Fiber Musings

Beggar's Bag (click to enlarge)

CNCH starts tomorrow. I’ll provide a report next week. In the meantime, here are some eye candy on a few of my submissions. Drop by the gallery and take a look if you are in the Bay Area this weekend!

The bag on the left is the Beggar’s Bag for the Traditions and Innovations Gallery.

Draft: Floral Dance Star Variation (Anne Dixon)
Warp: Borgs 22/2 Cottolin (natural)
Tabby Weft: 8/2 cotton (natural)
Pattern Weft:  assorted handspun handpainted BFL singles (purchased at 2011 Whidbey Island Spin In from Island Fibers, I think)
Construction: all hand pieced, even down to the zipper and  lining.

I definitely learned quite a bit on this project. Even after re-sleying, I think the sett is still too close. I found out later in my research that I should have sleyed it for a loose plain weave. This is why I had to go to a 8/2 cotton instead of cottolin for weft. It’s a good thing too since I ran out of natural cottolin.

Return to Sender Yarn

Return to Sender Batt

On the left is my Return to Sender skein, blocking on the skeinwinder. On the right is what the batt looked like before I started. The fiber is 85/15 BFL/tussah, dyed with natural dyes by Mary Finley and Roger Salter of Dreamy Goat Design Studio.

I split the batt into pure colors, and stripped out the mixed bits as my “in-between”. Spun the colors in progression as a fine single and plied it with an 80/20 “black” BFL/tussah (SOAR 2009 ? special — Bend, OR). You can see that the black BFL toned down the colors quite a bit, but still quite nice.

Weight: 4 oz. (2 oz. RTS, 2 oz. black BFL)
Yardage: 1,012 yards
Plies: 2
WPI: 44

I have one more gallery submission for the Return of the Return to Sender (yarn spun for the 2010 CNCH), but I forgot to photograph it before sending it on. I used an alternate treadling to Floral Dance with my 2 ply yarn and turned it into a sketchbook cover. Probably subliminal. I’m not that happy with the cover. I will likely re-do it after the conference.

Tags: CNCH, Handspun

I was looking through my web stats (*) this morning and saw that someone had been viewing my Baby Blanket post from several years ago. This was made for a girl friend’s first baby. She just had her third last fall and very recently made the decision to take a respite from work and stay at home with the three little ones. (Tomorrow is her exit interview. Congratulations!)

Summer is upon us. Summer means lazy outdoor meals, including meals in the marina with my friends. And after the sun goes down, we scramble for blankets and wraps. These “baby” blankets will be fabulous as a shoulder wrap. Even better, all that mindless knitting is perfect for social knitting.  I think I may have have some yarn around here that might work. snerk.

* The reason I was looking through the stats wasn’t due to vanity, but security. Last week, I installed a Word Press plug-in that limits failed login attempts. It’s completely configurable, but I have it set to 4 failed attempts before it locks that IP out from further logins for 20 minutes. I can not believe how many people / robots / what-have-you have attempted to log into my WP installation as “Admin”, which is the default administrator account. I have since (a) created a strong password for all of my WP accounts, and (b) changed my default administrator account to another account name. All this is in addition to the plug-in.

It’s scary out there! How about you? What are you doing to protect your blog?

It would seem that I’ve circled back to teal again.

I tend to cycle through a limited palette: teal, blue, purple and red. I was on teal for quite a long while. I made some short excursions into reds, purchased some purple, but no finished projects with those colors.

So what is the fiber for? It’s for a Friendship Coverlet Exchange. I dyed 1 pound of brown BFL yesterday. The second pound is cooling in the turkey roaster right now. It’s been a while since I dyed a full pound of fiber at once and there are definitely spots that will need to be re-dyed.

I wanted slight depth of shade variability in the roving so that, when spun, the yarn will have some gradations to keep it interesting. However, I have spots that just didn’t have any color on it. I changed my dye application method slightly for the second pound. Let’s see if I get better color saturation with this batch.

Next up, spin all two pounds of this teal BFL into fingering weight singles then skein them off into 250-300 yard skeins to give to the other participants.

Tags: Coverlet

I don’t always wear clothes with a pocket to put my iPhone in while I’m out and about. So, while I was cleaning up after my CNCH gallery submissions, I had one little scrap that was just the size of an iPhone pouch. I stitched it up and added some of the cord I made for one of the gallery bags.

On other news, all my promised gallery submissions are finished. I have one more bag waiting to be pieced and a yarn ready to put on the inkle for a strap. If I finish it in time, I might put it in the gallery too. Although my submissions may be a bit too predictable … they are all overshot from the same warp threading (different treadling though!).

Barbara and I were chatting about band weaving and she mentioned that she wanted to weave her own labels using the instructions from Weave-Away’s post. Armed with that information and a copy of Linda Hendrickson’s tutorial, I pulled out my Palmer Tablet Loom, tablets, and some spools of polyester interlock thread.

What you see above is the result of about 6 hours of weaving with 24 cards. What you don’t see are the warm ups (aka false starts) that I cut out. I had modified the alphabet Linda provided in her tutorial a bit to better match the font in my blog masthead. Letters are a little lighter weight and the “g” is a bit more stylized. The graph was still not perfect but it was enough to test it out and see how it will work.

Anyway, it’s an interesting idea, but I can think of much better ways of spending my time. I can weave a towel in under 2 hours, probably closer to 4 towels in 6 hours. Even if I get faster with more experience on the tablets, it’s just not the best use of my time. I can’t imagine weaving these labels for all of my projects.

My current method works okay — just okay, but it works well for towels. I don’t like labels on scarves (they always show no matter how artfully you arrange it) nor clothes (they always itch and scratch in the most uncomfortable places). If I were to ever sell my handwoven goods, I will order some woven labels. Until then, I will continue to use my little iron-ons on twill tape. If I have something really special that I want to label, I might, just might, pull out the tablets again and weave my own labels. Before I do that though, I will need to tweak the letter templates a bit more to better match my masthead font.

In any case, I am ready for my tablet weaving class with John Mullarkey at CNCH next month!