Fiber Monday - Buckle up...

Because this is a lot even for me. I'm going to start with my decisions as to what I'll be making for the holiday market. 

First are guest towels. 

I finished my exploratory warp and hemmed and washed everything. Here are what I've decided to make. A red patterned towel, though I'll probably make some in a forest green as well. They will be one of three patterns. This one:


And these two:



All the towels are hand hemmed.


There will also be two types with border patterns on a natural color. Trees:




And a red flower-like design:



After I weave a bunch of the guest towels, I'll put on a striped warp and make more napkins like these:


I'll probably weave a variety of patterns. 

Now that I've done the trial run, I'm happy to take orders. I know some of you have expressed interest. 

Along with weaving, I needed to do some dyeing because I have a couple of Sheep and Fiber classes coming up and I needed to replenish the fiber I use to teach spindle spinning. Over the weekend I dyed about 3/4 of a pound of fiber. 




This is still drying, so I had to take a picture in the dryer. It's very much earth tones.

While I was dyeing wool, I also threw in some of the silk look waste that I saved to embroider with. Here's what I have. The bottom is the original color. 


You'd think this would be enough, wouldn't you? Evidently it wasn't. Remember the weaving project where I was trying out a pattern I wanted to try and used up a bunch of leftovers? 



You can see it isn't very wide, but I've been wanting to see if I could use it to make an article of clothing. I've been rolling the idea around in my head for a while. Over this past week, I decided how I wanted to go about it. 

I'm going to use the pattern for the jacket I made for B.'s and HC's wedding. Since I have so little of the cloth, it's going to be just a few parts of the jacket and the rest is going to be made out of a dark blue denim that was in my stash. 

It's always a little nerve wracking to cut into handwoven.


I'm almost done cutting it out, but I need to graft some bits together to get big enough pieces for the pattern. 


The other thing I want to try to do is see if I can use all the little bits of handwoven cloth as decoration on the jacket. That is still a very vague idea.


That's a lot for a week, I think.

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