Whew – FINALLY!

It’s been about forever since I posted. Why? I much prefer to post finished pieces. It’s okay to do some process photos, but only if there are some finished ones as well. And it has taken me FOREVER to finally finish those polka dot towels.

Again, why? First of all, in addition to the threading error I noticed on the first towel that had to be repaired when they were off the loom, there were no fewer than 6 places where the weft inadvertently skipped over a warp thread as I wove. Always on the bottom of the piece, so I didn’t notice them until later. Sigh. As noted in earlier posts, I HATE to needle weave, so kept putting off the task. Finally I could procrastinate no longer. So here we go.

These 2 towels have the same burgundy-ish weft. This photo demonstrates why I like the colored circles better than the white circles, at least as a general rule. So much more dramatic.

This one has a bright cherry-red weft.

And these 2 have an orange weft (2 different oranges). The one with the white circles showing was SOOOO orange it screamed at me, so I finished with the white circles as the good side.

The top towel has sort of a peach weft, and the bottom one a bright yellow weft. If I’d had more yellow cotton I would have woven another of those.

And this last one has a dusty rose weft.

Since I was postponing doing the hand work on those towels, I quickly got another warp on the loom. This time all rayon chenille in shawl width. In the must-use-stash vein, I used up several bits of colors. I really like the intensity of these yarns. (Nope, nothing finished here yet, although it is off the loom and another warp is on.)

I had my 8-year-old grandson for a day when school was closed. We went to a presentation at the planetarium, went out to lunch, and I had 3 different potential craft activities for us, assuming we wouldn’t get more than 2 done.

Well. The first, a gargoyle kit, had to be returned to the store. The molding medium had completely dried out and couldn’t be used. The second, these pumpkin luminaries made by gluing tissue paper on a jar, was not as easy as it looked, and the boy HATED it. His is on the right. He couldn’t take it home with him as it was too wet…had to dry/cure a few days first. (Sorry for such a crappy photo-out of focus and the tissue paper is very orange, not pale yellow-orange as it looks here.)

The final one, ghosts made from milk jugs, was also, ummmm, a challenge. First of all, it is NOT easy to remove the labels from either milk or water jugs. Especially when you just picked them out of people’s recycle bins that very morning so didn’t have time to work on them before you had to go get the lad. Then my several sharpies were mostly dried out. Granted, I’d had them for years, and should have checked earlier, but I didn’t. So although he drew a face on one, I couldn’t let him take it home till I got new sharpies and blackened it in. I then drew all these.

I like the concept, but those milk jugs had to be weighted or the ever-present wind at my house would have blown them away. I gathered some rocks at the bay for that purpose, and obviously wasn’t as careful as I should have been at putting them in, because now half the string of lights is dead and only 4 ghosts are lighted. C’est la vie. I plan to get a new string of white lights before Halloween. I want to put the ghosts along the otherwise impossible-to-see-in-the-dark steps up to the top of my lawn, where I’ll be with the goodies.