Category Archives: Fine Craft

>I’ve wanted to post several times in the past two weeks, but didn’t manage to squeeze it in! Now I have too much to say all at once!

I should be posting a photo of the finished Swallowtail shawl….but I’m not. When I attempted to block it I discovered my bind off was too tight to get the appropriate scallops. Rushing to finish made me forget to do the specified bind off, so it’s rip, rip time for me. Hope to rip it today and get it blocked this evening…. I had to leave out the last pattern row in order not to run out of my handdyed indigo silk border!

Also, I’ve got a Hudson River design for my next tapestry! (Never mind that two tapestries are not finished yet, as I begin this one.) Soyoo photo shopped two images together for me so I could get what I wanted: a view of the Palisades with a Herreschoff NewYork 30 sailing by. I’ve warped up and started weaving. I will not weave the derelict pier and birds that are in the foreground.

Here are the two photos which were photo shopped together. As you can see, the Palisades image was flipped so that the light would be coming from the right direction.

That wonderful box of tapestry yarn was great to look at but quite a bear to wind into balls. The yarn is snarled and broken in many places, almost like it had been attacked by mice. It has been a horrible chore trying to wind it, and I’ve got 4 more skeins to go. I’d rather be weaving….

>Various thoughts are coming together here to make me evaluate both my commitment to using up my stash and my incredible excitement (and sense of conquest) at purchasing a large quantity of discontinued yarn from Weaving Southwest.

Whenever I go searching through my closets and bins for yarn for projects, I’m thrilled with what I find in my stash. It’s like going into a yarn store! The yarns I’m not searching for inspire so many creative ideas that I end up thoroughly distracted, sometimes aborting the idea that sent me searching in the first place. I have a treasure trove of beautiful materials, and I know I’m not the only one.

Many years ago I heard Daryl Lancaster give advice not to feel guilty when we impulsively buy a beautiful yarn, but to promise ourselves to ‘design from our stash’ in the future to ensure that those impulsive purchases get used. I’ve lived by this advice for decades. The down side of it is that is has allowed me add to my stash far faster than I can weave, knit, or spin. I’m not going to ‘fess up to how many of spare bedrooms’ closets are packed completely with my stash, not to mention the storage areas I’ve managed to squeeze into the basement. I’ve taken a sober inventory, and I realize I need to slow down. I thought a year of using the beautiful fibers and yarns I already own would be totally joyful anyway, not at all a burden.

In my current tapestry of Rob I am using only yarns that I can find in my stash or that my teacher Soyoo supplies. The combination of yarns I’m using on Rob’s piece quite surprise me, as I would never have blended such hard yarns with such delicate ones in one weft bundle. I’m sure I’ll pay the price for that when I release the tension on the loom, but I do want to begin to learn how to work with different qualities of yarn and be successful at it.

Meanwhile, during the past couple of weeks at Soyoo’s studio, she has been talking about designing and building a new house on land she has in Korea. She is quite knowledgeable about Feng Shui, and she also knows a man who advises people on Feng Shui. It’s his opinion that most Americans live way beyond their means, and he doesn’t mean just monetarily. He believes we are a culture of people who hoard everything from paper towels to cars, to big houses filled with too much of everything. We become slaves to our hoarding and it drains our energy that should be used on better things. We have so much space which could be used so beautifully, and yet we fill it up with too many things like mega rolls of toilet paper, cans and bottles of soda and water, endless food… We buy so many supplies for the endeavors we love (in my case knitting, weaving, spinning) that a lot of creativity and joy gets killed under the weight of our possessions.

I know I’m pleasantly surprised that with Soyoo’s help I can create the colors I need in the tapestry of Rob when I actually don’t have the color. So why do I have to have every color? It’s better anyway to create a color from a blend of others than to grab just the right color to start with, as we’ve all learned at some point in weaving.

I want to cut back on having things in order to have more freedom to express myself, instead of always trying to manage my stash, always looking for more storage, a better system to organize things. If I had less stuff I wouldn’t be burdened with managing it.

Meanwhile, I really did need that yarn I bought yesterday! It’s going to feel like Christmas morning when I open it, and there in lies my dilemma!

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Just some things I’ve been puttering with, having fun, when I don’t face the more serious tasks at hand (like tapestry!)….

This is the original ‘Carriage Driver’s glove’ from the Shetland Museum photo archives, which is worth all the words in the directions that don’t tell you why you are turning the hand inside out to cast-on along the original cast-on edge to begin knitting the other direction! Turns out they are gloves with fingerless mitts attached to give an extra layer of warmth, or to give a little extra protection from horse reins…or something. Anyway, I could not figure out why I was casting on to the wrist edge of my glove and knitting the other direction. I’ve decided I don’t want double layer gloves anyway, so I’ve just gone on to the fingers! One done!

This little pearl bracelet was the outcome of my January local guild meeting. It’s a technique called ‘right angle weave’ and very quick to do with large pearls. It used most of one strand of pearls and was done in less than two hours! I wore it the next day! Total instant gratification!

>Well, the long haul of winter starts now for me. It’s time to take down the holiday decorations, which actually should have been done already….
I finished these mitts some time ago, but never photographed them. I’ve enjoyed driving with them on since they allow me to deal with delicate operations like answering my hands-free or digging in my purse for a lipstick!

Here is little Zoe’s cap. I wanted to make a bonnet for her (she is the baby of my younger son’s long time friend), but decided on this little cap with ear flaps. The yarn is mostly angora, and the colors are fun! I’ll deliver it to Chris tomorrow, and he’ll give it to her over the weekend.

One of my birthday presents was a kit for these gloves called “Carriage Driver Gloves” from the Shetland Textile Collection. So far they are fun to knit, perhaps addictive is more accurate! I wonder if I’ll still say that when I’m doing the fingers. They are my first attempt at gloves. Thank you, Lesley!

I ordered seeds yesterday. That too, should have been done already. I’ve given up on veggies in the garden due to a family of groundhogs that has lived under my front porch for several years now. In fact, I’m starting to give up on numerous flowers as well. We used to live in harmony with the groundhogs, deer, and rabbits, but the past two summers they have taken more than I was willing to share. It’s becoming a drag… Anyway, this year, I plan to grow a few veggies in pots in the greenhouse. It has a shade cloth and evaporative cooler in the summer, so I will give lettuce, tomatoes and ancho peppers a try.

>Moments before I took this photo, there were three pairs of cardinals all within my camera lens frame! I was just a nano-second too late! Oh well.

This year my birthday arrived with lots of snow and our coldest temperatures in years. I have stayed in, hibernating and working. It’s been good!

I celebrated in my very favorite restaurant which just happens to be right down the street!

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I hope I’m not the only one who sang that song as a kid. When Bob was finished with my basement studio renovation, we both realized how bad the stairs looked! So this weekend he ripped up the stairs and put down tiles, similar to the ones on the basement floor. We had plenty of spare tiles, but they didn’t seem the right choice for stair treads, so he picked something similar.

I’m funny about creating good karma in the places I live. I really needed the entrance to my studio to be inviting to me. I cleared off the shelves on the stairway landing and put stuff that is dear to me there, to entice me down to work!

Today I tied on the rest of a warp I’d used to make a clerical stole for a local minister. The rest of this warp will be a scarf which I’ll probably post on Etsy. When I packed up the studio stuff I put the cone of weft yarn someplace ‘safe‘ so I could get back to weaving when the reno was finished. I can’t find it! This is so typical of me. I wove off the bobbin that I kept near the loom, but I can’t find the cone I need for the rest of the weaving. I wonder how long it will take me to find it…. I sure hope it’s not months….or years!

While Bob was painting the trim yesterday, I made this braid for a workshop I’m doing through my online guild. It felt really good to braid again after more than a year!

>I started a lace panel for our half glass front door. We’ve had this front door for over 10 years now, and I have toyed with idea of knitting a lace panel for it and the two narrow side lights, and searched online for commercial lace panels to buy. When I’m out driving or traveling in other cities I’m always looking at houses with lace curtains, trying to find some inspiration.

This panel is “Rose Leaf” from Marianne Kinzel’s First Book of Lace Knitting. I thought I was probably the first person in decades to tackle one of her patterns, but no! Ravelry has quite a few posts for finished items in this very pattern! I have company! And the fact that all those other knitters finished their projects gives me a lot of confidence! I want to be among those ranks!

I’m knitting the antimacassar chart for the settee, although I’ve enlarged the pattern to fit my door’s window. The actual curtain panel in this pattern had too much plain knitting before the rose leaf design. If I’m worn out after the main window I’ll do the side lights as described for windows, with all that plain knitting.

The yarn I’m using is DMC cotton cordonnet #40. It’s the finest thread I’ve ever knitted. It’s a good experience! Also, this thread is so tightly spun and hard it is making a very crisp fabric. That should work well. Now to keep up the knitting (finished all of part A and one repeat of part B, about 6″ length in all)….

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>While all the previous days have gone so smoothly, with so much accomplished, today everything seemed to go wrong! It was one thing after another. First, Bob didn’t have his wallet when he got through buying miles of 1/4 round and kick plate trim for the walls and floor. Then on his second trip, when he actually paid and took all that molding, it fell out of the car and was broken up all over the road! He scrambled to get it all back in the car before anyone came along to run over it, and I had the exciting job of finding all the matching pieces when he got home with his ‘road kill.’ Then, the rubberized kick plate that he bought for the base of the walls would not stick, not even with glue! It kept falling off the walls into a heap on the floor.

He returned the defective kick plate and bought pre-primed wooden cove molding. He had to clean off all the glue from the previous attempt and put on the new. It was a frustrating and arduous day. Perhaps all this happened so he’d be happy to go back to work tomorrow!…

I had plans to get everything back in place during this week, but since we still need to paint I will have to find something else to do!
As of 6pm this evening, I have three looms back in place. I have a long way to go on getting things back, but for the moment I need to leave room for painting!

Here are my three resolutions for 2009:

1. To enjoy this room and spend a good deal of time working here! I know we won’t live here too many more years, so I want to use it to the fullest!

2. To keep this workspace organized! Always a bit challenging for me!

3. This is the hardest of my resolutions! To use only stash this year and not buy any yarn or fiber. I’m going to need a lot of strength for this one. But I feel buried in my stash, and I’m stashing it all over the house since it doesn’t fit in the two storage rooms off this studio. I bought all of it because it is so beautiful, so now the time has arrived to make use of it!

Wish me luck!

>Today we got a late start. Bob had a doctor’s appt. and some errands to do in the morning. It was noon when he started laying tiles. I had the important job of handing him tiles! The dog’s job was to get in the way as much as possible.

One loom back in place! Tomorrow Bob will finish the alcove (that you can’t see) where the AVL lives. Then it will be time for all the trim. I doubt all that trim will get finished tomorrow. And then there are the stairs to re-do. That will be another big, nasty job!