I recently finished a beautiful handwoven shawl. Made from rayon chenille hand painted by Tammy, I’m really happy with the overall appearance of this shawl. The rich, saturated gemtones are pretty much my favorite colors. 
This will go up on my website soon, but I’m betting I’ll get a much bigger reaction at shows. Although I’ve tried many different techniques, I’ve never managed to get what I consider to be a great picture of rayon chenille. The fiber’s natural sheen causes light to bounce around a great deal, despite the various ways I’ve tried to minimize it. Also, with this rayon chenille shawl, the color was a real challenge. Either it was all REALLY blue, showing next to no purple, or it was washed out looking more gray than anything. I probably took 20 shots of this handwoven shawl before I got one that I thought was worth using.
Now for something else in shades of blue & purple…
Isn’t that attractive? (Please ignore the fact that I have rather ugly feet, with a big bunion and toes that, at best, resemble cocktail wieners.) I dropped a piece of firewood on my toe yesterday. Not far, but it went down on end, and the edge of the firewood hit the toe really directly. Now here’s the really amazing thing: doesn’t that look like it should hurt like hell, all swollen and black & blue like that? Well, it hardly hurts at all. 🙂  Immediately after hitting it I elevated, iced, and rubbed in arnica oil whenever I could for the rest of the day. And today it’s really not feeling bad at all. I even got in 1/2 mile of walking my dog. Mind you, I’d usually have walked about 3 miles, but the single digit temps combined with the toe turned us around really quickly.
Your turn: got any good tricks, either for photographing rayon chenille or for keeping your toes safe?
i will be sure to tell mike the next time he has boo boo on his toe to suck it up. yours looks much worse. hope all is well and you are staying warm
[…] before in rayon boucle, and folks really loved it. You’ll remember I also recently finished a handwoven shawl using this yarn. For the scarves, I put a thin stripe of solid purple along one […]
Nice marketing ploy. That is why you did it, right?
Jumbo’s dog yanks his toe off, you smash yours with firewood…and here I was feeling a bit bad that I haven’t properly conducted a pedicure since before Christmas.
Pedicure or not, I’m pretty sure I’m winning the picturesque ped-pics in this family.
You and Margaret need to swathe yourselves in bubble wrap. It might not be pretty, but it’ll keep you safe 🙂
Yowch – despite your claims to the contrary – that made me even hurt from a good distance away. So – are you really unlucky in dropping it directly on your toe (I’m imagining it was barefoot) or really lucky that it wasn’t worse? Trying to keep that glass half-full as often as possible -I’ll opt for really lucky. (Or were you just needing some sympathy after helping Margaret with her broken ankle?)
Amazing that it doesn’t hurt, isn’t it?! I wasn’t barefoot – I did have on a pair of fairly heavy socks and my crocs. Not like I was wearing steel-toed boots around the house or anything, but there was something on my feet. And in my opinion, I’m lucky it wasn’t worse. It is within the realm of possibility that the toe is broken, but I don’t THINK so — I have good range of motion bending upward and a little bending down. Anyway, I know that if it is broken all they could do for me is tape it to the next little piggy, which I’ve been doing myself.