So many not-weaving tasks

Today is a day for doing many business-related tasks that are not weaving.

One of my fellow artisans kindly pointed out that the black knit dress Dolly (my mannequin) wears at shows looks like granny, while I want to attract younger women to my booth. So I made a few stops at thrift stores to find clothes that would send a different message and still (a) travel well and (b) fade into the background so the weaving I show on her would stand out.

I couldn’t find things that I thought were perfect, but did find things that I deemed an improvement. I thought a size 8 skirt would fit Dolly well. Hah! She’s clearly much more like a 6, or maybe a 4. So I had to modify the skirt by sewing some snaps in the waistband. Then I hemmed another skirt to be (roughly) above the knee instead of ankle-length.

Then I had to sew binding on two blankets made from that troublesome piece of mis-warped baby wrap.

Since I had my sewing machine out, I decided there was no time like the present to make a cooling neck wrap. I was so hot at the Roycroft show that I wore a constantly wet bandana-sized lightweight cotton scarf I’d woven around my neck, re-wetting it many times during the day. As a result my blouse was constantly wet, too. I didn’t care.

I have 2 shows in August, and while the temps have been much cooler than average this summer, that could change in a heartbeat. So I took another piece of the same lightweight cotton (I knew I’d saved that for a reason!) and sewed it into a strip. I had some plant water-saver beads for the filling.

I used the proportions from this tutorial, putting 1/2 teaspoon of beads in 3″ of the fabric. That did NOT seem like enough to me. So I soaked the first finished neck wrap in water for about 10 minutes before I worked on the second one.

WOW! What a difference!

From this angle, the soaked neck cooler reminded me of an illustration in that lovely book, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The one of the snake that ate an elephant. If you don’t know the book, you should. An electronic version won’t do – borrow it from the library so you can see the illustrations.