>Rejuvenated and Inspired!

Posted on July 7, 2008 | Leave a comment

>I’m just back from Convergence and the ATA workshop “Channeling Your Muse,” as well as a long weekend sailing in Narragansett Bay for the July 4th holiday. What a whirlwind! It was all great, but the ATA Workshop stands out way above the rest as an experience I won’t forget anytime soon!

I’ve got photos! I bought a new camera the night before leaving for Florida, since my husband and I are always needing the camera while going in different directions. So….I have to learn how to get the photos from the camera to the computer. I’ll be back shortly with images!

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Posted in Fine Craft

>Convergence!

Posted on June 25, 2008 | 1 comment

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I’m leaving for Convergence and the ATA workshop tomorrow morning! I’m looking forward to all the wonderful events and to coming home full of inspiration!

I did not harvest my weld…..I guess it will just wait for me….
I saw the first fire flies of the year last night, so it’s really summer!

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Posted in gardening, weaving

>Wedding Shower

Posted on June 13, 2008 | Leave a comment

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I finished the cover kimono from Knit Kimono in time to wear to my future dil’s shower tomorrow. I’m not happy with my photos, but I’ll try again. Bob and I are still hurtling ourselves around, and I had to find the camera in his packed bags in order to take this photo! I’ll be camera-less for the weekend….

He’ll be sailing in the Shelter Island area of Long Island, and I’ll be on the Connecticut River at the shower and then visiting my sister. Hopefully we’ll be buying a flower girl dress this weekend! Poor mother of the groom is going to be the last one to get her dress!

Tapestry is beginning to seem like something I used to do. I’ve started a new warp for a small sample project while I have two larger projects in various stages of woven incompletion (my neglected historical piece and ‘Handsome Rob’), and there’s a Hudson River design that is dying to get out of my head onto some paper. sigh…..

My weld is huge, and I’m ready to dye. I’ve got some handspun single-ply Romney for tapestry, as well as some commercial merino/mohair and some commercial wool, both of which I’d probably use for knitting. All I need is some time at home!

My dog Riptide continues to take up much of my time on weekdays. He’s not failing yet, but he needs to be monitored fairly regularly to see if his liver function can improve enough to get him back on his chemo therapy schedule. If he doesn’t improve soon it will become too late to accept him back into the program. It’s a clinical trial being done by Abbott Labs. He’s done very well on it for nine months before chemicals began to build up in his liver. He still acts perfectly healthy, although a bit more subdued than he was before getting lymphoma.

On that note….I have to get ready to take him for his blood work….

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Posted in dyeing, gardening, tapestry

>Found Time

Posted on June 8, 2008 | Leave a comment

>It feels like I haven’t had a moment for anything spontaneous in months. I’ve done lots of outrageously wonderful and fun things lately, but it’s been all pre-scheduled and hurry, hurry, hurry! This weekend was to be no exception. It’s both my 31st wedding anniversary and my husband’s birthday. We had family come down for CT to have dinner Friday, and it was wonderful to sit in the back garden among the foxglove, peonies, iris and cranesbill as the evening turned to night.

To celebrate our anniversary, we spent Saturday at the Cloisters as you’ll see below. It was ‘garden days’ with special tours planned every hour, some focusing on medicinal plants, plants for scent, and general tours. We arrived in time for one of the general tours, which included a stop inside in the room with the ‘Hunt for the Unicorn’ tapestry series. (I’d already gone in there to make sure I had my own visit since I never go to the Cloisters without visiting the tapestries!) I had not expected the tapestries to be included in a garden tour, and it was a pleasant surprise! The docent did an excellent job talking about the works. Everything she said about tapestry weaving was very accurate, although not terribly detailed (after all this was a garden tour), and she did a very credible job talking about the plants depicted in the tapestries and the sacred/secular underlying meaning of unicorns in medieval lore. It was an unexpected highlight! We finished the day with dinner at our favorite restaurant, which just happens to be in our town!
Today I was busy making plans for the another round of relatives who were coming for lunch, when we realized that we’d all misunderstood each other about where lunch was taking place! I was waiting for them to arrive for lunch in the garden, and they were waiting for us to arrive at our typical half-way meeting place on the shore of Long Island sound in Rowayton. It was too late for either of us to jump in the car to get to each other, so I’ve got an unexpectedly free afternoon! The first thing that comes to mind is spinning! And secondly, doing a little research on how to use the weld I have flowering in the garden this year, and the woad seeds I’ve just managed to obtain (not willing to admit where I got them just yet…..)…..
So….without delaying anymore….I’m off to spin!

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Posted in gardening, tapestry

>Photo Collage!

Posted on June 4, 2008 | 2 comments

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Scenes from my garden in early June

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Posted in gardening

>Launched into Summer

Posted on June 3, 2008 | Leave a comment

>Well, I have not managed to learn how to make a photo collage. Everything technical is such a steep learning curve for me!

The garden is looking quite nice….the peonies have just opened, along with the pinks and cranes’ bills and Siberian iris, while the bleeding hearts are fading. My weld is huge and just about to bloom so I’m looking forward to some dyeing! Hopefully I can rejuvenate my indigo vat and get some wild lime green like I saw at Vicki Fraser’s studio two years ago!

My catalog for ATB7 arrived in the mail just before Chris’ graduation. What a wonderful surprise to find part of Buddha’s face on the cover! I’m very honored!

Wedding plans abound, Convergence is just around the corner, I’ve got homework from my Pre-Columbian workshop with Susan Martin Maffei, and three tapestries in various degrees of completion (one that is still in the design stage). My knitted kimono is almost done! It’s sewn together and the knitted band is about 1/2 done. I’d like to wear it to the wedding shower in mid-June….next weekend! Yikes! I’m partially done with a silk kimono style vest that tempted me at the MD Sheep and Wool. It’s a kit from Just Our Yarn. The only downer for me right now is that somehow I’ve caught a summer cold that’s been making the rounds here.

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Posted in Fine Craft

>Time in a Bottle

Posted on May 30, 2008 | Leave a comment

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Can you believe the Saturday crowd at MDS&W this year? It’s downright scary! There are so many spinners now, we could really make a difference in the world if we organized!

Holy smokes! It’s been six weeks since I’ve posted here. I think my little hour glass of sand has all leaked out…..

My younger son the physicist has graduated, I’ve been to The Maryland Sheep and Wool, seen the “Blue” exhibition at the Textile Museum in DC, had a much needed visit with my parents in VA, and spent almost a week away celebrating Memorial Weekend by sailing around Eastern Long Island Sound. Maybe I should try to do a photo collage…..

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Posted in Fine Craft

>Hurdles

Posted on April 14, 2008 | 2 comments

>There are times when I am decidedly anti-social. I’ve been underground for a couple of weeks now, due to some extremely emotional things in my life which I’m just not willing to write about here. When things are weighing heavily on my mind yet I don’t feel I can write about them, it’s hard to write about anything! So I’ve been underground.

One of the things I find therapeutic for anxiety is spinning! I haven’t spun in over a year, but during the past week I’ve been glued to my wheel. I had bought some silk top from Carol Weymar in two beautiful colorways. I neglected to take a photo of the fiber before I started spinning the green/blue/brown top. The interesting thing is I was attracted to this colorway because it was so watery: blues and greens with only a hint of copper/browns here and there. Yet the finished yarn is decidedly earthy, not watery. I still like it….alot. My skein is just shy of 400 yds. and I’m hoping it will make a very pretty (and small) Swallowtail shawl. I spun this entirely worsted and made a 2-ply.


I began spinning the second colorway yesterday. I finished the second bobbin today. There is only about an ounce on each bobbin, so it’s not a great deal of spinning. This time I spun from the fold and used a modified long draw. I am letting the second bobbin set and will refrain from plying until tomorrow. I can’t wait to see if the yarn is loftier than my worsted skein, and I can’t wait to see what happens to the color. I love all the bright pinks and corals mixed with blues and purples, but I don’t know if I could really wear this colorway! I wonder if it will mute a great deal when it’s plied.


My younger son turned 22 last week, and I went to spend the weekend with him in Rochester (NY). The highlight of our time together was a tour of the laser lab that he arranged for us. The University of Rochester has the largest laser in the world. That must be a little known fact. It was an incredibly impressive machine, but since photography was not allowed I cannot show you just how impressive. They are using this laser to work on fusion, and I hope they figure it out soon! Meanwhile I’ll include a shot of my son’s much smaller laser lab where he works when he’s not in class. It looks quite disorganized although he assures me this is how all labs look!

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Posted in Fine Craft

>The Orkney Pi

Posted on March 21, 2008 | 1 comment

>This is Elizabeth Lovick’s “Orkney Pi” shawl. She made this pattern and is leading a KAL (knit along) for a yahoo group called EZasPi (a play on Elizabeth Zimmerman’s name as well as Pi). I am in the midst of section three, which is the lattice work area. In this section there are 640 stitches per row, and it’s going very slowly for me. The stitch pattern is very regular with a short repeat so that should be easy, and yet I’ve made some mistakes. What is challenging about this section is it gets repeated 5 times. That’s a lot of knitting! The last, outer section with the large trees has 1280 stitches per row and a lot of rows. That will be quite daunting for me, butut I do want to make it to that point! I’ve managed to keep up through this KAL until this week. Well, naturally, it wasn’t that hard when I had 80 stitches per round, or 160, or even 320. 640 has really slowed me down, and I can’t imagine making any progress when (if?) I make it to 1280!

So I’ve been dividing my time between tapestry and lace knitting for the past several weeks. I haven’t taken any photos of the progress on ‘little man in the boat’ (I need a name for this piece!) or H.Rob, and I’m not sure why. I just don’t feel like photographing them yet….maybe that’s a sign that I’m not happy with something about them. I’d better give that some thought!

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Posted in knitting

Posted on March 17, 2008 | Leave a comment

>Well, I’m mostly over all my angst of the past week, in time to celebrate my Celtic roots before the day is done. So here’s a photo of my favorite Emerald Isle and a quote I love to use more often than I should!

‘Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.’ –Yeats (of course)

Cead Mille Failte

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Posted in Fine Craft