South Seas Scarves

I got the fringe twisted on the South Seas Scarves - the tencel warps were hand-dyed by me, wefts are various colors of tencel. Only the center scarf is listed in my etsy shop so far - others to be listed soon. As always, if someone sees something they'd like but it's not in my etsy shop yet please drop me a note or leave me a comment.  Sorry the color in the lemongrass scarf on the left didn't quite come out right as I was trying to lighten up the background - it's not quite that acid looking..........although I like it. I think these scarves would look great worn with jeans, and a chartreuse top - what you don't have any chartreuse tops in your closet???  I have several - one of my favorite colors. I've even got a couple pairs of shoes in this color.........

Weaving the day away.......

 I got to spend quite a bit of time at the loom today on a painted tencel warp - first scarf I used a chartreuse weft - a favorite color of mine.......

 .....next scarf a medium teal weft........

......final scarf a dark teal weft........

Has anyone else watched any of the new Netflix Original Series Grace & Frankie?  It stars Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston. A friend and I spent yesterday afternoon noshing and watching the first four episodes. We both got tickled over it and will get together a few more times to watch the rest of the 13 episodes. It was really nice to spend the afternoon doing something decadent.....usually I'm way to driven to spend an afternoon watching tv.....I'm looking forward to the next get together.

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday weekend.

This and that...........

I finally got the fringe twisted on these 3 scarves recently woven - they have a hand-dyed silk warp and tencel wefts. The center one is listed in my etsy shop for sale - the other two will eventually make it in the shop, if anyone has an interest in one of them please contact me......takes me a while to get the photography work done to get them listed in the shop.

This felting landscape kit is available in my other etsy shop.  I grabbed a kit before I went to my spinning group yesterday, grabbed my blending board and started making rolags using all eight colorways. I've got 5 other colorways of felting landscape kits available for sale, bet they would be fun to make rolags out of on the blending board too.

 Here are a few of the rolags........I've got a total of one pound ready to spin, can't wait to see what the resulting handspun yarn looks like.

 It started out as a nice walk on the inlet beach looking for seashells and seaglass until that danged log showed up........

 .......Yikies - it moved - better back up fast.......

 .....whoa, that thing is alive......

 

.....better watch it carefully and definitely not turn my back on it........such are the perils in the life of a beach dog......

Vertigo........

Ok, I was way down on the ground, in the house and this sight still gave me vertigo. I took this picture from my studio window trying my best to get him way up there in the sky as it was very close to the house. We had 3 giant trees taken down that were within 5 feet of the house. This guy worked his way up the tree wearing spikes, chainsaw hanging from a rope, cutting off limbs as he went - he reached the top and starting cutting off 2 ft chunks and letting them drop to the ground - thud, thud, shake the house thud. I was in awe of him. This tree was 100 ft tall - that's really tall. The entertainment factor was almost worth the money paid to have it done......almost.......

This afternoon another painted warp went on the loom.........as it was supposed to, effortlessly, no tangles, no halo'ing. This is a view from the back of the loom, it's sitting in the raddle, the cross through the lease sticks.

Here it is from the front of the loom as I'm getting ready to thread the heddles and reed. Unfortunately, once again, my camera isn't catching the color - it's a great chartreuse/lime color  combination - one of my favorite colors.

Here I'm auditioning wefts for the 3 scarves. I'm thinking the blue green near the start, definitely the chartreuse next to it and then I'm not positive, maybe the light teal on the other side of the chartreuse. It's really hard to know how the others will look as they cross other colors in the warp - in the area where the sample is woven I'm not thrilled with the other three blues.

Things always get better.......

Things always get better. After dealing with that tangled painted warp yesterday I got to weaving it today and no issues weaving - phew......I don't think I could handle another day like yesterday in the studio. Unfortunately the camera isn't capturing the color on these accurately, hopefully it will do better when I take pictures of the finished scarves once ready to sell.

First scarf using a lavender tencel warp

Second scarf - fuchsia tencel weft

Final scarf using a charcoal tencel weft

 

I think the next warp on this loom will be another painted warp in greens & blues then I'll move on to something else as all my other painted warps are in autumn colors and I want to weave more summer things at the moment. I'll work on dyeing more in the next month or so and will make sure to be more varied in my color range.

 

We had around 30 minutes of steady rain this afternoon, a welcome sight in our third year of drought. It's going to be another ugly, very long, fire season, it may drive me to drink........if so I'll have to find some fun fruity tropical drinks to make.........

 

 

A test of my patience......

Yesterday my patience was tested. I'm really a pretty patient person but this silk warp almost did me in. It's an 8 yard warp I painted last fall that somehow got tangled in the dyeing/rinsing process even though I choke tied the bejeezzes out of it. I'm not quite sure how the tangles happened but they did - I've never had this issue in the past with painted warps but a few I dyed that day got tangled. I did have to cut the cross out of a couple sections - hopefully that won't come back to bite me in the butt as I'm weaving.

I eventually got it untangled so I could get it on the back beam but then I had to deal with halo'ing. I tried to capture a picture of it but it was tough - it's the fuzzy section you see. What happens is as the warp is coming through the lease sticks fibers fuzz from one thread grab the thread next to it and stop it from moving like a log jam. I could only advance the warp a foot at a time before dealing with 'un-halo'ing' the threads from each other - ack!  All I kept thinking is if I dressed the loom from front to back it would have been worse to deal with going through the reed and heddles which would have already been threaded....one of the many reasons I'm a back to front warper.

Finally the warp is wound on the back beam and I'm ready to thread the heddles - I'm almost to the end and realize there are extra warp ends.........well, I always leave extra warp ends hanging from the back of the loom on a painted warp in case of a broken thread....only I forgot after the fiasco of dealing with the tangles.  So, I pulled the warp out of all the heddles, pulled those extra threads to the back and rethreaded - ack again!

At the beginning of the day I thought I'd get that warp on the loom in no time and be well on my way weaving but instead it took all day to get it on the loom. If it had been $5 worth of tencel I wouldn't have spent the time on it and would have sacrificed it to the weaving goddess but it was around $50 worth of silk so I wasn't willing to give up on it.

Finally on the loom so I could audition wefts (above) - hoping to weave today. And yes, you weavers out here may spot a few errors in the weaving, I had one tie-up hook that kept falling out as I was sampling - I replaced it several times with others and finally got one that would stay put. This is not a problem I usually have with my Macomber but it seems like with this warp I'm having all kinds of issues.......hopefully today I'll weave away with no issues at all..........

Handwoven Shawls

Handwoven cotton/rayon shawls finished and listed in my etsy shop - above is all a lovely lavender color, below is a lavender warp with a pale lilac weft. On to the next project which I think will be scarves woven from one of my hand-dyed/painted warps.

Update:  the top lavender shawl sold within minutes of being listed to a wonderful customer of mine.

New shawl in the shop.......

I had put this shawl aside in the studio last fall after dyeing some silk/rayon devore shawls and scarves.......maybe I thought I'd use it, maybe I would but I haven't yet so up in the etsy shop it goes. I'll be dyeing more of them this summer so there's many more opportunities to dye one for myself. I just love the colors in this one.

This afternoon I spent some time twisting fringe on the rayon/cotton huck lace shawls that just came off the loom. Crisis when my battery fringe twister (Conair hair twister) stopped working and it wasn't low batteries. It's working intermittently now, hopefully Sam can fix it. In the meantime I did have a back-up so I finished the fringes. Maybe tomorrow I'll get the photography work done so they can be listed in the etsy shop and I'll put photos up here on the blog at that time too.

A mini weaving studio

I finally got a small weaving space carved out at the beach cottage. This bedroom used to have 2 twin beds but there have never been 2 guests staying in here at the same time so only one bed has been used at a time. Out goes the second bed and in comes my small Macomber loom.

It's turned out to be a really comfortable, welcoming guest/weaving room. I hung the quilt that was on the other bed and love the way it looks. There's even room for my extra spinning wheel in this room. My shuttles and other small tools are stored in the two little boxes on the magazine table. Bigger weaving items are hidden under the bed and will come out when I'm weaving.

I put all my little Cape May, NJ houses up on the quilt rack, they look so much cuter there than in the window seat. From the age of 13 thru college I spent my summers in Cape May Point, NJ at my parents beach house - my fondest summer memories are from those years and I get to be reminded of them seeing these and some books I have on Cape May even though I'm on the total opposite coast. I can't wait to get a warp on this loom, it's going to be a lovely space to weave in. I've brought all the cottolin over there so towels will be on this loom for quite a while.

I started knitting a new shawl using the black baby alpaca/silk blend I spun recently. I'm stuck. I'm not so sure I like it but I don't think it's the pattern, it's the handspun. It's much hairier and fuzzier than I was thinking it would be and I don't like that. So for the moment this will sit until I decide if I want to continue on or rethink how this handspun will be used.

This is a Vellela vellela jellyfish. Starting last year I was seeing the clear sail/cellophane looking top of these jellyfish all over the beach but I thought it was trash, not from a living creature. Then I saw photos of them on two different blogs from beaches north of us.....and this past weekend I saw an intact one so I snapped a photo. Apparently the clear cellophane looking part acts as a sail on the ocean. These aren't anything like the giant jellyfish from the east coast that I got stung by more times than I'd like to remember.

Handspun handknit shawl

Here's the finished handspun, handknit shawl after blocking. Too bad the morning light doesn't do the colors justice out on the covered deck. Colors are more true to life in the photo posted two days ago when it was being blocked. You can see an excellent photo of the handspun here. I knit it much bigger than the original pattern because I didn't want a little shoulder warmer, I wanted a full fledged shawl. This is my finished item for the fair display challenge but I'll be wearing it between now and August.

I'm trying to decide between knit shawl patterns for the black alpaca/colorful silk blend I spun up recently. You can see a photo of the handspun at the same link as the handspun above - it's the second picture down. I need to get something on the needles - I like to knit while we watch tv in the evening.

This morning when I went downstairs to the studio to wind the alpaca/silk yarn into balls I got sidetracked in the sewing room. My machine just came back from being cleaned/yearly maintenance but in the 2 weeks it was gone I had filled up the space with piles of 'stuff'. I started in on the piles, reorganized some other things to get them off the table for good but I left it in chaos as I've got other pressing things to do - will get back to it soon which will make me happy when I start sewing some quilted placemats for the beach cottage, so much nicer to work without the clutter.........not to say there won't still be some clutter as there's not enough room for everything but it will be a vast improvement. Now what to do with that pile of Altoids tins that were for a project that I no longer want to do........maybe someone else will want them.........they're great for storing needles, stitch markers, etc for my knitting bag but I have what I need.......