|
|
I know it’s been a while and I wanted to do a catch up post, but it’s got to be quick because I’ve too many things on my must-do-today list. Let’s start with this.
I don’t know who Larry is, and Jack doesn’t look anything like this (he’s a little mixed breed Lhasa), but he ABSOLUTELY agrees with the sentiment!
One of my must-dos is to give Jack a haircut. He got a bath yesterday in preparation. I used to take him to the groomer, but stopped doing that even before the pandemic hit. Jack really hates the groomer – or being groomed, and although he usually looks quite, um, silly after I cut his hair with scissors, it makes both of us feel better, so I do it.
I continue to have fun with sourdough. I’m definitely getting better at the process, and feel like I can now consistently turn out a beautiful loaf.
I made this one yesterday, and other than eating a heel (always my favorite part of any loaf), I sliced the rest of it and put it in my freezer. A slice or two in the morning is just right.
I also made a batch of sugar scrub. It’s the time of year that oranges are plentiful in the store, so I grated some orange rind and put that, along with some orange oil and cinnamon oil in the standard sugar scrub recipe. I could eat this with a spoon!
Yesterday I started on a project that will take many days to complete. I took my 36 towels in stock, removed their tags, put each through my steam press (thanks again for the trade, Kathy!), and photographed. A lot. 121 shots, to be exact. Photographs in groups and solo. Close up and showing the whole towel. Photos with props to make them more enticing. Then I had to put the tags back on, so organization throughout the process was important.
Then I did the work – MANY minutes, probably more than 120 – of uploading three batches onto my Etsy page. I’ll do another batch or two today – I think to have any hopes of coming up in searches it’s important to post regularly. That ‘truth’ was years ago and things may have changed dramatically since then. I was inspired by another weaver in our Guild who wove and sold more than 800 towels in 2020! Obviously all online! Just to do that math for you, that means she wove, finished, photographed, and sold an average of 15 towels per week, every week! All with hand and foot power! She’s doing a Zoom presentation for us later this month to share how she did that.
The towels were actually easy, compared to scarves and shawls. At least the photography was. I used a bit of my lovely hardwood floor for the background. It’s important to have multiple shots of every item. And I have no solid white/cream wall in my house to use as a background for wearables. Laying my mannequin on the floor? That won’t work; the drape would be all wrong. So I’ll have to try to figure out something that doesn’t cause me to have to do a ton of editing in Photoshop. (1) I’m not good at it and (2) it takes a long time, adding HOURS to the whole process.
I’ve been cogitating on this puzzle for well over a month, and haven’t come up with any creative solutions yet. So I’ll get the towels up. One step at a time. Put one foot in front of the other, at least figuratively.
I took a 3-day online weaving workshop from Denise Kovnat. I’ve taken a few from her before and always learn stuff, but this one? Over the top in terms of learning for me! This was One Warp, Many Structures. And yes, I learned stuff about that. But I also learned a lot about how to make Fiberworks, my weaving software, do a lot of heavy lifting for me. And about color. And finally understood what network drafting is and how to do it. I think I wove 20 samples for that class. And changed tie ups at least 6 times. And resleyed twice. And rethreaded once. So lots of work, and SO worth it!
When I got that off the loom I finally beamed a warp I painted back in October onto the loom. I’m loving the colors, but don’t have a photo to share yet.
And last night I spent roughly 3 hours online, but again, totally worth it – I have an appointment to get a COVID vaccine – March 2!
And today, in just over an hour, I teach my first online class in making a yarn button. I’m offering the same class twice, 8 people per class since we’ll be making the button together – in our own homes, of course. Both classes filled.
I know I’ve made more than a dozen samples for this class, as well as all the other prep. But I’ve got to run now and do the final preparation. Make sure all the technology is working, lighting, etc. As they say in Britain, ta ta!
Honestly, I have absolutely no idea where the time goes. Suddenly two and a half weeks have passed since I last posted. How does this happen? What am I doing with my time? Sometimes I don’t even know, but each day goes by. So it’s time to share some odds and ends of what I have been doing.
FINALLY, after MONTHS, I got the blues-greens handpainted warp off the loom These are not intended to be beauty shots…it takes me a long time to set those up, take them, edit out the junk in the background, and adjust the lighting so the colors are relatively close to real life. I knew if I took the time to do that, it’d be another week before I got to the post. So I just sort of snapped images.
This is a shawl. I added some narrow stripes of the very dark purple that’s in the weft. It adds a bit of interest. And here you can see the difference in the two sides of the fabric. A nice thing about shawls is that I don’t have to decide which is the ‘right’ side since I’m not hemming or seaming anything.
The rest of the warp is just yardage at this point. About 3.25 yards. I intended to sew it into a garment, but I may try to just market it as yardage. Easy peasy…if it sells.
On the knitting front, after I finished all my gift knitting, it was time to pick up the needles for more socks for me. After all, socks wear out, and I’ve learned that I am absolutely no good at darning them. Since I pretty much always have socks on my needles, I’ve become much more comfortable with tossing them out when they get holes. (Ok, truth be told I have a small collection of holey socks…shouldn’t they make good rags or something?)
I had 2 skeins of the sock yarn, purple plied with blue. Love the colors.
I like to do different things, so I searched Ravelry and downloaded a free pattern with some lacey ribs. Knit a few inches and it just didn’t move me. Back to Ravelry, and this time I picked another free pattern with a combination of cables and purl bumps. I knit all the way up through half of the gusset, and realized that those cables were making it too tight; I would not like the way it fit if I continued. I’d have to make it wider/add stitches, or go up a size in needles, which I didn’t have. So I pulled it all out. Ergo the sloppy skein you see.
Back to Ravelry once again. Decided I wanted to make a gansey sampler, but nothing moved me. (Don’t know about ganseys? Here’s a nice article that compares ganseys and Aran knitting in sweaters, which is their traditional form.) So I came to my computer and played in Excel to create a sampler of my own.
Then I realized that the nice blue & purple yarn would not be the best to show off the stitches, so I pulled out some plain undyed yarn and set to work. I’ve already had to make some adjustments to my plan, but here are the first 4 motifs. I put my hand inside because it’s much easier to see the stitches that way.
Meanwhile, I tested out my button making class on my friends, made the necessary changes, and scheduled it with the Weaving & Fiber Arts Center. You can find it here, twice, in an attempt to accommodate different schedules. As we moved forward, the Management Team at the Center decided we needed to buy a document camera and make it available to our teachers to encourage more online teaching. So I ordered that, and then had to figure out how to use it myself, and draft procedures for teachers. I still have to get it to the Center and make sure it works with the laptop that’s there.
Finally, I’m registered to take an online class via the Jacksonville, FL weaver’s guild. A Rochester woman and Center teacher is teaching the online class, entitled One Warp, Many Structures. Our warps will go through shadow weave, doubleweave, echo, rep, and more, so choosing 2 quite different colors for the warp was essential. I chose a rust/brick and a lavender. Here’s the measured and chained warp. I love the way it looks, and the sheen on the mercerized cotton adds to its beauty. I plan to beam it and start threading today.
So I’ve not been sitting around and eating bon-bons, but sometimes it feels like that.
Once the holidays were over, the decorations taken down and stored until next year, the baking frozen (ok, mostly eaten), I focused on doing the year-end inventory. This is always a chore I really dread, although it’s never a bad as I think it will be. That’s because I’m nowhere near as careful or exacting as I might be. Here’s my process.
Print out the inventory of both raw materials and finished items from last year as my starting point. I do actually take all of the finished items out of bins, count them, and organize them as I replace them in the bins. But for the raw materials? I look into my many bins of yarn and sort of guess. I mentally add up how many partial cones I have and sort of combine them to make full cones, and then tally the total. For a business my size (minuscule, really) I believe it’s good enough. In now-almost-ancient parlance, ‘good enough for government work’. And since I only do this to file my taxes and thereby report to the government, I decided a few years ago that it is good enough for me.
So what came next? I had to re-knit that cabled hat for my daughter, as the yarn I’d used previously, 90% acrylic and 10% alpaca, itched her. So I have the hat now and have worn it several times with no itchiness. She went to the local craft store and bought some variegated 100% acrylic yarn and I went to town. I dropped it off to her yesterday morning, sans pompom since she makes WAY better pompoms than I do. By afternoon she sent me this photo. Happily it doesn’t itch her.
Yesterday I realized I could actually get back to my loom. I haven’t been able to sit in front of it since….drum roll…the first week of November! Two whole months! The warp, of course waited patiently for me; what choice did it have?
I only got about 15″ woven yesterday when I’d had enough. I just wasn’t into it. Today I got about 45″ woven when it was time to walk the dog.
Leaving the house, I saw that I’d received the sweatshirt I ordered for the little grandson. Today is actually his 5th birthday, but I hadn’t ordered it in time to get it, dye it, dry it, and get to him today. Still, I’ll be seeing him tomorrow, so that will have to do.
For a long time his favorite color was “lello” – yellow to those of you not familiar with interpreting little-kid-speak. But for a while now when you ask him what his favorite color is he’ll say “all colors” – meaning rainbow. So I dyed a sweatshirt for him, and a mask to match. The dye job wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but sweatshirt looked pretty good hanging up. I was as careful as possible when removing that hanger, but one of the sleeves swiped the body leaving blotchy dye on it. Sigh. 🙁
I need to move quickly on this as I have to babysit him at noon tomorrow. So I decided to steam it to set the color as best as I can. It’s batching overnight now, and I’ll rinse it as soon as I get up tomorrow morning. Then I have to get it into the washer and dryer so I can take it to him.
On Friday my older grandson, age 9, had a Zoom guitar recital. He did great! I snapped a shot of the Zoom screen (and blurred his face ‘cuz I want to respect his privacy and not be send his image all over the internet for time immemorial). Looks good, eh?
Oh yeah, I also spent a god-awful amount of hours sitting on my butt figuring out how to share screen with both my desktop and my phone, mounted on a holder borrowed from my daughter, working up 8 samples and a handout, all so I can volunteer to teach an online class on how to make a covered yarn button for the Weaving Center. I still have to organize a slide show to use during the presentation. Two friends have agreed to be my test subjects this Friday afternoon so I have a deadline.
I’m going to start with a Christmas miracle of sorts.
On May 31st I posted some newly-finished towels for sale in the Handwovens For Sale group on Facebook. The next day a lovely woman living in France ordered 2 of them, and decided, based on her experience, that she wanted First Class shipping. I mailed the towels on June 3rd. Keep that date in your head as we proceed.
In about a week tracking information told me the package was in Jakarta, Indonesia. And there it sat. And sat. And sat. I communicated periodically with the buyer, and on June 28th she wasn’t concerned; her experience told her it was all good. On August 3rd – a full two months after mailing – we were both concerned. I attempted to do the whole ‘missing package’ thing via USPS, but because it had been sent First Class, without insurance or Registered status, they couldn’t/wouldn’t track it once it left the country. And the woman in France had no luck on her end either. By the end of September I’d given up all hope. I figured all I could do was learn from this experience if I had other out-of-country buyers.
Then on December 28th the woman contacted me — her towels were just delivered!! Five days short of seven months since they left my house!! 😀 We were both so pleasantly surprised.
*******************************
Finishing up Christmas gifts, although some packages have been delayed due to major funding problems at the USPS, the recipients should receive them today or tomorrow. Since I don’t believe either read my blog anyway, I’m finally comfortable posting pictures and information here. As I usually do, I’m going to show the things I made in chronological order.
In addition to gifts from my kitchen, I’ve made hats, fleece headbands, socks and towels, and perhaps other things that aren’t coming to mind right now. Since my two nieces live in the south, figuring out what I can make that will work for those of us in cold western New York as well as those in the southern clime is a challenge, and I like making similar things for everyone. (That must be my OCD side.) This year I decided I wanted to try my hand at beaded wristlets. I’d seen photos of them and found them rather elegant looking. A woman who teaches at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center had offered a class on how to make them over a year ago, but I hadn’t taken it. I took a chance and emailed her, offering to buy her patterns/instructions. She graciously provided them. Thank you, Marcia Weinert!
The first pair of wristlets were for my daughter. I used a things I had in my stash – basic wool/nylon blend sock yarn in off-white and some size 8 seed beads. The beading was one of the patterns from Marcia.
I found the wristlets easier to make than I’d thought they might be, so decided I’d make a pair for each niece and my sister. However the majority of my seed beads were size 11, too small to thread onto the yarn. So I put on my mask and my big-girl panties and made a trip to a local bead store. I didn’t really know what color yarn I’d use, or what pattern of beading, so bought a variety of beads.
The next pair would go to a niece. I didn’t want to use the same pattern, so I spent some time online looking at beaded wristlet patterns and found this one that looked complex enough to please my eye, easy enough to accomplish, and called for a number of beads that I could accomplish with my recent purchase. Because they were heading south, I dug through my stash and found some off-white sock yarn that was 45% cotton, with some wool, nylon, and elastic in the mix. I’ve made socks from this type of yarn and like it, so hoped it would be fine for more-sensitive and warmer wrists.
I used size 11 Delica beads for this pair. I had a difficult time photographing them, as there wasn’t much value or color contrast between the beads and the yarn. I honestly am not certain which niece got which pair – LOL. I THINK this pair was sent to Dallas.
I had enough left in that skein of sock yarn to make a pair for the other southern-living niece, but didn’t want to use the same beading pattern. Again I went back to the internet looking for a pattern, and after going down that rabbit hole for quite a while, I ended up playing with graph paper and a pencil till I came up with a design I liked and had enough beads for. These are size 8 beads, and I like the not-quite-monochrome nature of the finished pair, which I THINK went to Hilton Head.
I was really enjoying myself, and these little beauties worked up relatively quickly, so next up was a pair for my sister. She lives in Buffalo so could easily use the warmth of a standard wool/nylon sock yarn. BUT. I know she’s very sensitive to wool, and while I find standard sock yarn to be fine for my feet, I wasn’t at all sure it would be soft enough for her wrists. I didn’t believe I could find what I wanted at a standard craft store, so I placed an order and did a curbside pickup at my local yarn store. Because I totally trust the quality of yarn this store sells, I was comfortable that I’d be happy with their 50/50 nylon/acrylic blend yarn without having to feel it first. And I was. I also was happy enough with the beading design I’d worked out for the last pair to do it again, this time in a size 8 peacock blue bead on black yarn. Much more eye catching.
Now the reality is that I have absolutely no idea what the younger generation will think of this as a concept. Add to that two of the three live where it’s warm, and they may simply be stuck in a drawer for a few years and then donated somewhere, but I enjoyed making them, so that’s good enough for me.
In my final holiday knitting, my daughter had asked for a specific knit hat for Christmas, in black or camel.
It’s a Michael Kors, and in addition to the fact that the black was out of stock, I knew I could knit something similar. And I really do like knitting cables. I could have designed it myself, but would have struggled with making the decreases for the crown look good, so I again poked around online until I found a similar pattern. Then I masked up and went to my local craft store for yarn, ending up with an acrylic/alpaca blend.
I’m very happy with how the hat turned out. But while I’m confident in my knitting, it has been proven over the years that I can’t make good pompoms that hold up – but my daughter can. So I made sure I’d have a sufficient quantity of yarn left so that she can make herself a nice, full, long-lasting pompom for the top when mine falls apart. 😀
I think that’s all I’ve got to report right now. It’s the time of year for me to do the dreaded inventory. Then I think I can finally get back to actually weaving…it’s been almost 2 months since I sat at my loom!
That was the Christmas Eve sunrise. Actually it was much more beautiful than that; that’s the best my phone and I could do.
After my walk I got 2 loaves of sourdough bread shaped, baked, and ultimately delivered, masked of course, to neighbors. I’m really enjoying making bread, and especially giving it away. If it’s here I’ll eat it all. 🙂 (I’d made a loaf with rosemary and roasted garlic I gave to a friend several days ago for an early gift.)
I also made 25 meatballs and a huge pot of sauce. Then I put together this lasagna. It’s ready for the frig; I’ll bake it tomorrow and enjoy it with my son.
Here’s another bit of my handiwork. I made this valance from 10 pin loom squares, woven with a hemp-cotton blend yarn.
I’d seen it on the Schact website a year or more ago, and was waiting for the right place to have a reason to make one. My newly painted and updated bathroom provided that. Like almost everything in life, it took longer to make than I’d hoped. Working on the pin loom with a yarn that has absolutely no stretch was challenging, although I did get better at it as I went along. And I only needed 10 squares, so it was totally do-able.
Then I had to starch the squares. Not having starched anything since high school, I looked online and found a recipe for homemade starch (cornstarch and water).
I still can’t show you most of the gifts I made for Christmas, and now I know that two of my boxes, despite being sent Priority, aren’t going to arrive until after Christmas, so I figured I’d show you what I can. The box with these was delivered to West Virginia today, and while perhaps not yet opened, those friends don’t read my blog so it’s safe. 😉
If you read my blog with any regularity you know I always have socks on my knitting needles. And I have a wealth of hand knit socks in my drawer. So a few months ago I decided to repeat a gift from a few years ago for a dear friend of 40+ years and her husband. I knit them each a pair of socks.
Chuck’s socks are my basic ribbed socks all from toe to cuff. Knit in self-striping yarn, with a solid for the cuff to make them long enough.
Anne’s socks are my new favorite lace pattern. I’ve made myself 2 pair in this pattern, and find them great – both soft and well fitting.
I spent a bunch of time today reading. So nice to just sit and read. A great way to spend the holiday, if you ask me.
|
|
