Yellow

One of the photos I didn’t post yesterday matches a scarf I worked on earlier this month. It’s yellow, and a nice antidote to the gray weather.  Yellow is also the June color for Project Spectrum, so here you go:

This month I worked at Penland as a studio assistant for Suzanne Halvorson’s weaving course, and it rained almost the full two weeks.  When it came time for the students to work on an ikat project I decided to dye some yellow to lighten the mood.  The scarf is for my mother, whose favorite color is yellow.  These are the dyed warps:

And this is the final scarf:

Thinking about color

instead of revising my dissertation.  All photos are from the Charles W. Cushman photo archive.

placemats and looms

I borrowed Lydia’s loom to weave a stack of placemats last month and it turns out I find it impossible to weave placemats to scale.  They varied widely in length when I took them off the loom, but shrank to a somewhat consistent shape once they were washed.  I think for the meantime I’ll stick to single projects that don’t have to exactly each other.  Some of the placemats are pictured below.

The above mats are from a group that I wove from a white cotton warp and blue linen weft.  Below is an example of the all cotton placemats–I think when weaving patterns I like using only one color.  It seems like patterns are meant for two colors, but I love the way one natural fiber offsets the texture of the pattern.

The big news this week is that I bought an Ashford rigid heddle loom! The model I purchased is pictured below.  I’ll assemble it and post photos this weekend.  [I'm so excited!!!]

Deadly hubris

I was so excited about novelty yarns I decided to try plying yarn with feathers, as depicted in my wonderful new spinning book.  Now I, my wheel, my room, the dogs, and everything that comes near us are all covered in fluffy feathers.  Until further notice, I will be vacuuming.

Spinning

This spring I started teaching spinning at Yarns Unlimited.  After the class ended I decided to invest more time in my own spinning, which I’ve negeclted for a while.  Now spinning is almost the only thing I do, and eve though it’s probably a far less marketable product, I think yarn will be the bulk of my inventory at the upcoming A Fair of the Arts.  I am starting to spin more novelty yarns, two of which are pictured Here. Below are shots of a merino / bamboo bouclé plied with metallic silver embroidery thread and superfine elastic.

Novelty yarns can be tricky, especially the white merino / bamboo blend (super slippery and unwinds easily). For anyone interested in learning more about spinning I highly recommend the book the intentional spinner, by Judith MacKenzie McCuin.  The book gives short but comprehensive coverage of fibers, processes, approaches to yarn design, etc.  It’s a wonderful book, and I believe one of the only craft books I’ve actually read.  Normally I read only patterns or guide myself from pictures.  This book is an exception.

Unfortunately, the color of the beaded yarn below doesn’t come out well in the poor light of my room.  When the weather improves I’ll take photos outside, but until then I’m making do with dim light and heavy shadows. I love the result of plying with beads, but so far *hate* the process.  If anyone has advice, I’d love to hear it.  Threading the beads onto the purple thread with which I plied took ages and I found it very difficult to place the beads fast enough to keep up with the act of plying. I’ll do another skein of this tomorrow, and hopefully with practice it will go better?  After the bouclé it’s difficult to find other projects satisfying.

For now I’ll continue spinning and posting the yarn I come up with.  I have at least three other types of yarn that I wanted to post today but the photos are just too dismal.  Soon.

Salt Peanuts Sweater

Last fall I bought The Best of Interweave Knits with the aim of knitting my mother a birthday sweater.  This February I finished it, and now I’m finally blogging about it. All in all it only took about seven months, so it could be worse (…right?).  The pattern is mostly stockinette stitch, so for the most part it would be a very easy first sweater.  It’s not my first, but it is the first sweater I’ve knit that I think is wearable, so I’m very pleased.  Turning the collar while decreasing was a bit tricky, but I only needed to rip back on one side to correct; after that there weren’t any problems.

The sleeves are a bit long and the sweater doesn’t yet have the beautiful button she chose for it, but you get the idea.  I love the dark green she picked, though it’s perhaps a more sensible color and material for the midwestern winter than here, in the blinding Florida sunshine.  I promise the next post will be spring / summer appropriate.

This pattern gets its name from a Dizzy Gillespie peice that is appropriate for every season. See for yourself, and enjoy the beautiful weather:

Craft Hope

I’ve been terribly negligant about posting and I’m so sorry!  This is what happens when you finish up your dissertation.  But I’m back and will be posting again soon about the upcoming farmer’s market and some classes at Yarns Unlimited.  In the meantime, I encourage anyone who is still reading (thank you rss feeds) to have a look at the second project for Craft Hope.  They will be collecting sewn and knit dolls to send to the Casa Bernabe orphanage in in Managua, Nicaragua. If you are interested in participating you can find all of the details here. The packages go out June 13th.

More soon! – K

A year of crafting in movies

For those of you who relish the end of the year oscar review, check out Lydia’s post on our sibling blog Not That Critical.  She’s tallied up some of the year’s best movies for crafting, and I’d love to see people posting suggestions for other films that deserve recognition.  I have horribly neglected my duties as a weaver and nerd by not seeing Wanted, but I anticipate renting it this week.  WEAVING IS OUR DESTINY.

While I was reading Lyd’s post it occured to me that nobody loves media quite like the crafting community.  Crafters make what they see–almost compulsively.  Their efforts and the collective they belong to elevates a lot of otherwise overlooked media to the status of cult favorite.  This is one reason I believe we should be concerned about the BBC’s attack on Dr. Who fans who knit characters from the show.  I’d like to see the BBC take their cue from the creators of Star Trek and recognize that when it comes to franchizing a cult classic where you give your fans the space to pattern and create what catches their eye, you gain a lot in satellite product sales. It’s something to think about, especially for those of us currently sitting on projects inspired by something we watched and loved a little more than a passive viewer.

So if you’ve knit through movies (or disc upon disc of tvd) this year make the jump and let us know what you think deserves recognition for its use of the hand crafted!   If you’re feeling particularly active, knit a Dalek to show the BBC that where their fans are concerned, the crafting will continue unabated.

Am I the only one around here with a cold neck?

I developed, over the course of getting ready for the winter market, a serious neck warmer problem.  All I knit now is neck warmers apparently.  Well, neck warmers and mom’s Christmas sweater, which will be posted here as soon as it’s done (the first and only sweater I’ve seen fit to post, as most of them are lumpy, irregular, and look inexplicably angry).  So, in the interest of sharing below are a few of the neckwarmers I’ve posted for sale on etsy. Here’s hoping the etsy community is familiar with the concept (far too many of our market goers held them up and looked at me with confusion in their eyes: “For your head?”).

The two neckwarmers on the left are organic cotton (with vintage buttons–thank you Cindy!), the top right is cashmere and the bottom rigth is a really soft beautiful wool. They were all fun, fast, and look lovely on IU’s favorite naked lady statue.  Expect to see more of her in the next few weeks of postings. She and her partner are excellent models as they are perfectly still, never cold, always attractive, picturesquely placed in Dunn woods, and naked (and therefore fun to dress up).  I love them.  They are like life size barbie and ken dolls that wish only to model knitting for Lydia and I.

You don’t write, you don’t call…

I am a punk.  But I’m back online and have spent the last two days in a mad scramble to update flickr, ravelry, and Etsy.  Yes Etsy! I have finally started posting material on my etsy profile.  I’m going to try today to master the etsy widget for this blog and post the rest of my materials.

I was finally inspired to do so by Lydia who suggested we take photos of all the material we had left over from this year’s Winter Market.  The Market was a huge success–we had a ton of fun, met a lot of people, and made a lot more money than I’d anticipated.  I highly recommend it to any of you (if anyone other than Lyd reads this) who are thinking of doing any sort of craft fair or sale.  Forcing yourself to do these things goes a long way in helping you to think of yourself as a professional.  Talking to hordes of people about fiber arts also helps you develop an accessible vocabulary for what you do, which I never noticed was necessary (usually I use crafting as a way of *not* talking to whoever is in the room, so it’s nice to use it to be social).  I’d also strongly recommend to anyone exhibiting that you hold demonstrations at your booth.  I brought my spinning wheel and Lydia knitted, and it seemed that everyone really loved seeing the various stages of the process in action.  Children especially loved the spinning wheel; I spent a lot of the day explaining its mechanics and welcoming kids to touch the fleece and then the yarn to see how it changes after processing.

Aside from the craft fair I have either tons of news (in that I’ve made a huge pile of clothes, hats, etc.) or no news at all (in that all I do is knit, weave, or write my dissertation). I did take 3 more weaving classes this year and am desperate to purchase a loom.  I’ve made a scarf that I’m really proud of:

It’s a lightweight linen and my attempt to emmulate the aesthetic I saw in the materials displayed by Habu during Takako’s visit to Bloomington.  After this scarf I tried some doubleweave:

which is like magic.  Now I’ve become obsessed with rag rugs;  I’ve begun cannibalizing my wardrobe to make softer footing for the world.  I can’t say why right now, but rag rugs are like…my weaving project soul mate.  They’re colorful, soft, recycled and sustainable, and they have personality.  My rugs were really outclassed by the others at the market, but I think they were also the only rugs there that were actually from scrap material, so I’m really happy with them.  Expect lots of long boring posts about scrap rugs and how I believe they will change both the world and our living rooms.  In the meantime I’ll be posting a lot of backlog: descriptions of items I made for the market, what I think worked and what didn’t.  I’ll be a regular presence online again!  For now I hope hope hope you are all keeping warm and enjoying the snow as much as I am.