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?

Rediscovering Brioche

Lately, I've been rediscovering brioche. No, not the yummy French sweet bread; it's a knitting stitch that I don't see much about these days.

My first encounter with it was in one of Elizabeth Zimmermann's books. I forget which one, though. It may have been Knitting Without Tears, but my copy was stolen so long ago that I don't remember.

Anyway, brioche stitch looks at first glance like single ribbing--not too exciting. However, it's very elastic and stretchy, and with a closer look you can see that the structure of it is different. It's a slip-stitch structure combined with yarn overs; the slipped stitch and the YO from one row are knitted together on the return row. That sounds more complex than it really is, though. Here's the pattern.

Cast on odd number of stitches. Slip all first stitches to give chain edge. Row 1: Slip first stitch, *YO, slip 1, K1*, repeat between *. End with K1. Row 2: Slip first stitch, *K tog the YO and the slipped stitch, YO, sl 1*, repeat between *. End with K1. Repeat Row 2 ad infinitum, or until your piece is the desired length.

It looks like this. http://knitting.about.com/od/stitchglossary/g/brioche-stitch.htm It's thicker than a 1x1 or 2x2 rib because of the yarnovers; the only way I can describe it is 'fluffy'. If you want to have a ribbed fabric, but thicker and with more elasticity than standard ribbing, AND you hate to purl, brioche is for you.

How am I using it? Well, all of us have those neat yarns in our stash that we bought ages ago for something, but we never really decided what it was for. I have a number of those. Among them are several balls of a dark-camel (?) almost-fingering weight, wool from Lane Borgosesia (now defunct, I think)that I must have bought in graduate school. My roommate Rebecca and I both bought a number of balls in a gorgeous rust shade, intending them for matching lace vests; I never did get around to knitting mine, but hers is stunning. I'm assuming I got this color too at the same time. There's no color name, just a number. 'Cork' or 'Caramel' might be good names for it, too. It's a warm medium brown, and I've never been able to decide what to use it for. It's quite fine, and I just haven't the attention span to make it into a fine-gauge sweater, which I think might have been my original hope for it.

Then I decided to try it out as a brioche-knit scarf, for the Rocky Mountain Weavers' Guild Sale next month. Nice! I'm really pleased with it, and I think it's going to be a handsome scarf, a guy's scarf even.

What's Black, Red, and On a Wheel?

My newest yarn!  Here's a not very good photo of the beginning of the first bobbin. 

It's a mixture, not a blend—I'm not carding the two colors together, just spinning them in parallel—of black Merino combed top and bright red Merino combed top.  It should make a really attractive and dramatic yarn, and very soft, too!

What am I calling it?  "Roulette", of course!

There should be roughly 8 ounces of it when finished.

There Is No Secret Ingredient

This is something I just added to my profile on Ravelry. I thought about it a while and decided I wanted to put it in a blog post as well.

I know this will sound really odd, but lately I am beginning to understand something important about myself, art, and life. As long as I have been working with fiber, I have always felt that if I could just design like this person, or knit like that person, or weave like so-and-so--or spin like my roommate (!)--THEN I would be a “real” fiber artist. But I never felt that anything I did ever really ‘measured up’ to what other people I know (and love dearly) were able to achieve or accomplish -- my work was just a (distant) second-best, if that.

Slowly, I am beginning to understand something different. It sounds ridiculous to get a deep truth from a children’s movie, but there it was, waiting for me.

“There is no secret ingredient… it’s just you.” Yep. That's right. Kung Fu Panda has a surprising amount of wisdom hidden in there (even though some of the humor tends toward crudeness). There is one scene where Po and Shifu are shouting at each other about whether Po has what it takes to really become the kung fu warrior he has always yearned to be. He says, at one point, in complete frustration, "I thought if there was anyone who could make me not-me, it was you." That's what hit me squarely between the eyes -- just like me, Po thought that the secret of achieving what he dreamed of was to become "not-me" -- to become someone else.

But Po is Po. He can't become Tigress, he can't become Crane, he can't become Monkey. He can learn from them, but he can't be them. He can only become what he already is. Po's strengths are his own, and he learns to fight in a way that is uniquely his.

This is not to say that I can’t learn more, develop my skills, grow, and strive for excellence -- but I am learning that I don’t have to become "not-me" to be a fiber artist. For me to be who I am--and for you to be who you are--is enough.

There is no secret ingredient.

More on cotton...

Short post today. I have dishes, gardening, and grading to do, followed by helping a friend with entries for a flower show and then teaching my evening class.

But I did get a photo of the takli and its first yarn...

The weight of the skein of 2-ply cotton is .5 ounce. I have no idea what the yardage is, because I wound the skein around my elbow when I couldn't find my niddy-noddy. So I suppose it's X number of cubits, but that's not especially helpful, is it? Once I've boiled it, I'll rewind it and measure properly.