ArgoKnot

ArgoKnot
A journal of my weaving, spinning, and knitting life
Menu
cropped-cropped-IMG_4728.jpeg

Eccentric Pleasures

| 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….

| 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!

Progress on Boundweave

| 1 Comment

A rainy Saturday

And the first tomato from my garden….yes, I did eat it on my homemade bread with pesto from the basil in the garden, topped with parmesan….it was a very comforting lunch.

Here is the progress made on my boundweave wall hanging.  Aside from the tree, which is not my design anyway, I am not happy with my images.  Drat!  That second figure is supposed to a coleus plant.  Are you laughing?  (I’m not.)  And the next figure is a lady slipper.  I think others may wonder if it’s some kind of bug, or a really bad rendition of a person standing on her head.  Dear Bob says these are things that mean something to us, so I shouldn’t worry what other people see in them.  I’m trying to convince myself of that!

This is a lady slipper, this is a lady slipper, this is a lady slipper…..I still don’t believe it….

Some boundweave hints:  many years ago when I did a Christmas wall hanging on 4 shafts, I remember reading about how the weft will slant up or down according to the direction of the treadling, because it is a twill afterall.

So, if you wanted eyes or hair (or in the case above, the lower petals on the orchid) to slant in a particular direction, you have to consider that in your treadling.

So the tree and the coleus were woven by treadling from left to right across my tie up.  But the petals on the orchid did not look right done that way, so I switched to treadling ‘backward,’ or right to left.  I could have changed direction in the middle of the orchid so that the individual picks up the upper petals would have slanted upwards.  My experience with the coleus plant was that treadling either direction didn’t quite give me what I wanted, so I decided not to change direction.  The source of this information is Clotilde Barrett’s book Boundweave, Chapter 7, page 60.

The other thing that I’ve found very helpful this time around is graph paper.  On the previous project I used square graph paper and had to figure out how many rotations of the treadling sequence it took to make my weaving square.  Now I discovered on  Weavolution that Karen in the Woods is using a flattened type of graph paper, where the height of each space is shorter than the length, making squat rectangles instead of squares. I went looking for graph paper like that.  I found it at incompetech.com (clever name). Click on ‘Grid/Graph Paper.’ I chose this one, and it is pretty close to being on square per pick.  And by ‘pick’ I mean a full rotation of the treadling series, which you’ll understand if you’ve done boundweave.

I hope my next few figures are better.  I’m going to start weaving a loom now, and it’s not my design either, so I feel it’s bound (could I have picked a different word here?) to turn out better.  I’m not feeling overly confident about any of my designs, and yet 20 years ago when I did my last boundweave project, all the designs were mine and I think those figures turned out very well.

Elves and Reindeer

Santa

Santa Lucia

Onward…..

Feeding My Disappointment

| 2 Comments

I didn’t expect to be writing a post this week.  I expected to be at the IOLI lace convention in St. Paul.  But here I am, at home, sulking a bit….

I’ve had some health issues that are too boring to write about, and I ended up in the hospital on the night before my flight.  I spent the weekend recuperating, which mostly means sleeping, and I was just barely awake for a moment or so on Saturday afternoon right when my flight took off.  Why couldn’t I have slept through that?

I’m missing a class in Chrysanthemum lace which sounds so intriguing!  It is lots of little free form pieces, mostly of a tear drop or paisley shape, that are assembled together in a technique called ‘sewing’ that does not involve the kind of sewing one would do to hem a skirt or make a seam, but which I believe involves bringing up loops through the edges of the lace that are then closed to connect the separate pieces of lace together.  I know.…that wasn’t a very good description at all.  I cannot do better because I haven’t learned it yet.

Here is a little detail of the ‘sewing’ process:

From this book….

This book cover gives a good idea of the little curved paisley pieces of lace that are made and assembled into the Chrysanthemum. I imagined myself making a simpler flower that could be used to embellish a silk blouse.  The lace was to be pale pink on my imaginary bone white silk blouse….

My class was to be each morning for the week, and I envisioned myself doing lace through the afternoons, shopping in the vendors’ hall, and seeing the lace poppy exhibit.

Today after class, I was going to rent a car to drive to the Swedish American Institute to see  Helena Hernamarck’s exhibition there.  Big, big sigh….

I only just tackled unpacking my suitcase today because yesterday the thought of unpacking brought me dangerously close to tears!  And for the rest of the day I have fed my disappointment….literally….

 I made my second batch of bread based on suggestions I got from a very interesting baker.  I bought a loaf of his artisanal bread at a local farmers’ market and learned that in addition to baking he also owns a local Italian restaurant in Old Saybrook. He bakes bread based on ratios of flour/water/yeast/salt instead of any specific recipe, and he always uses a starter.  I usually use a starter too, but my bread is not nearly as good as his!  He gave me his ratios (which he learned at the San Francisco Baking Insitute), and he gave me a large bag of high gluten flour.  He suggested two starter methods:  a ‘poolish’ which you make yourself, and a ‘biga’ which is based on using leftover pizza dough.  My first batch was based on my homemade ‘poolish,’ and the bread shown here is based on his ‘biga.’  Both techniques are delicious.  I won’t bother to describe how my husband lined my large oven with ‘reflective’ tiles, nor how I hurl a big scoop of ice cubes into the oven just after I put the bread in to bake….but these are important factors!

Along with bread, I made my first batch of pesto with basil from the garden, so dinner this evening will be pesto spread on cod filets.  Tomorrow I hope to pick the first tomato from the garden!  I will make a sandwich with my bread, spread on a little pesto,  sliced tomato, and a shaving or two of parmesan…. to assuage my disappointment….

I know this is absurdly off-topic, but really, there is nothing like a day in the kitchen to brighten my spirits….

A Touch of Lace

| 3 Comments

On Saturday I will travel to St. Paul to go to my first bobbin lace convention!  This is the IOLI, the International Old Lacers, Inc…..a rather dowdy name for such a talented group of women keeping these amazing techniques going.

I’ve been thinking that if lace makers are like weavers, most of the attendees will want to wear a little something that they’ve made.  I’ve had a good length of lace edging laying around for a couple years, slated to be used as an edging for some handwoven linen hand towels.  But I have not even got that warp on my radar yet….  what I do have is a lovely, old linen blouse that I suddenly realized might look very charming with a lace border at the neckline.  Hmmm….. this blouse is probably more than a decade old now.  I sure hope it has plenty of life left in it since I now love the touch of lace at the neckline!

Gosh, I hope someone notices!

Scroll to Top