Fiber Musings

Random thoughts of a fiber enthusiast - mostly fiber related, sometimes coherent

Month: April 2012 Page 1 of 4

Teal…again

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On 30 Apr, 2012

In Dye

20120430-095353.jpgIt 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.

Phone Bag

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On 23 Apr, 2012

In FO, Sew, Weave

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!).

Labels

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On 22 Apr, 2012

In Weave

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!

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