Winter's coming...

It's not here yet, but the lovely sunny fall days we've been having here in the Front Range have suddenly turned chilly, grey, and damp. Time to dig through the tea stash and find the Lapsang Souchong; it's perfect stuff for a cold, raw day.

Here's the fiber that I'm in the process of preparing. Right now I'm waiting impatiently for it to get dry! I tried combing it on the English combs a few minutes ago, but it fought me trying to draw it off, so it's still too damp to work with that way.

There's a bit of a story to this one, which makes it unfortunately a one-off. I don't think I could reproduce it. The Friday night before the last day of the Weavers' Guild show, I found a bobbin full of plied Merino that had gone astray and ended up under my desk. After discarding the outermost layer of wraps to remove any dust, fur, etc. there were still 4.5 ounces on there--excellent!

My blue skein had sold early on, so I wanted to make more blue, but not the same. So I went for a teal instead, and mixed up Peacock, Robin'sEgg Blue, and a bit of Turquoise in a dyepot, and plopped the skein in there. After it was done to the depth I wanted, there was still dye left in the dyebath. I hate wasting dye, so I dashed downstairs and rummaged around in my fleeces, and found a nice white CVM fleece I'd bought some years ago from WIndyHill Farm. Grabbed a big double handful, ran back upstairs, soaked it for a few minutes in hot soapy water, and then stuck it into the dyepot still on the stove. Ignored it for a half hour or so, and then turned off the heat and let it cool overnight. What you see is what I got.

Now if it would just get dry...

Weaving Away...

The RMWG (Rocky Mt. Weavers' Guild) Annual Fiber Art Show and Sale is in just a week from today. As usual, I have almost nothing finished... why does that keep happening? I've been working on a number of things to enter, but few of them are actually complete. It's going to be an interesting weekend, I imagine, as I try to finish a bunch of in-progress things.

I was going to do the dark camel brioche scarf, maybe a cowl for that show, but I won't. I can't knit it that fast.

I had intended to spend Tuesday weaving on the scarf I've had on the Harrisville loom for months on end. I hadn't finished it because the studio had become a howling disaster and there were too many things in the way. So, I spent most of Tuesday cleaning the studio instead. Was able to rearrange some things, find some things that had gone astray, and only found two spiders. So,by Tuesday night, late-ish, I finally sat down at the loom to weave on the gray color-and-weave scarf.

Ah, bliss. I love to weave; why had I put it off for so long? Humming right along, it was going great until the last of the Harrisville's original leather harness cables (is that the right term?) that raise and lower the shafts decided to snap, right in mid-treadle. Not hard to fix, but I wasn't about to do it when tired and approaching midnight.

Fixed it this morning, and weaving away. Two more feet ought to do it. Here's the scarf at present: Pattern from Jane Patrick's The Weaver's Idea Book.

Rings and Things

Last Saturday we, my DH and I, had a wonderful time visiting the NoCo Mini Maker Faire in Loveland, CO, and delighting ourselves with all the splendid geekiness on display there. Can't wait for the next one! What a blast! There were so many things to see and experience that I'm sure I missed a few things.

I spent quite a while hanging out with members of the Northern Colorado Weavers' Guild, a number of whom I met at the Estes Park Wool Market Sheep to Shawl; I also got a second good look at the shawl they made at Estes, which won the blue ribbon. They had brought some spindles and fiber, so of course I had to stick around and spin for a little bit. Can't walk past a pile of roving, no, I can't...

One of the things I saw there was a group, local to Loveland I believe, called Hand Tech, High Tech (correct me if I'm wrong, please), who was doing something high-tech (which I didn't look at) along with a table where a charming young lady was demonstrating weaving for kids. She had set to LARGE circular weaving frames, one on a repurposed hula hoop and one on a length of PVC tubing bent into a circle and secured with duct tape. That was kind of neat, and a lot of kids were stopping by and weaving lengths of doubled yarn into the giant circular mats that were developing as the day went on.

That gave me an idea. As my fellow Sheep-to-Shawl mates know, I have a thing for what I call "accessible weaving". Although I own both a rigid-heddle loom and a 4-shaft floor loom, I love exploring and demonstrating approaches to weaving that don't require high cost or specialized equipment. In our booth display, I often include a section called 'Many Ways to Weave'. If someone gets bitten by the weaving bug, there are ways to start weaving NOW. Today. For example, stick weaving sticks can be found, bought inexpensively, or made; card-weaving cards can be cut from file folders, or even old playing cards, a rigid heddle can be also cut from a file folder (a bit too floppy, though) or a cereal box.

Seeing the hula-hoop weavings made me think, though-- how to scale it down in a functional way? Then it came to me: embroidery hoops. An odd number of 'spokes' to form the radial warps could be looped through each other at the center and pulled tight, and away we go. When finished, the 'spoke' yarns can be secured by tying each single yarn to one of it next-door neighbors (Yes, I've seen circular weaving done with a paper plate, but the yarn was just wrapped around the plate through notches on the edge; I don't know what would keep the 'warps' from being able to be pulled loose. And paper plates are not especially rigid and buckle easily.)

So I scrounged up a plastic embroidery hoop and gave it a try. This is a small one, so I can see it being a mug mat. Bigger ones, if wool or cotton, could be hot-dish trivets (acrylic yarn MELTS if you plop a casserole on it fresh from the oven--found that out years ago, the hard way!).

Here it is, so far. It's fun, it's fast, it's portable--what's not to like?