One More Thing…
This is the sun that set on my father’s remains on his first evening traveling the Gulf Stream.
May all the dolphins, turtles, and sailfish, and all the creatures of the warm Gulf Stream sing you home….
Fine Craft
2nd Attempt
Well, my journey with warp painting continues with round two. Here is the list of what went wrong this time.
1. Warp was too wet. I got more bleeding in the knot area than I would have liked. Ugh…. (Note to self: in future blot the warp before painting!)
2. Mysterious faint smudges of pale blue that are no where near where I was painting. These blue smudges are behind the stencil and it was a brand new stencil that I cut since I was afraid any leftover dye on the first stencil might cause problems (unlikely, I now know, since the dye on that has lost its activation)….still, I was also afraid that the manilla folder’s cut edges might have gotten a little soggy from the first round of dyeing so I just thought it best to go with a new stencil. So, how on earth did these smudges get on the warp? There is no dye at all on the back of the stencil, and the smudges occured in an area that was covered by the plain, uncut part of the stencil. No clue….
See all those smudges above the beginning of the knot? Most of them will be in the hem, but not all. I am pretty bummed about this right now…. the blue warp that is in the lower left corner of the photo is my shadow…..not a blue warp!
I’ve been thinking about the kind of shifting I’m getting as I wind back on, and although the shifting has been quite different for each project, there is one thing that the two projects I did at home have in common that is different from the two projects done in class with Sarah Saulson.
Sarah insisted that we tug on our warps after every revolution of the warp beam. I hated doing that. I felt like I was losing the registration of what I’d painted when I grabbed the whole width of the warp in one hand and tugged. But I have to admit that the two scarves done with that technique have almost no shifting. I guess I will give that a try this time. Besides, I feel like this round is already a failure, so not much to lose.
Thanksgiving
It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without some outdoor time, walking in the woods, putting the garden to bed, and (hopefully) having bulbs already planted. This is not the first time I’ve posted photos of these two lovely structures. There is moss growing on the cedar shakes of this pretty barn. I did not catch the light properly because (in real life) the moss was glowing vivid green in the soft light.
I can’t seem to walk by this house without taking yet another photo of it. It was a mostly grey holiday weekend, rainy and raw, but I seem to love the scenery along this walk in almost any weather.
The highlight of our walk yesterday was seeing the beaver that has caused so much destruction along the banks of this stream! He has not left a single tree untouched….busy guy! I was thrilled to see him, although I know you probably won’t! He reall is there, right in the center of the photo, just under the branches with the green leaves! Trust me!
Moss and lichen on rocks. Someday I’ll get just the right photo to begin a tapestry cartoon. This is intriguing, but the light is not quite what I saw yesterday.
At home I am re-mounting my Flax Spinner and getting a new silk warp ready for painting.
Knitting is Catching Fire!
Oops! See note at end the end of this post for why this post is badly titled!
Bob and I went to the movies last night. It was an escape from the very sad and very stressful time we are going through, which involves a loved one’s serious health condition. Bob has been not-so-patiently awaiting the release of the second “Hunger Games” movie so we dashed out to see it last night on his return from the daily hospital visit. I was mildly intrigued, but definitely looking forward to an evening’s distraction…
No one warned me there would be KNITTING! The whole first segment of the movie held me captive, and I was craning forward in my theater seat to get a better look at the unusual knitted designs that Katniss wore! It was a visual feast! I swear there were three knitting garments, but I must be wrong…
….because these garments are already all over the internet, and there are only two:
This garment does not look knitted to me. It made me think of nalbinding or some other rather ancient technique that predates what we call knitting today. I’m intrigued! I’d love to see the real garment.
Then there was this lovely cowl in luscious shades of berries/trees/water. There is something really interesting going on in the stitch pattern. I tried to magnify this image to get a better look, but it just got a bit blurry! Hmmmmm….
Okay….enough about Katniss! Here are a few things I’ve been working on lately. Mostly, I have to say that I’ve been curled up in a fetal position for several weeks now….sleeping too much….
My English friend, Lesley, just finished this sweater in a deep garnet merino wool. I bet it is breathtaking! I was so intrigued that I had to have one too…. in medium blue cotton (Cascade’s Ultra Pima in color #3772). I have finished the cables around the neckline, and now I’ve put it aside…..it’s a lot of plain stockinette for the rest of the body….sigh…. I do love the way the longest cable comes down below the garter stitch area, which you can see on the right side in the photo. What a beautiful design!
And I’m spinning my first “Tsarina of Tsocks” kit called “Kitri.” The body of the sock is a lovely claret red merino/silk blend. I’m doing a test spin for a 4-ply by topping off a few bobbins with the tsarina fiber so I can ply just a short amount to check my knitting gauge.
A couple of weeks ago Bob set up my large Shannock tapestry loom. I’m ready to start two tapestries and need to decide which one comes first! The full size Flax Spinner or “Into the Night,” which is a new cartoon I recently made…
Isn’t she an impressive loom? Cartoons are draped on the treadle bar, including a really old cartoon that I never wove. In the foreground you can see an umbrella swift with a skein of silk draped on it. I just finished using that silk to make a warp for my next painted warp project. It will be a small wall hanging based on an image Bob took while we were in the Bahamas. If all goes well, maybe I will bring it with me in January and hang it on the wall of our main salon.
And speaking of making cartoons…. I borrowed an opaque projector from an old friend. It’s quite a relic from the 50s and makes quite a roar when I turned it on. In fact, it blew a fuse, so I haven’t actually gotten to use it yet. Here’s Bob setting it up for me.
So, I guess I’m doing more than just sleeping my days away, and I’m glad I wrote this. It helped me see that I am progressing on work….just at a snail’s pace… and that (in reality) is not much slower than I normally work.
NOTE: It has been 10 months since I posted this, and clearly interest in the Katniss fashions from “Catching Fire” is still running high! Many thanks to Kristin from dreamspunfiber.com who sent some links to the two designs I wrote about. It turns out neither one was knitted! They are both woven! …and the green cowl is a beauty in what looks like deflected double weave! Although that makes my post title inaccurate, I am quite thrilled to learn these garments were woven. You can take a closer look here and here.
Ups and Downs of Life Aboard
It’s no surprise that living on board a boat has its challenges….some things are just so easy at home and so hard on the water. I have gone for months and years at home with no major equipment failures…..heat, water, appliances. At home we expect these things to go on working for decades…. On board they break all the time. You cannot get through a single sailing season without constant repair to major things….. why is that???
So, I won’t go through the laundry list of things that have gone kaput on Pandora. It’s too long and technical for a weaving blog anyway. But I will say that these problems fall heavily on Bob, so he has been under strain to find the source of our engine problems and our failed heating system. We have been freezing the past few days as the temperatures have been unseasonably cold in Virginia and North Carolina.
I finished my niece’s sweater and have plenty of yarn leftover to make her a matching hat….I could almost make a second sweater! (Polly Macc’s Brother/Sister pattern)
But I have been SO cold that I decided to take out a bigger unfinished project so I could wrap myself in it as I knit. It’s the fun Vivian Hoxbro wrap called “Zig Zag.”
As I began to take a close look at where I left off and how to get back into the zen of this pattern I began to realize that’s it’s been a really long time since I put this away. I bought this kit when I met Vivian at a workshop at a friend’s house….we were able to arrange this workshop because the friend offered to meet Vivian at the airport on her very first knitting workshop tour of the US, which meant that we became her very first group of students on her US tour. Ours was not a scheduled workshop, but something that my savvy friend was able to put together since she was housing Vivian on the first leg of her US tour.
So….how many years ago was that?? Vivian’s book Domino Knitting was new in the US, and she had copies with her to sell. It was autumn, and I knitted my Zig Zag through that season and on into winter. I remember specific knitting times when I was waiting in a physical therapy office, happily knitting, while my younger son was getting therapy for some long distance running injuries. Yesterday I asked Christopher what year that might have been, and he thinks it was either his sophomore or junior year of high school. That was a long time ago…..2002 or 2003. And since I met Vivian a few months earlier in the fall of the previous year, I’m pretty certain that I started this pattern in fall of 2002. Eleven years ago…..
What surprises me about how long it’s been since I set this project aside is that I have thought of this fun pattern every few months, planning to get back to it. For over a decade I have told myself that I would pick up my Zig Zag right after I finish this or that other project…..and it’s now been 11 autumns. Where does the time go??