Weaving A Gem Of A Life

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After my last post I did receive the new modem from DishNetwork. Unfortunately I couldn’t activate it. A phone call to Dish, and the techies couldn’t figure it out so they had to send a real live person to my house. Four days later.

The technician worked on it for 2 hours before he got it to work. Made me feel a little better – if he’d gotten it to work in 5 minutes I would have felt a bit dopey.

Anyway, I was without any internet for four days. In truth, I rapidly got used to, and rather enjoyed, my 3 weeks of not being able to connect to my work email. When I was home, I was home. Period.

I even got used to, although not as happily, being without my email or internet searches for 4 days. In the meantime I took some photos on one of my walks. The weather changed dramatically and we have almost no snow on the ground now – it’s replaced by mud & yuck – but I like the beauty of the snow shots.

I’ve also been weaving. I thought I’d taken photos of all of it, but apparently not, so you’ll only see some of it for now.

I wove 4 cotton flannel baby blankets in variegated yarn. I’ve woven them before, but didn’t have any all last year. They’re so soft and colorful, they usually sell well. This time I used 3 different binding colors – 2 in yellow, 1 in pink & 1 in blue.

I was a bit surprised by how much that blue binding really brought out the blue in the yarn. My personal preference is the yellow, but I suspect my customers will like them all.

I set up the Mac for 12 placemats I have an order for. The customer chose the yarn and the pattern, but neither of us was sure how this particular yarn would work with this particular pattern. The pattern is an adaptation of the Spot Bronson placemats in Best of Handwoven’s Top 10 Placemats on 8 Shafts.

I decided in advance that I’d weave a sample one, hem & wet finish it, and let my customer see it before I wove all 12. She also wants 12 coordinating napkins – I figured I really better get this one right before I did all that weaving.

I have to say that this photo doesn’t do the placemat any favors. It looks all uneven, and it’s not. Plus you can see that after I pressed it I folded it to take with me and those lines stayed. C’est la vie. I’m not sure the customer will like it. She’ll see it on Tuesday & I’ll go from there.

Maybe next time I’ll have the scarves I wove photographed to show you.

Destashifying

I used to make jewelry. A lot of it. When I started weaving I slowed down and eventually stopped making jewelry. I still have quite a bit of finished pieces to sell, which I do only very locally and at a bargain. More than that, I have many, many, MANY beads. You don’t want to know how many beads, or their value.

So I’ve started selling off my raw materials. Back in June I packaged some up and sold them to a local woman. Then I got too busy to do more of that. Finally last week I took the hours needed to gather up many of my full strings of beads, grouped them by stone and/or color, located them on my inventory sheet, identifying the size and cost of each group. I made 12 bags/groups of beads and asked the woman who’d purchased the prior beads if she wanted these, too. She’s gonna come and look at them and buy some, but not all. I’ll post the remaining beads on CraigsList and/or Etsy. CraigsList is free, so I’ll probably start there.

Here’s a sample of two of my groups.

First is mookite & red jasper.

Next is aventurine & labradorite.

I’ll probably have to take new/better photos for online posting.

I’ve been trying to get this post up for 3 days. My router was replaced & is fine, but it appears something is wrong with my modem. The DishNetwork people are replacing it. I should have the new one in a few days & then should be in good shape.

New Year Looms

No, not the new year is looming, but rather what my looms look like as the new year dawns. The idea of photographing your loom(s) on New Year’s Day has become an annual invitation by Meg over at Unravelling, and this is the 2nd year I’ve joined the fun. Without further ado…

Above, the Missouri loom, folded up and awaiting its next warp. I broke two pegs when the table sort of collapsed on me while I was experimenting to see if the loom would fold with a warp on it – while I was weaving my first warp on it last week. I need to fix that before it’s used again later this month.

The Macomber (above) still has leftover cotton on it from my special bookmarks woven as Christmas presents. Plus the back beam is a great place to hold many things, from my ball winder to the choke ties I use when measuring a warp on my warping board.

My little LeClerc rigid heddle (above) has a warp on it that I was using to demo weaving at the Roycroft Winter Festival. I’ll finish it up soon…perhaps.

Last but certainly not least, my lovely counterbalance loom has a space dyed rayon chenille on it – rich brown with flecks of gold, blue, green, magenta, and more. The seller called the color Countryside, but I don’t think that’s a good name. I haven’t yet come up with exactly what I think it should be called, but I will before I finish weaving this warp of 3 scarves.

Looking forward to a great year of weaving.

Now THAT’S Snow!

Winter storm Euclid hit western New York State yesterday. I went out early in the day to get my groceries, and by the time I got home at about 11AM the snow started. It never stopped. When I went to bed 12 hours later it was snowing just as hard.

So when I got up this morning I knew I’d be greeted by quite a bit of snow. I wanted to walk the dog a bit, and figured the road was our only hope – the snow in the driveway would be too deep for him, and the road had likely been plowed at some point during the storm.

I put on my boots & gaitors to slog through and make a path for my little guy, but I was still surprised by the depth of it all. Here are the tracks I made.

They don’t really tell the story very well, though. So after the dog & I walked on the road for a bit and I got the mail that was delivered yesterday, I went back in the house for a yardstick. Check this out.

I had planned to work today, but my plans have now changed. My little Yaris isn’t going anywhere until I get a plow up here. Those 14″ are unadulterated snow – there’s much more at the bottom of the driveway where the plow dung has piled up. I’ll call my plow guy as soon as we reach a reasonable time of day – 6:30AM isn’t it.

While it was snowing I knit 2 hats for my grandson. No surprise that most of the adorable hats he had last year, knit by a few people and store-bought, were outgrown; it just hadn’t occurred to me to make him more hats this year. So now I did.

Like most knitters/crocheters/weavers, I have a stash of plenty of yarn. I just had to go to the cupboard and see what I had that appealed to me. Then go online and find free patterns. Or find patterns first and then check out the yarn. For the first hat I started with pattern first, for a cone hat. Pattern from Lion Brand yarn, and their chunky Homespun yarn. It’s not my fav yarn but I liked the pattern & knew it’d work up really quickly.

Then I modified a simple striped hat in red (a favorite color of the boy) and white.

I’m going to wrap these up and get them out to the mailbox today. Hope they fit his little head.

Christmas+kids=great joy

As planned, I spent Christmas Eve and Christmas day with family. I had a wonderful time in all of our visits, activities, and meals. I loved the gifts I received and seeing other open the gifts I gave.

Here’s the last of the gifts I made this Christmas – an owl hat was requested by my daughter.

I got a free pattern from Penguin Pearls and made some modifications to suit me better.

Most fun of all, of course, is little ones at Christmas time. Despite the fact that the holiday has lasted a week and my grandson is over tired and easily cranky, he can still laugh with abandon when something tickles his funny bone. Having his Mama make an earthquake in his new beanbag chair is a barrel of laughs. I had to learn how to edit & embed a video that isn’t on YouTube to get this in here – I hope it works so that you can all see this crazy fun.

Although both sled and swing were presents from before, we had fun playing outside in the snow for a while with them anyway.

Then we had fun playing with trains on the new little wooden table.

Weaving A Gem Of A Life

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Now THAT’S Snow!

Christmas+kids=great joy

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