ArgoKnot

ArgoKnot
A journal of my weaving, spinning, and knitting life
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A new venue

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As happens every year in January, I have changed venue from my messy studio in Connecticut to a tiny living space and studio aboard our boat Pandora, in the Caribbean. It’s now mid-January, and I have been in Antigua in the West Indies for two weeks.

We arrived by plane on January 30, with one day to move into the historic English Harbour for the annual New Year’s Eve’s fireworks, after first having a memorable French dinner at La Brasserie. English Harbour is where Lord Nelson protected this island’s sugar cane plantations before he was Lord Nelson. He made a name for himself here which catapulted his career. Over the past 60 years Nelson’s Dockyard has been carefully restored and is now a UNESCO site. It’s a dramatic place, and also quite lovely. There is a strong sense of the 18th century here, amidst some modern conveniences, like running water and electricity for the boats on the dock!

Dinner at La Brasserie and the fireworks afterward never disappoint!

But my real story here is how I plan to continue to work while I am living aboard. I often get lonely over the winter because I miss ‘my people,’ those I meet with at groups throughout the year. They are the spinners, weavers, lace makers, and others who work with their hands who inspire me and learn with me. Down here people do plenty of work with their hands. Just keeping their boats running is a huge job, and often there are women who do handwork as well, which includes knitting, crocheting, quilting, embroidery, and other kinds of handwork, and even more pressing work like sail repair and canvas work on their boats. Sadly, in the 11 years we’ve been doing blue water sailing, I have yet to meet another weaver.

This year a friend of mine who is down here for the first time aboard her own boat, with her husband, has started a needlework group that meets twice a week. Now, why didn’t I think of that? Every Tuesday and Thursday we meet for at least two hours. The group changes week by week as some sailors move on to different harbors on different islands, and some new comers join us. It’s been fascinating. We actually have a member who lives here in a house, although she’s also quite an accomplished sailor. I definitely look forward to this creative time with new friends each week. Thank you, Ellen, for making this happen!

The restaurant of the Antigua Yacht Club allows us to use their space to meet. How generous! Our surroundings are amazing so sometimes we just have put down our projects and admire the views.

I have been bringing my tiny Nano 2 e-spinner to some of the meetings. This is my first spinning project on this little gem, and I was concerned about stressing it by filling the bobbin too full or spinning too fast. It can handle anything I’ve done so far, and I think it’s perfect for spinning in small spaces.

The second bobbin is almost full, so Bob will soon be ’inventing’ a lazy Kate for me to hold the bobbins while I ply the the strands of yarn together from each bobbin. I knew I’d forget something! I’m looking forward to seeing how the plied yarn turns out. I believe I know what I’ll do with this yarn when I get access to my looms at home.

This old fashioned hot water bottle cover was the first thing I finished during the first week of January. I won’t need it down here, will I? Still, it was something that caught my eye before we left home, and I enjoyed knitting it! To make the opening I knit one round in waste yarn, only on the front half of the stitches, and then unpicked the waste yarn to separate the front into two pieces for an opening.

As I unpicked the waste yarn I picked up stitches on both the upper and lower sides of the knitting. Then I could knit ribbing on the lower half and ribbing plus a button hole on the upper half.

And here is the finished hot water bottle cover. I just need a button. I will block this on the actual water bottle when I return home.

Yesterday was my birthday, and I woke up to two surprises. One was a decorated main saloon on Pandora! Bob bought these fun decorations in the US before he sailed down here. How thoughtful! It feels like party, although I do not! I awoke on my birthday to some kind of very nasty bug. I hope it’s only food poison, but in the middle of the night for the past two nights I’ve imagined myself dying of ecoli or some other horrible thing. Surely, I’ll be on the mend soon!

And how about these fun knitting inspired presents? I love them! This is a journal in case you’re wondering.

In the meantime, I had a wonderful zoom call with family and a couple of close friends. The joys of keeping in touch with loved ones, from such remote places, is priceless! This year Bob has just installed Star Link. So far, so good! It’s struggling with streaming video so far, and it requires more of our battery power than he realized. Thank heaven for solar, wind, and lithium batteries. I have been trying to catch up on the videos I missed from Giovanna Imperia’s class for the American Kumihimo Society’s recent online event. But I’m not discouraged yet! It’s interesting to hear the small white Star Link disc change direction as Pandora moves to and fro at anchor.

I hope to back to normal soon so I can finish spinning and move on to other projects. I wish you well in your own endeavors in the new year.

The Act of Making

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Over the years Bob has described me as ‘goal oriented.’ He seems to think that I am overly focused on finishing things, and even perhaps that I define my ‘success’ in the number of finished projects I complete in a year. I’ve never felt this defines me, and only recently have I realized what might be a better description of my compulsions. I need to be making things. It is wonderful therapy for me to spend a day in my home studio working toward some finished item. It’s not the finished project that entices me nearly as much as the act of spending a day using my skills to make something. It’s definitely the process of making over the having of a finished object that motivates me, but I will admit that finishing things feels great! I have spent a wonderful six weeks this fall engaged in making.

I have been working on some tiny baskets during the past few weeks, each one only 2″ in diameter. My favorite supplier of basket materials is DELS in Freetown, Massachusetts. Their in-house scrimshander (a female, so perhaps scrimshandress?) did the lovely scrimshaw for the handles of my baskets. The scrimshaw is done on old piano keys. The unfinished one in the foreground is one of three I’m making for my three young grandchildren. These did not get finished due to not having enough waxed linen. They are made with bleached staves and weavers which makes them look a little like ivory. I have scrimmed piano keys for these as well, candy canes on the two baskets with red waxed linen, and blue snowflakes on the basket with blue waxed linen, plus the children’s names and the years they were born. These little baskets are woven in 2/2 twill (over 2, under 2) while the adult baskets are woven in plain weave with natural cane and weavers. I only finished two of the three needed for the grandchildren, so these will have to wait until next year. It is what it is!

This year I needed three hand made presents for the various groups I go to throughout the year. One is my lace group, and that was the first holiday party that took place this month. I am the least skilled lace maker in this group, so I certainly wasn’t going to make any lace for a present. Also, I am incredibly slow at making lace! I opted to make a cover cloth which is used to protect lace while you are not working on it. This was a completely machine made item, embellished on an embroidery machine and then machine sewn to a lining. Still, the placement of the embroidered bobbins took me hours to do. That’s another skill I am inexperienced at accomplishing. The embroidery pattern was for one bobbin, and I wanted three placed almost the way I got them positioned on the fabric.

The lining fabric came from Spoonflower and has a wonderful array of lace making images in the print–bobbins, tatting shuttles, bits of lace and tatting.

The small group within my large statewide weaving guild also had a holiday party for which we needed to bring a present. The theme was to make something out of a scrap of fabric. A small treasure bag is what was recommended. Well, since I don’t make clothing, I don’t have scraps! I decided to make a tiny tapestry and a bit of kumihimo and somehow turn them into a bag. This became the most therapeutic process over the span of three afternoons. I enjoyed every minute of making this bag.

The tiny tapestry, sett at 12 epi, uses a technique for ‘couching’ that I learned this summer in a workshop with Fiona Hutchison. Wrapping and couching a larger diameter weft that floats on the surface of the tapestry creates a wonderfully dimensional effect. I’ll be using this technique more and more. After weaving the small piece, I enjoyed making the kumihimo braid and then machine sewing the small bag which brought the whole thing together. I am happy with the project, which is the best part of enjoying the process of making–being satisfied with the end result!

The last thing I made was a set of four pot holders. This was by far the least enjoyable project. I won’t make many more of these, although I am frequently drawn the patterns you can create in a potholder. This was the pattern I made in the “Potholder Wizard” program.

I made four of these, two each with a light background and a reversed dark background. Here are two of them.

And so the holiday season has started. I’m content that I carved out enough time to make things and that these went to people who expected to receive a handmade gift rather than to those who might not want this kind of present! It was time well spent for me to indulge my love of making, and giving the gifts to other makers was an additional perk.

It’s time to head back downstairs to begin wrapping the presents for family and friends. These are mostly bought items. A couple of them are handmade by others, and then there are my tiny baskets which will go to my two sons and their partners, and then eventually the bleached ones will go to my grandchildren.

I’ll close with a personal holiday image. Here is one of our grand-dogs on a walk with our son on the Columbia campus in New York, taken by our wonderful Melody.

Today is the first day of Hanukah, and it’s less than a week until Christmas. Whatever you celebrate in this season I wish you time for making and time for giving. I’ll be back in the new year, in a very different setting.

The Saga of the Japanese Paper Yarn

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It’s December 17, which means it’s only one week until Christmas Eve. It’s past time to focus on getting ready for that holiday with my family, but I am entangled in what has become an unusual adventure using paper yarn from Habu.

When I first put on a linen warp to weave some placemats with paper as weft, I was so excited to use the paper yarn dyed with indigo. Granted, it was a very pale indigo, so I admit I had some worries about how the woven pattern would show up on the pale warp of white and unbleached linen (#365 in Strickler). It didn’t show up well at all! Unsure of how to progress, I may have reacted too quickly by diving through stash and deciding to use a beautiful blue linen as weft. The placemats are lovely in this blue, but I continue to wish they were paper. I now have four of these, and I used up the whole first warp to get them.

In October I took the remaining paper yarn and dyed it with indigo from a friend’s vat. She had re-invigorated the vat a bit more than she planned. After just a five-minute dip I pulled out my skein that was far darker than I had planned. Well, that’s the nature of natural dyeing and certainly the nature of being a novice. Although it was a quite a bit darker than what I’d envisioned, I was smitten by the variation in blues. It’s quite stunning. I call the color variation ‘abrashi,’ a word I learned from Persian rug weavers.

In summer I made a new warp and tied on to the old placemat warp. I won’t do that again any time soon. I started weaving my newly dyed paper yarn in late October, mixed in with making the gifts I needed for this busy season. Now, with gifts finished (sort of…and nothing wrapped yet!) I have turned my attention to getting the last four paper-woven placemats finished. I will have two pale indigo paper placemats, four all linen placemats, and four darker indigo paper placemats. All of that was from an original wish to have six indigo-dyed paper placemats. I could finally see the finish line of this extended project! There is quite a difference between these three attempts, and you can see the changing colors in the newest, darkest version.

Yesterday I finished the 3rd placemat and went to wind more bobbins. That’s when I realized how little is left of my skein of indigo dyed paper yarn. I would be lucky to get another two bobbins wound, and that’s far from what I need for this last placemat! Why is nothing every easy?

I slept on my dilemma for a night and woke up this morning ready to take apart one of the pale paper placemats to salvage the weft. Of course I have to dye it, and it will take more than a novice’s ability to get a blue anywhere close to what I got back in October. That makes me think I need to pick out the weft from both pale placemats.

It took me 1 1/2 hours to unpick one placemat. The weft became tangled in the warp whenever the warp got to be longer than 1/2″. So every 1/2″ I cut the warp closer to the weft and continued to unravel. That means the one placemat was cut into almost 50 little fringes. Here is the mess in progress.

I only unraveled one placemat, and I know I should do at least part of the second placemat to ensure that I have enough weft. I also went looking for my indigo kit from Maiwa, but it wasn’t where I last remember putting it. Nothing is easy….ever.

Although I am focused on getting this project off the loom before I leave, I realize I may not succeed. I want to come home next spring to an empty loom ready for a new project, but I am only home until Tuesday…this Tuesday. It will be a downer to come home to this last placemat that needs so much work in an area I am completely unprepared to tackle. Such is life. It’s a good thing I love weaving. This is quite a hurdle and a saga, but we can’t help what we’re drawn to do. I fell for that yarn, and you can’t choose what (or who) will melt your heart.

The yarn has also compressed during weaving. I need to get it back to the ‘tape’ it was initially, and I need to get close to matching the blue I dyed in October! Wish me luck!

Onward….but maybe not for months to come. The saga continues.

Fullness

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This morning I am sitting in my favorite chair knitting. There is coffee. The sun is brilliant in spite of the low temperatures. Last night we had a hard frost. Time to finish harvesting lettuce and cilantro.

I have only written blog posts in my my mind for the past couple of months. Life has been exciting and full in ways I’ve haven’t experienced before. I have dreamed of being my own person for decades, when the kids were independent, when I was not tied to Bob’s working schedule. That time seems to have arrived!

In the photo above I am working on a hot water bottle cozy. I’ve never had a hot water bottle before, but now I do. I’ve been thinking about all the people in the world who will be cold this winter, far colder than I ever am. I wonder if any of us will ever have the luxury of constant heat and endless water again. Even though I know that I still live in the incredible lap of luxury, I want to ensure that I am warm in bed at night…at least for a short while, until the water bottle cools. A hot water bottle seems just the ticket, and this cozy, designed by Kate Davies, caught my eye. I am using her yarn as well. The natural grey is “Ooskit” in colorway “Horkel.” (Don’t ask me to translate. I have no idea!) The white is “Schiehallion” in colorway “Crowdie.” You can find the cozy pattern and the yarn on Kate’s website, KDD&Co.

I’ve spent a lot of time traveling during the summer and fall, and I’ve been teaching tapestry classes and giving talks about the book I published about Archie Brennan. It’s been an exhilarating time for me. At the moment I have a few days to relax before the holiday chaos begins. It’s almost Thanksgiving and I am counting my blessings from the past two seasons.

I went to Convergence in July for the first time in what feels like a lifetime. I connected with some old friends and finally met some friends I’ve only known through the internet. I got to spend some private time with Robbie LaFleur and Katherine Buenger, and I had a wonderful sprang class with Carol James. I traveled by car all the way from Connecticut to Tennessee with an old friend, and that gave us time to catch up with all the things we’ve missed about being together since before the pandemic. It was all good!

Schiffer Publishing had a booth in the vendor’s hall, and they sold out all their copies of the book I wrote with Archie Brennan!

This is Carol James wearing one of her amazing sprang woven designs. I don’t think I’ll ever figure out how to make clothing out of sprang, but I am trying to learn these color manipulations.

I came home with a lot of ideas and inspiration from everything I saw at Convergence, and I gave a short program on it to one of my smaller weaving groups in October. It helped me keep the embers burning on my own ideas.

I drove straight to Massachusetts when I got home from Convergence, in order to take a workshop with Fiona Hutchison. Her wonderful ideas and techniques have got me going in a new direction. I have wanted to meet her, and I got way more than I expected!

I taught four tapestry classes over the summer and fall. Two of them were 8-week classes, and two were 3-day workshops. One of the workshops was the first time I have taught at someone’s house. That was a great experience, all of us being in the comfort of someone’s home which lends itself to a more personal experience for both students and teacher. It was late September, the weather was delightfully mild, and the colors in this part of Connecticut were already blazing (although not in this particular photo.). What a lovely setting to teach a class!

During one of my classes in Hartford I also hosted Katherin Weber when she gave a workshop for my guild. It was a busy time, with me leaving for my class while another house guest and good friend drove Katherin to the guild class each day. I never turn down an opportunity to host a teacher because it’s the best way to learn more about weavers and what makes them who they are. Katherin was no exception.

Some of you may remember that I have been struggling to weave paper placemats after having a successful experience weaving ‘paper towels.’ The warp for these projects have been a mix of natural and bleached linen. The weft is paper yarn from Habu. For the towels I used a pale green paper yarn that was interesting and did not break my weaving budget. When I planned the placemats I was pulled to the indigo paper yarn that was a bit dear for my comfort level. The first round did not make me happy. Remember this?

After two placemats where I could not see the Greek Key pattern unless I had just the right light and held the camera on just the right angle, I dug through my stash to find something else. I have a ton of linen yarn, and this seemed a perfect blue. In the back of my mind I wondered about dyeing the rest of the paper yarn a slightly darker blue with indigo. This is better obviously, but I was disappointed not to be using my precious indigo dyed paper yarn.

Then in October my smaller weaving group had a dye day. They used MX dyes on cellulose fibers, but they also had an indigo vat going. Yippee! I brought the remains of my paper yarn and gave the vat a try. My yarns were the first ones in the vat that day, and the color was strong. I only left the yarn in for five minutes, and I got a much deeper color than I wanted. Hey, that’s life when you’re not an experienced dyer!

And here is my third attempt at the placemats I’ve been envisioning since I wove the ‘paper towels’ over two years ago. Some things take time. At this point I had to make a new warp and tie on to the old, not my favorite exercise! They are not the color I’ve seen in my head for a long time now, but they are interesting. I love the inconsistency of the color most of all, which is traditionally called “abrash,” from Farsi, meaning “rainbow.” Sometimes you don’t get what you want, but I am happy that I got something interesting.

A lot has happened over the course of the summer and fall–half a year! I’ve had two surgeries (both successful), we have a newly renovated kitchen, I’ve taught and traveled and spent time in the gardens and with my grandchildren. Along the way I’ve done a little lace, some basketry and some knitting. It’s been a very full time, and I feel very blessed. Of course, I’d always like to have more finished projects to show for my time. Pipe dreams for sure.

Back to School and Projects

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That’s rather misleading since most weavers go to ‘school’ more in the summer than the rest of the year. I went to Convergence and to a tapestry workshop in July. In August I taught a workshop. Summers are usually quite busy for weavers.

And now it’s September, so although it is technically late summer, that sense of ‘back to school’ and autumn is quite firmly in our heads. I have only two short months before I’ll be living on a boat again, and the urge to finish projects and get some new ones started (and finished!) is strong.

If only I’d gotten Bob involved in my loom problems earlier I would be much farther along on my fabric projects. I still have all that glorious pale indigo paper yarn from Habu that needs a mission. I resorted to a linen/cotton blend for those no-longer-paper placemats, and the pattern is showing up nicely. I’m just disappointed about them not being paper.

The weft is now Duet from Gist. The color is Chambray. It’s left over from a couple of previous projects, including napkins for our son and his partner a couple of years ago.

It’s 55% linen and 45% cotton. It works beautifully for these placemats, but I am still wishing they could be woven with paper. The important thing is that they work, and I like them! The downside is that of course I didn’t have enough weft, which was one partial cone and one full cone. Now I’m waiting for the arrival of another cone, and it’s a holiday weekend. Ugh. I ordered on the 2nd and got a message that shipping usually takes one day to my address. But as of today my order has not been ‘fulfilled.’ I guess that means it won’t go out until tomorrow, and then it won’t get here in time to meet my self imposed deadline. I hoped to take them to my small area guild meeting on Thursday for show and tell, and then I wanted to use them next week when I have two weavers staying with me. Oh, fate.

It’s lovely, right? I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that I have to tackle making my indigo kit from Maiwa because I want to use this yarn, and it needs to be just a tad darker. I can’t use this color. So I decided to dip my toes in the dyeing process by using a kit I got from Abundant Earth Fibers. They carry acid dyes rather than natural dyes, but they say their ingredients and their process for dyeing is organic and vegan. I bought two colors: sugar snap and moonbow. I decided to try sugar snap first, on some singles wool that I spun for tapestry. It was an easy project and enjoyable on a late summer morning when I was home alone. I started by wetting my wool. No need to mordant ahead of time in this process. The kit comes with a tea bag of dye and a pouch of citric acid.

I used my pour over kettle, which has a built in thermometer, to heat water to 185 degrees F. I heated a bit higher since this kettle does not hold the 10 cups required. I poured the first overly hot water into a big measuring cup while I heated the second batch. I took a video of adding the water from my kettle to the glass jar with the tea bag of dye floating in it.

The second short video is adding the wetted wool skeins to the jar of dye. I had two 50 gram skeins to dye, and each tea bag will dye 100 grams of yarn or fabric.

Someday, if I ever get smarter, I will combine these two videos into one. I enjoyed the process! How could I not? It was simple and watching the color transfer to the yarn was magical, as always. The instructions say to add the packet of citric acid after the yarn is in the jar. Swirl things around to get the citric acid well distributed. That was quite magical because I could see the yarn bind with dye. Suddenly the water in the jar barely had color. The yarn had all of it.

The color of the yarn is hard to show. It’s not the color of young sugar snap peas that I see in my mind. It’s almost as dark as pea soup on the first day you make it. It’s an interesting color, quite complex. Here are my attempts to capture that color.

This is closer.

I also happened to watch a video from Botanical Colors about their new easy to use alum mordant. It requires no heat and can be re-invigorated several times. You have to leave your materials in overnight since it works at room temperature. The upside is there is no trying to keep a pot at an optimal temperature, and you don’t dispose of the mordant liquid until you’ve used it a number of times, adding just a bit more alum each time. I ordered some liquid madder so I can dye something with the new alum product.

I want to ‘up’ my dye game. After I try the aluminum triformate and madder I hope to have the courage to tackle the indigo vat supplies I bought from Maiwa.

Who knows when I’ll get to do this, but I do hope it’s in September or October. After that I will be a sailor’s wife living onboard. I have quite a busy schedule this fall, all of it I am very much looking forward to doing. I am giving a short talk about Archie Brennan on Thursday this week. It will focus on his ability to find solutions. Our afternoon project will be to weave portraits on chopstick looms. This is a project near and dear to me, because all of us in the Wednesday Group were surprised when Archie presented us with little looms he’d made from all the chopsticks we’d used over the years of having Chinese take out together after our Wednesday classes. He was so very clever. We all gave our chopstick portraits to Archie, and he had planned to find a venue where they could be displayed. That never happened, and sometime before he died all our chopstick portraits came back to us. Now I want to keep that wonderful idea of Archie going. So, onward to a new batch of potential weavers.

A fellow weaver has commented on my last post with suggestions for me to consider about how make that paper weft I abandoned work. I’m excited and plan to look into that this morning. I can pursue some alternative treadlings for my Greek key twill and possibly make use of such a subtle color difference between my warp and weft. Thank you, Valerie! Meanwhile, I also want to try dyeing that yarn just a couple of shades darker.

There is a certain energy at this time of year, isn’t there? It’s the beginning of winding down to the end of the year, but it seems that most of us face that with renewed energy to make something, do something, be something. Let’s all get going!

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