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I love to use hand painted yarn in my weaving. I purchase virtually all of it from the talented Tammy of Yarntopia Treasures. Tammy’s color sense, the way she blends colors that coordinate and contrast in her yarns, really appeals to me.
While I’ve been recuperating, I’ve managed to set myself up so I can wind all my newest Yarntopia yarns into balls and still keep my leg elevated. The batch of them together is so beautiful, I had to share it.
On the left are yarns made from 100% bamboo, on the right are Tencel® (a particular type of rayon). Both make handwoven scarves that are really soft and drape beautifully.
If you’re not familiar with the term, hand painting is a time consuming process. Each hank of yarn is first prepared to accept the dyes. It is then laid out on the dying surface, and very concentrated dyes are carefully applied in spots along the length of the hank, with the colors blending to create new hues where they overlap. The hank is then wrapped and rolled and put into a steam bath for an hour or more. After that it may require another process to ‘fix’ the dyes before it’s rinsed and hung to dry. As you can imagine, hours and hours are involved, as well as lots of underlying talent to select great colors. Tammy makes sure that she uses safe dyes and earth-friendly processes.
I can’t wait till I can start weaving with these beauties!
Your turn: where’s the color in your life?
Yes, I’m recovering from surgery. Yes, I’ve been keeping that leg elevated. But I’m way too obsessive to simply sit and watch the crap on TV. Sure I’ve got books I could read, I even went to the library in advance and got a few more in case the unread ones by my bed didn’t please me. But I didn’t feel like reading.
So what have I been doing while I’m laid up? Making Victorian beaded ornaments, of course!
In November I’m doing the Christkindl show in Canandaigua, and I’ve been accepted with my handweaving and my beaded Christmas ornaments, which are a form of bead weaving. I didn’t have enough stock, so I planned in advance so I could do more beading while I had my leg propped up. Since I often make ornaments in the summer, working on a snack tray on my great front porch, this was only a slight modification.
I’m teaching a class in making hand beaded ornaments at the local library in the fall, and needed to both have some samples for them to look at, each using a different number of beads in each section so they could see the difference. Also I needed to actually write down the directions. This was an opportunity to do both at once, and not wait until the last minute. Although it looks complex, I think beaded netting is actually one of the more simple techniques to learn, so that’s what I’ll teach. Here are the first four I made.
As I kept working, I got more into it, as is often the case with me. Push your skills further, try out new ideas, develop new patterns and methods. In order of creation, here are the next four.
I really like that last one a lot. As you can imagine, it took a lot of time, but I think it’s worth it. Will my customers be willing to pay more for it? That remains to be seen.
Your turn – what been on your plate lately?
Although I do all my weaving at home on a floor loom (usually my delightful, handmade, 4-harness counterbalance), I really like to bring my LeClerc rigid heddle loom to shows to demonstrate the weaving process. Lots of people like to watch me weave, and when I’m doing a plain weave, I can get kids involved in the process, helping me to change the position of the heddle and beat the yarn.
For the Roycroft show in June, I had beamed an interesting heathery bamboo warp. Since it was a medium-weight yarn, it worked up pretty quickly. And because I had my wonderful sister with me (yes, it is the same one who tormented me with those scary movies – she’s outgrown her evil phase), I could really focus on the weaving while she played the helpful sales associate role.
The first bamboo scarf was handwoven in a simple tabby weave, letting the colors provide all the interest. For the second scarf, I decided to try my hand at some hand-manipulated lace on the ends, so added three rows of leno. I must admit, it all looked a bit wonky while on the loom – not nice and even at all, and I was a bit worried. But lo and behold, the wet finishing process did its usual magic, and the end result is just swell.
I’m currently thinking about what I’ll warp the loom with for the Elmwood show in August. I’d love to do something with some yarn I have that needs to be sett at 18EPI, but that’d be a real challenge on my loom, and not one I’m willing to try for the first time at a show, so I’ll have to choose something else, something that will be lovely sett at 12EPI.
Your turn: have you woven on a rigid heddle loom? What do you like/dislike about it?
 When I was little, my older sister loved to scare the heck out of me by watching the Friday Night Fright Night movies on TV when she was babysitting me. I was too scared to go upstairs to bed, and too scared to stay downstairs and watch them with her. Downstairs pretty much always won, but not happily. I remember bits and pieces of various movies that I found amazingly frightening, from Mothra to Frankenstein and The Mummy. They’re all pretty laughable now, but they sure weren’t at the time.
It’s probably a good thing that my leg didn’t get wrapped up like this back then!
I had surgery on Monday. Just outpatient and not a big deal, but you’d never know that from the looks of the bandage. Had to have what they thought was a cyst but turned out to be a fatty tumor removed from near my knee.
Fatty tumor. Could there be a less desirable term? Fatty – always a good name for something, don’t you think? Tumor – who doesn’t immediately think of cancer when you hear that word? In fact, fatty tumors are virtually never cancerous, and are fairly common among people of a certain age, but yuck – bad name! It’s official name, lipoma, isn’t any better. Let’s re-brand this thing, folks. How about calling it a marbled knob – that doesn’t have all those negative connotations.
Anyway, I have to keep it elevated and iced for the next several days, so won’t be at my warping board or loom, but do have some finished pieces I haven’t posted yet, so watch for them in the next several days. On the up side, this down time will give me the ideal opportunity to get back into the habit of regular blog posting.
Your turn – got any terms, medical or otherwise, you’d like to change?
I really have wonderful children. I don’t know how I got so lucky, to have kids who are kind, generous, caring adults.
For a combination Mother’s Day & birthday present we took a family mini vacation, just the three of us. Michael met Amanda & I at the airport early in the day on Saturday, and it we had to kill a few hours before we could check into our rental cottage, so Amanda had scoped out some wineries on our way from Charlotte to Asheville. This was the first one – we liked their logo, as well as their wine.
Before we go any farther, I have to tell you that I CLEARLY wasn’t thinking about taking good pix for the blog. Apparently I wasn’t thinking about taking good pix at all. We spent most of a day at the Dupont State Forest, with beautiful trails, waterfalls, and scenery, and what did I take pictures of? The entry sign and two wildflowers I wanted to identify.
 
Oh, yeah, and this really cool sign. It’s the kind that always makes you feel warm and fuzzy when you’re hiking.
Our first evening in NC we went to a street fair in a park and saw this amazing group of children clogging. Unfortunately, my one shot with the tiniest couple (they were both 4 or 5) is too fuzzy to share. It figures.
We spent most of another day at the Biltmore Estate. George Vanderbilt built quite a monument to himself. You can get good shots of the whole 34-bedroom, 45-bathroom mansion at their website. I just want to share few things that amused me. There were many gargoyles and grotesques on the place, apparently not there to function, since he had solid copper gutters installed. But our guide told us the gargoyles & grotesques were all carved IN PLACE. Up on the edges of this really steep slate roof!
Much of the roof was decorated with these embossed copper decorations. In their day, George’s initials and the acorns were decorated with gold leaf, most of which as washed off in the many decades of weather.
The Blue Ridge Mountains were really gorgeous. And always hiding behind a light mist that led to their name.
 The weather was perfect — although it was hot during the day, it was almost always breezy, and it cooled off at night so that the next day started out at a reasonable temperature.
We finished our mini-vaca with a trip to 12 Bones, a great barbecue place that Obama stopped at just a few weeks after my son discovered it. Do you think the President knew Michael had been there?
I had a wonderful time spending 4 days with my terrific children. I hope we do this again!
Your turn – did you take a vacation or staycation this summer? Spend time with the family?
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