if she didn’t get enough students the class would be cancelled, so I registered.

I learned to embroider as a pre-teen. In the (MANY) intervening years, I’ve done stamped cross stitch, other stamped embroidery, counted cross stitch, and probably others that aren’t occurring to me at the moment. I was therefore a bit surprised to learn new things in this class. :-0 Here’s the output of the first 2 classes. I still have to do my ‘homework’ before the 3rd and last class which will take place this Friday.

As always, I’ve been line dancing with THE BEST group of people EVER, and kayaking. I even got my 7-year-old grandson out kayaking twice in a little plastic sit-on kayak. I hope we can do a few more adventures when he gets back from family vacation.

July 26th, 2023 | 

So much for good intentions

I wanted to get better at posting regularly. Hah! I actually got WORSE! It’s now been 6 weeks since I posted. Yikes.

Here’s my excuse – I haven’t woven much. Does that work for you? It doesn’t really work much for me.

Anyway, the time frame means this will probably be another lengthy post. As I was preparing it...and I’m not at home when I’m doing so...I see that I’ve neglected to take photos of everything I should have to show you what I have been doing. Sigh.

Let’s continue in the kitchen first. In the last post you saw & heard about my efforts with gluten free sourdough. Of course, that wasn’t the last of it. You saw up to trial #4. There were more. I won’t give you tons of details now, but here’s GF sourdough #5. Decent.

Then I tried a different recipe from a different blogger. MISTAKE! Granted it was going to be a smaller loaf, but here it is from the top, with my potholder for size. This has an egg in it.

And here it is completely cooled and cut. Look at how gummy it is. It went straight into the compost.

Time was passing, and it was nearing my trip to my friend’s in WV. So I decided to make her one more loaf with Georgia’s now tried-and-true recipe. This time I added a few cloves of finely minced garlic and some Herbs de Provence, just for fun.

Then I realized that her non-GF hubby might feel left out, so I baked him a loaf of regular sourdough. His has more garlic than hers, and black olives (she hates olives, he loves them), and Italian Herb blend. Here they are side-by-side before being cut.

And cut in half, GF in the front.

If I was lived near them, I’d continue to make her more GF sourdough, and would try more things with seeds and nuts and other additions. But this was as far as I went.

I brought her the GF sourdough starter and all my remaining GF ingredients, as well as all the bread. I told her that if she wante we could make a loaf while I was there so that she got some experience with the process. As I expected, she declined, acknowledging that she was unlikely to actually do it. No problem. Made me even more glad that I’d brought her as many loaves as I did.

Then it was Easter. I wanted to make an egg braid to bring to my daughter’s. Haven’t made one in many years and was looking forward to it. Doesn’t this look nice?

Hah! It was not the moist and chewy delight I wanted at all. Instead it was dry IMHO. Sigh. Let’s leave the kitchen. 

I sewed bead bags for April and dropped them off at the Weaving Center.

Then my 7-year-old grandson called me on a Sunday morning and asked if he could set up a lemonade stand on my corner. Sure! It was the first really lovely spring day we’d had. I hauled out my garden umbrella for him and a folding table. He and his mom made and brought everything else.

Hand squeezed lemons, simple syrup, and just a touch of hand squeezed lime. Add ice and it was DELISH! The truth was even it had been made from a frozen concentrate he probably would have done as well at selling. Location, location, location. Add a really cute little kid and it’s a winning combo. Plus his mom texted a few friends who came by. Some cars driving by simply stopped and gave him a donation. Most of the lemonade purchasers gave him a large tip as well.

I had to be at the Weaving Center that afternoon, so he packed up and went home and set up in his driveway in their cul-de-sac They don’t get much traffic, but the kid was entrepreneurial. He went door to door and offered to deliver. Of course no one said no! He made a ton of cash that day.

Sticking with nature for a bit... 
No, I didn’t take this photo recently; it’s from mid-March. But I was fascinated with what I saw on my morning walk.

The shadow of the cable and power lines made a very definite and noticeable impact on the melting snow. Who’d have thought? Not me, obviously.

Last year I went to a plant sale of a local garden club and picked up a few gems. One of them was a small bit of kerria shrub. It’s blooming nicely in this, its first year at my house.

As it grows it should be one more thing to offer me some additional privacy in my backyard.

And I couldn’t resist taking this shot.

This is a little corner of my garden that both looks and smells wonderful! I picked up the bearded iris years ago from a woman who painstakingly made her own crosses, using a paintbrush and lots of attention and patience. Beautiful and fragrant! I have always loved poet’s narcissus for both their simple beauty and their fragrance. Not sure how they, or the single tulip, got planted among those iris rhizomes.

Ok, on to fiber. 

Here are those 8 Spring Flowers towels you saw all my trial and tribulations with in the last post. Only 2 are left in my Etsy store

Then I actually wove something for myself. A rare occurrence indeed. I saw something another weaver had done and it moved me to try my hand at it. My fabric is mostly cotton, with one of the warp yarns a rayon-cotton blend.

So I made my calculations and warped up the loom. I didn’t have quite as much yarn as I wanted so I made some last minute changes to my plan. And still, I played warp chicken. This is the back of the loom – couldn’t have gotten another inch out of this warp.

I also played weft chicken. This is ALL the weft yarn I had left at the end of weaving. (Note that the color is quite off in this photo It’s most red, not pink.)

Then I took the warp off the loom, washed it and dried it, and laid it out in my backyard. It obviously hasn’t been pressed here, nor have I yet dealt with all my thread ends.

In addition to cutting and sewing, I wanted to make button closure for the jacket. Trust me when I tell you that this Dorset button took me hours to make, as did the kumihimo braid I used for the tie to loop the button with.

And here I am modeling the finished jacket. Although this type of weaving is, as a general rule, very 

much outside my comfort zone, I am really pleased with the jacket.

I want to make a few improvements and try something along these lines for sale. We’ll see how that works.

May 13th, 2023 | 

And suddenly it's October

An entire month. To the day. With no post. How does this happen, especially when I’m feeling so busy? Obviously too busy to blog.

But then I should have a lot to show for it, shouldn’t I? Alas, that is not the case.

In chronological order – or something close to it...

Way back in late August I showed you the striped warp I was beaming for towels. They got woven and listed in my Etsy shop. A few have sold. Trust me when I tell you that part of me hopes that none of the towels I weave at this point sell, as I want to have plenty of towels to bring to the Weavers’ Guild Holiday Sale.

So why do I put them up on Etsy? Because a sale is a sale is a sale, right?
After those towels I put another warp on with all those luscious new colors. More dots.

That lightest colored one? It’s not dots – or at least not just dots. I really sort of hated it on the loom so didn’t make any more wit that type of treadling. Off the loom? I like it and now sort of wish I’d done more. That’s how life goes, right?

Then I quickly put on rayon chenille warp for 2 rainbow shawls.

Seeing these colors just makes me SO happy. And these will be my last rainbow shawls. This is the end of my yellow and orang rayon chenille and I won’t buy more.

Then I wove the two shawls, using black rayon chenille as I’ve done before. After the fact I wish I’d just used black rayon, which is substantially finer than the rayon chenille and wouldn’t have covered up so much of the warp threads. The black rayon chenill darkened everything up more than I would have preferred.

Instead of doing a self hem, I machine stitched on a bias binding I’d made many months (years?) ago of dupioni silk. Then I han hemmed that down. You can just see the corner of it in the photo.

I sent one of the shawls off to the Copper Shop Gallery in East Aurora; the other will go to the Holiday Sale. While those shawls were in the washer & dryer I stitched up the September batch of bead bags.

Then I planned, measured, and beamed a warp for my September hugs. On September 28.

On the 30th I got 1 and 1/3 woven. Today I’ve woven 1 full one, so about 2/3 left to weave. I had to leave the house for a few hours for another obligation, and *hope* I can get that last hug woven before the day is out. I’ll still be late for September, but that’s the best I can do. Besides, this is a self-imposed deadline, so....

Closing shot. While Florida & South Caroline are dealing with Hurricane/Tropical Storm Ian, we’re having pleasant weather here in western New York. Look at last night’s stunning sunset.

October 1st, 2022 |

Still at home with rainbows

Although many people around the country are significantly expanding their worlds outside of their homes, I’m one of the people who isn’t doing much more now than I was in March. I’m still mostly staying home, finding things that make me happy here. Like weaving rainbows. Here’s my latest batch of towels...a different take on the Safe At Home towels and the Rainbow circle towels

As you can see, I’ve already sold 2 of them, so if you’re interested, let me know. I’ll be posting them on Facebook this morning and they tend to move quickly. Note that towel #1 is short – I ran out of warp. So that towel may remain with me unless someone wants a short towel, for a short price.

I also got that painted warp woven – 3 shawls, but the fringes will take me some time to twist, especially since I plan to include beads on two of them. But here’s a bit of a preview of the first one while I was weaving.

As usual, each piece is different, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot.

July 23rd, 2020 | 

More colors, more towels

17 of the 19 colors of yarn I ordered arrived on Thursday.

When I saw it all, I gulped. I fear I overdid it. But it’s done.
This afternoon I wound the warp for another 8 Safe At Home towels (the squares within squares).

I’ve already decided (thanks to a suggestion from a friend) that after this warp I’m going to go back to circles for at least one wa of 8. When I wove circles before, my warp colors were limited – usually 5-6 warp colors for the run of 8 towels. I think I’m going make every circle (18 across the width) a different color. Although I may change my mind before then. Maybe I’ll limit it to 9 colors – 2 circles of each color.

Earlier today I took the photos of my crackle towels and posted them on Facebook. (Have you joined the Second Wind Fan Group?) I’m happy with them.

I wove each of the 6 towels with a different color weft. I also used 4 different treadlings.

Unlike the last 2 batches of towels, all the colored yarns here are commercially dyed.

The Midnight Multi towel has a variegated weft with navy, purple, medium blue, green, and red-orange. Contact me if you’re interested in purchasing any of my towels.

May 22nd, 2020 | 

Using stash - or not

 

For MANY months I’ve been saying ‘must use stash’ yet somehow I keep acquiring more yarn. I have an excuse/rationale, b still...

My handwoven towels have been a real hit. Especially those colorful squares of Safe at Home.

I only got 7 towels out of this warp, and each one is long for a towel – 33′′. I was counting weft stripes instead of measuring length, and apparently I wasn’t beating as firmly as I did for the first batch of these towels.

Regardless, I had requests for 2 of these towels – which turned into 3 – before the warp ever went on the loom. As soon as I posted this batch of 7 on Facebook I sold 3 more of them, so only 1 towel is left.

So I knew I’d need to weave more of these joyful and useful babies. And I didn’t have enough unmercerized cotton left to put another warp on the loom. (Ok, honestly, I do have some grays and taupes, but I don’t think that’s what people want right now. I may try that in the future.) So what to do? First I contacted a woman handling the sale of yarn from a local estate. I got a few unmercerized cottons but she didn’t have many. However I did also buy a few cones of light tints of cottolin and some mercerize cotton. And some undyed tencel. I couldn’t pass up the price. Sigh.

Not much for the Safe at Home towels, so I HAD to place an order. I had no choice, right? RIGHT?? I ordered 8oz. cones of 19 different colors. Sounds like a real lot, but honestly, that’ll only make about 3.5 batches of these towels.

While I’m waiting for the yarn to arrive, I put another batch of towels on the loom. For years I’ve said to myself, “I don’t like crackle weave.” And then I’d see something woven in crackle and say, “That’s beautiful.” Repeat the “I don’t like it – that’s beautiful” sequence several times, and I knew it was time for me to try it.

I doubted they’d sell as quickly as the Safe at Home towels, and knew I might not like treadling them (the treadling is all somewhat complex) so I only put on a warp for 6 towels. I have 4 woven so far, each with a different weft color and I’ve used 3 different treadling patterns. We’ll see how they go.

Meanwhile, I have way too much Tencel & rayon, chenille, and silk to use up. But that’s not what’s moving out of my house right now. So I will weave cotton towels.

May 19th, 2020 | 

Pandemic brain

 Let me just start by saying I am not sick. I do not have COVID-19 or any other disease. I feel fine, other my usual age-related aches and pains.

But...

I clearly have what I’m calling pandemic brain. IMHO it’s related to pregnancy brain for women going through that. One’s norma mental processes are not functioning properly. Thinking isn’t always rational. Counting skills go out the window.

I would never want to imply that I don’t make mistakes. I sure do. But it’s highly unusual that I’ll make mistakes 4 out of 5 projects in a row. And that is what has happened.

It started in mid-March. I planned a beautiful skein-painted project, intending to make one shawl and weave yardage to make something else – a vest, perhaps. The weaving went fine, but I hadn’t done my calculations correctly, not wound enough warp ends, so the fabric isn’t as wide as I’d intended. Fine for the shawl, but for the yardage? I’ll have to find a different pattern than the one I had planned on. I’m confident I can do that at some point, but not yet inspired to do so.

Next up was my Safe At Home towels. I do love them, and the mistake wasn’t a big one – winding 62 turquoise ends instead of 72 as I was winding the warp. So I had to hang 10 ends over the warp beam and hope I could maintain tension. It all worked ou fine but caused me a small amount of anxiety as I wove.

After that was my Comfort At Home towels. They went off without a hitch.

Then my Spring At Home towels. As noted, I didn’t pay attention to my math and initially wound skeins only half the size I needed for my wefts. Again, a problem fixed easily enough by winding and dyeing more skeins, but a silly, if simple, mistake.

Now I’m working on another batch of Safe At Home towels. I looked through my stash and found colors that I thought worked well together.

The turquoise is obviously a commercially dyed yarn. The magenta and green are skeins I dyed back in 2016 for a project but didn’t use. I dyed the yellow and orange skeins specifically for this project. The dark blue-violet is some hand dyed yarn I’ve had for years, dyed by someone else, that I thought was just what this warp needed. In fact, I have 2 of the towels on this warp already spoken for, just from those warp colors and the Safe At Home weaving plan.

I got the threads measured out and beamed.

All heddles and reed threaded, time to tie on to the front apron. I had some difficulty in the beginning, and ended up doing my lashing on twice to get my tension right. Ok, that’s a pain in the butt, but whatever.

Then I started weaving. I was having difficulty maintaining tension and couldn’t figure out why, but said to myself, you just need to keep going. It will get better. But it wasn’t getting better; it was getting worse. All of sudden the lightbulb went off. I got up, looked at my yarn labels, and closed my eyes and moaned. That lovely dark blue-violet wasn’t an 8/2 yarn – 3,360 yards per pound. It was twice as thick – only 1,680 yards per pound. I thought it felt a bit different when I was measuring it, but as this yarn is also more loosely spun, I attributed it to that and kept going. BIG MISTAKE!

There’s only one way to fix this. Start by removing the weft.

Here I’ve got half of that done.

Next insert lease sticks to retain the cross.

Go back through the stash and see if I have something else that will look good for warp. Nope. Tomorrow I will wind another skein and dye it, hoping for something similar to that blue-violet.

Then I will go back to the loom. I will carefully unwind all of the warp, pulling it back through the reed and heddles so that it’s all at the front of the loom. (If needed, I will unthread the reed and the heddles, but I’m hoping I don’t have to.) I will attempt to save the 84 ends of the blue-violet yarn, as it is a lovely color and is almost 9 yards long, but if I have to toss it, I do.

Once the newly-dyed skein is dry, I’ll measure that out, put it on the lease sticks, and beam it along with the other 5 colors. Sigh I just HOPE that I DO NOT keep making mistakes. This is a royal pain. And not like me.

May 3rd, 2020 |