Ordinary Time

There has not been much to share this week. I've done exciting things such as clean the kitchen (multiple times), comb snarls out of several horses' manes, laundry, and repeatedly drive back and forth to the library. At least it feels as though I repeatedly drive back and forth since I'm currently in a go every day phase at the moment. None of it warrants a blog post.  Today's big event was some of the horses getting their annual teeth floating and vaccines and the sheep all getting their yearly vaccines. I did get this cute picture of Clark while he was waiting for the others to be done.  I also spent quite a bit of time sewing because that has become my go-to avoidance activity this week. I sew while I watch The Great British Sewing Bee and it does a lovely job of blocking out current events for that moment of time.  Plus, I'll end up with a jacket. Eventually. Sewing with handwoven fabric is a wee bit slower than using commercial cloth because there are some extr...

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...

I'm now working on the samples of the guest towels I'm going to weave for the holiday market. I'm pretty excited at how this is turning out because I created the draft for it myself.  Here is a view of what they will look like on the towel.  Before I get completely excited, I still need to wash it to see what it looks like then. Because what good is a towel if it can't be washed? I also have several more designs to try... I have a snowman and a star to do, plus I want to do an all over red and white design. Then, once I've done all that, I'll start weaving the actual towels based on my sampling.  I also finished spinning another skein of yarn this past week. This will also be sold at the market. It's 100% Shetland wool (no, not from our sheep) that I dyed, combed, and spun. Its about 92 yards. If I can get to it, I have a gradient in these shades that I dyed that I would like to spin and then sell the skeins together. We'll see. I often have bigger plans...

One day last week I had a day with nothing on the calendar and no project at home that needed my attention. It was the perfect day to work on something that I had been putting off because I didn't want interruptions once I began... Finishing up little odds and ends of projects that we're lying about the studio and getting things put to rights. So that is what I did. The little projects were the last 2% of many different things that I hadn't bothered to completely finish, so I couldn't put them away. I washed skeins of yarn, I completed various notes on projects and filed them, I completed weaving a swatch for my ongoing breed study project so that could get filed away, etc. It wasn't even things that warranted a picture.  This allowed me to clear the decks a bit. I realized that I needed a dedicated staging area for future weaving projects, so I reorganized a bit and made that. Things are much more organized now and it makes me happy.  The large inkle loom needed a ...

I finished the warp I had recently put on my loom. That means two dish towels and a set of four dinner napkins are done with an eye towards Christmas and things to sell in Fine Line Creative Arts Center's Artisan Market in December.  Here's the five plus yards of fabric. The napkins and a dish towel are woven with a black weft, but for this one I tried a blue weft. And the black for comparison. This is also one of the dinner napkins. The pink lines at the top and bottom give you sense of size. After the last napkin, I had a tiny bit of warp left, so did some experimenting. Instead of doing the treadling pattern the same over and over, I reversed it every other time to get diamonds. I really like this and may use this for another project at some point. This picture shows both treadling patterns so you can see the difference. I'm now going to move on to figuring out how to weave guest hand towels with holiday borders, but I also plan on weaving some more napkin sets. Here...

I have started weaving the project I showed you the colors for last week.  I am pretty happy with how it is turning out and it looks much as I had pictured it in my head, which is always satisfying. There's six feet of warp, so I'm hoping to get a couple of dishtowels and four dinner napkins out of it.  If you briefly wondered why I was only weaving four dinner napkins and since I routinely feed twice that many people, it's because these aren't going to be for personal use. I am starting on making the things I will be selling at the Holiday market this December in an effort to finance my own family's Christmas. I will probably make several sets of dinner napkins.  I also spent some time figuring out the draft to put holiday figures on the ends of guest towels. Cute guest towels seem like something that could sell well, right? Here's the designs so far.  These will be a woven border on the towels. For instance, one towel will have trees all the way across. The ne...

First off, I finished the project that has been on my loom for a few months.  This came about because I had leftover warp and weft from another project and I wanted to use them up. There was a pattern that I had been wanting to try, so this seemed like a good time to do it. I pretty much measured out a four foot warp of the silk until I ran out. It ended up being about 8 inches wide. My plan for this is to use it as fabric and put it and some denim I have together to make a casual jacket.  It's pretty long. I will probably end up cutting it in half and hand sewing the selvedges together to make a slightly wider piece of fabric to work with. I'll need to figure out how it best makes sense with the pattern I'm using.  This was my loom waste. It's a six-ply 100% silk and is buttery soft. I've discovered that it makes as excellent embroidery floss because you can separate it as you can DMC floss. I was going to save it anyway because of that. But I realized that it'...

So it seems having possibly identified the reason behind my creating desert was enough to move past it. Going with the assumption that I needed a project that required more concentration than I typically need for a fiber related project, I dug out something that I had put away for a while because I hadn't wanted to work so hard.  A long time ago I had seen a blanket by Arne and Carlos that was made solely by connecting crocheted flowers created out of yarn leftovers. I loved how it looked and I certainly have lots of bits of yarn. The crochet bit was the issue. I can crochet and have made crocheted objects. I just don't do it very often and a long time passes in between projects. So long in fact, that each time I start a project I have to essentially teach myself how to crochet all over again. That made this project seem like the perfect one for my current mental state. I will say that each time I do pickup a new crochet project, the relearning process goes a lot faster.  I al...

I think we're in good shape for the start of summer.  First, K. has been working and saving very diligently to buy himself a e-bike to make getting around easier. Today after months of work, he came home with one. G. and L. have also been working hard and we actually have a vegetable garden this year. It is already producing and we have had several meals out of it. Today the last of the beds had seeds planted. (Okra, which I love and neither of them do, but they humored me by planting it.) The portions without plants growing all have seeds that are planted.  And summer means the start of summer festivals and I got to weave at a local art festival in Fine Line Creative Arts Center's tent and explained to a lot of people how looms work.