weaving – Page 11

Busy Beautiful Days

January 14, 2013 | 4 Comments

We’ve been back on board Pandora for five days already, and it’s been a very busy cup of tea here. We thought we’d be crossing to the Bahamas on Wednesday this week, so there was a lot to accomplish!…. food provisions, engine maintenance, propellor cleaning, boat bottom cleaning…. various other small, but very important chores….not to mention getting ourselves further south so that the angle of crossing would be more favorable. And as weather often does, it has changed so that Wednesday is no longer our departure day. We are now cautiously aiming for Thursday… or Friday….

We left Ft. Pierce on Saturday morning and stopped in a lovely spot called Manatee Pocket that evening. Great name for the location where I did see my first manatee! No kidding, these creatures are unbelievably ungainly and touchingly sweet. I now fully understand why they are at the mercy of fast traveling power boats. They move very slowly and cannot possibly get out of the way of a speeding boat. When I saw my first manatee it had just started to descend back into the water, so its back looked like a giant black mooring ball!

There is so much beautiful bird life here … egrets, herons, osprey, kingfishers…. my favorite are the ibises. They are so delicate….almost ephemeral.

During our evening walk along the shore of Manatee Pocket (looking for the perfect restaurant), I found a weaving studio! Can you believe it??? Unfortunately for me, it was closed.

Who wouldn’t love spending time here??? That is a chenille warp on her loom.

Yesterday we motored 57 miles and went under 20 bascule bridges….surely a phenomenal logistical feat for any sailboat! We deserve a prize! I saw The Breakers from the waterway…. where I once spent a decadent long weekend with Bob about a million years ago! I thought I might want to jump ship and stow away in a luxurious resort suite….but oddly, I didn’t! At the moment I’m quite happy in my less than luxurious accomodations on Pandora!

The houses along the canals are getting more and more impressive. It’s more Mediterranean here than the Mediterranean with all the stucco and terracotta roof tiles….and porticos! The houses are huge, and are so close together. It would seem to me if you have a house with a full acre of square footage, you wouldn’t want to be looking right in the windows of your next door neighbors! To each his own…

On the knitting front, I cast on for a small Fair Isle purse at the airport in Connecticut. It’s Beth Brown-Reinsel’s design from Interweave Knits Fall 2004 issue. I’m making a number of changes to the pattern; the most significant change is that I could not stomach the idea of knitting this purse flat. I know Beth must have had good reasons for her design, but since I’m pretty stubborn about stranding in the round, that’s what I’m doing! I’ve got plans to make this a small tote bag, so I’ll be making a somewhat rigid insert for the bag when I return home next spring, along with a lining and leather handles instead of a drawstring.

I raided my J&S shetland and AS Scottish Campion stashes for these yarns (two large comforter-size storage bags stuffed full of yarn!), and I was quite surprised to find that I had absolutely no brown! So I solved that dilemma with a quick trip to Yarns Down Under the evening before my flight. Everyone needs a LYS who is willing to open shop for emergency travel knitting! My LYS is the best enabler!

We are leaving shortly for Middle River, Ft. Lauderdale.

Sweetgrass in Charleston

November 6, 2012 | 4 Comments

We are in Charleston, and I have not posted anything here since our arrival last Thursday. Bob has posted lots of photos and descriptions of what we’ve been up to, and he’s done such a thorough job, that I’m not inclined to try to catch up!

I’ve been distracted. We are photographing doors and window boxes, something I’m always intrigued to do… I’ve been thinking of window box images taken from every place I’ve been in the past decade or so…. Maine, France, England, now Charleston. There are so many beautiful little window gardens… I’d like to choose a few and weave them using Theo Moorman technique as Daryl Lancaster does (and as I have now done a couple of times), and put them together in a window frame fashion. I’ve got just the spot in our house for this…

I’ve also been distracted thinking about the potential group tapestry project that the Wednesday Group might do. For the first time in aeons I have been reading papers on classical literature and reliving my past when this was such a major part of my life. It’s been aeons of aeons since then. It’s rekindling the love of words and ancient languages that I’ve neglected for so long…

And I’ve been looking for the perfect basket. Actually, I saw it last Thursday, on my first day in the Charleston Market, but I did not know it until I’d spent days looking at hundreds more baskets!

I didn’t realize that I would have so many choices. And in the end that perfect basket was still waiting for me this morning, although when I finally realized it someone was holding it, considering it for themselves. They put it down, and I heard them say, “I’ll think about it and come back”…..bam! It is now mine.

Carlene Habersham made my basket. Here she is making some last minute adjustments to the rim.

She had this book on display in her booth

Carlene said the basket on the cover was made by her grandmother. She then turned to the pages that highlighted both her grandmother’s and her mother’s work. I was duly impressed. But most of all, I just love the basket she made.

Last Thursday I spoke to another woman, Susie, who had some very delicate small baskets on display. I wanted six of them to give to some basket making friends of mine. Susie said only her daughter did work that small, and she called to ask if her daughter could make six miniature baskets over the weekend. Susie told me to come back today and they would be ready. Luckily for me, her daughter came too so I could meet her.

There were lots of other stalls with small baskets, but only these were done to a scale that was pleasing to the size of the basket. Aren’t they lovely?

This basket is done by Susie’s other daughter. It caught my eye as I was leaving their booth.

I am in basket heaven….

Days 52 – 56, Nov. 1 – 5: Charleston, South Carolina

Eccentric Pleasures

August 29, 2012 | Leave a Comment

It is less than two weeks until we leave, and I have just spent a week with visiting friends, up to see our new location and to say good bye before we sail off into the sunset…

While doing a little local sight seeing with friends, I visited several amazing places over the past week. First the Chester Fair! Wow! This is a real old-fashioned country fair with oxen pulling contests; cow, sheep, and goat judgings; best vegetable and fruit contests. There was a sheep herding demonstration. There were judgings for best fruit pie, best whoopie pie, best vegetable decorations…just to name a few. This has been taking place since 1877, and it’s just down the road from me. Who knew?

Two other highlights of the week occurred yesterday when my friend June and I visited a weaving school in an historic octogon-shaped house in Carolina, Rhoda Island, run by Jan Doyle who also teaches at URI. She is doing an amazing program with local weavers, and she has lots of looms and quite a large weaving reference library. On the way home my friend and I stopped in Stonington at the Velvet Mill to see the Fiber Arts Studio. What an amazing space! Just walking in the door I felt the weaving zen come over me. I could live here…..

Now that I’m home, doing laundry from the week of visitors, all I want to do is weave. I have two weeks to get organized and packed for a 9 month trip, but all I want to do is put on a fine linen warp for napkins….wouldn’t that be relaxing? I really must snap out of this…

….which leads me to what I can realistically do today. In the laundry this morning are 13 handwoven linen dinner napkins (not all woven by me), a dozen linen cocktail napkins, and several small handwoven towels from the powder room. They are all air drying right now, and shortly I will have the pleasure of ironing them. I know…..it’s a bit eccentric….maybe even quite ’round the bend’…..but I love to iron linens. That’s a pleasurable activity I can’t wait to do in a short while when the linens are barely damp.

A spray bottle of water for the stubborn wrinkles, a really hot iron, steam that will waft up at me and the sweet smell of ironing. I can’t wait!

Tick, Tick, Tick….

August 23, 2012 | Leave a Comment

Isn’t this mid-August weather glorious? It’s hard to choose between being outside and being in the studio. With only three weeks left until my long voyage, I have to choose being in the studio!

Tackling My Toika

August 1, 2012 | 1 Comment

In spite of that pep talk from my son, in spite of Su Butler’s excellent website with extensive information, including photos (!) about tying up a Toika, and in spite of perusing every forum post about Toikas I could find on Weavolution, I could not get my loom to work. When I opened a shed I had such a jumble of threads at differing heights, there was no way to throw a shuttle! And I won’t even mention how hard it was to depress the treadles.

This is a warp I made somewhat over a year ago, before I knew for certain that we’d be moving. As soon as we decided to put our house on the market, the real estate agent we used insisted that I take this loom apart and put it in storage. She thought my studio would show well as a second family room. We rented a storage unit and I put both the Toika and my 40″ AVL in it, not to mention lots of other studio equipment.

The project I have on the Toika is 8 shaft boundweave threaded in rosepath at 10 epi. I’ve used some precious tapestry warp that is hard to get these days, and I put on about 6 yards, 24″ wide to make several boundweave wall hangings. I’m envisioning a little story board of my family. For me I have charted out a floor loom, a castle style spinning wheel, a drop spindle, various garden flowers, and maybe a bucket for dye! For my husband I’ve charted a boat, and anchor, and a car. My head is brimming with ideas to include our two sons, along with various cats and dogs…. and yet…. I could not get the loom to work.

Today I came close to tears. It wasn’t pretty…. I became obsessed with talking directly Su Butler because I believed that she was the only person left in the world who could sort this out for me. Either she had some advice or it was time to get rid of this loom. Shame faced, I sent her an email. Within moments she wrote back and recommended we talk on the phone. Hallelujah!

My Toika works like a dream now! What a relief….

So, what did I do wrong? Well, first (and probably most importantly) the distance between the bottom of the shafts, the top lamms, bottom lamms and treadles should be about the same. Not knowing exactly what that meant I had them within 2″ of the same distance apart. Su said I needed to get all these within a 1/2″ of the same distance. Bingo! The other dilemma was my treadle height. Doing it as described on her website didn’t give me the necessary position when the locking pins were removed. My treadles ended up slanting upwards toward the bench, and that was no fun for trying to depress them! She was familiar with this little quirk on some looms and explained to me what to do. Now everything is in great working order!

So, these are not the best looking trees by any stretch….but the loom is working well, and I don’t mind working on my little graphed charts to improve the image. I’ll give it another go shortly.

8 am next morning…. I have better trees!

I was compensating for my graph paper squares too much in my first attempt and therefore elongating the trees too much. Now I think I’ve got it! So I will weave a header and begin the first actual wall hanging! Can you imagine me doing a happy dance around the loom??….punching the air! Yippee!

Better looking trees shortly….