Finished Cowl

Very soft, very cushy, very warm.

Notice how the wrong side of the cowl looks like large sections of knit woven together.


I finally finished my first cowl. I do have a fleece cowl that I use a lot in the woods when it's really cold. This knitted cowl will be prettier and could be worn around town.


Quick to knit, but I couldn't knit this while chatting. I don't know if other people count lace in a different way than I do, but I was counting in my head....and definitely got confused if I stopped mid-row.



Needles: US 8 wooden double-pointed needles
Yarn: 1.5 oz (.85 of a skein) of Princess by Classic Elite
40% merino, 28% viscose, 10% cashmere, 15% nylon, 7% angora
Color 3432
Pattern: Lush-ious Swirl Cowl by Linda Frydl

We're having an unusually warm winter so far, so I've barely had the chance to use my new cowl. I'll bet I'll get a chance to use it soon though!

Related posts:
Starting this cowl
On ravelry

Holiday Ornament Making

Swag

In late November, the Col. Paul Wentworth House hosts a holiday decoration workshop.

Victorian Garland on Cardboard Deer

I made all of these Christmas decorations in 2 hours at the workshop, using materials and instructions set up at the house.

Clementine Clove Pomander

It was a great way to kick off the holiday season!

Front of Col. Wentworth House (Photographed in July)

Wentworth House has a great story. My super short version is that it was built in 1710, then moved to Massachusetts where it stayed for years, falling into disrepair. In 2002, it was numbered, disassembled and moved back to NH on a flatbed truck. It remained in the trailer of the truck on this property for years, while a team of motivated people raised money to put the house back together. Finally they were able to reconstruct it. Very cool!

Back corner of Wentworth House (also in July)

This saltbox shape is traditional in New England.

Foil Ruching

This foil ruching would have been made during Victorian times, when candlelight reflecting off silvery surfaces was all the rage.

Cranberry wreath

Cranberries strung on a wire make a small wreath.

Popcorn Cranberry Garland

Wentworth House (Rollinsford, NH, USA) is having a free holiday open house with music and snacks Saturday, Dec. 10 from 4-6 pm. If you haven't had a chance to visit the house yet, you could stop by to see it decorated for the holidays!



Related posts:
Making the cardboard deer head

Going Stag

Mr. LifeLoomsLarge might be a bit hard to shop for.

This year, I made the perfect gift.....completely out of recycled materials!!

Behold the cardboard deerhead, perfect for any man cave!


I printed and cut out templates (modifying the end of the antlers to make it easier for me to cut). Since I had lots of cardboard boxes around, I traced the templates on box pieces, then cut them out using scissors and an Exacto knife.

Putting the deer together was a snap. (I did cut thinner slots to fit the whole thing together, since the templates were created for foam core.)

For hanging, I just threaded a needle and put a piece of cottolin yarn (or string would be fine) through the two vertical pieces of cardboard on the back of the deer neck.


I can't help but think of other animals I could make!!

I'm so bad at keeping gifts secret, that as soon as I finished it, I gave it to Mr. LLL in a box so he could open it and laugh.

For more inspiration, templates, and how-to tips:

By the book

Plain cardboard version

Things that Make You Go Hmmmm: Part I

It might be a bad sign when I wake up thinking, "What do I want to blog about today?".

Nothing immediately sprung to mind (although I have unblogged-about projects and trips and adventures that I still want to share).

Then, I did the tiniest of babysteps toward getting my weaving inertia to be weaving in motion (rather than the weaving at a standstill that has been the story of November and December at my house.)

Thanks Theresa for the great idea of cutting samples in half!

I cut off a sample to wet finish it. (I know this sample looks a little crazy. I'm trying out different wefts and different treadlings to decide which four are my favorite for a run of towels.)

The results of the wet finishing were so surprising to me, that I have to share them with you!! I'm just not sure what to make of it, although my ever-supportive DH says he thinks the changes to the fabric enhance rather than detract.

I'm still saying Hmmmmmm.......

Unwashed version

Washed version
Look at all those vertical lines!

I really wasn't expecting vertical lines to appear like that. They are at consistent points across the entire sample.

I'm not sure that I like them. Mr. LifeLoomsLarge says he thinks they make the fabric make more sense....containing it and making it seem less "all over the place".

The only vertical lines I know about are reed marks....and I thought those are something that can disappear with washing, rather than something that appears.

So what do you think? Are these lines an intended part of the fabric? Are they a feature (or a bug)? Is there something I can do to prevent them?

They are even more noticeable and textural in person.

Related posts:
Folding the warp in half
Ordering more yarn for warp
Getting started

Chickening Out

I haven't been to my knitting group in months. I miss my knitting buddies!!

I need to have a knitting project I can work on while chatting.


These slippers are excellent to work on at a knitting group. Only thing is I ran out of yarn and started making the toe with doubled purple yarn from my stash.

While the project incubated, I decided to heed the warnings of my fellow bloggers. I'd rather spend a few more dollars to get an extra ball of yarn than risk having a bad felting experience when it's time to felt these slippers. I probably could have made it work, but since it's my first time felting I decided to be more cautious. (Or did I just want an excuse to shop?)


Luckily, the yarn shop still had the same colors and dye lot, so with my newly added ball of yarn and a little frogging, I'm good to go.

Photographic note: Despite my best attempts at color correction or fixing the white balance, I can't get the colors in these two photos to be the same. The second photo is more true to color than the first.

Related posts:
Starting the project, includes pattern and yarn info
Trying to use stash yarn for the toes

I Made Something!

Don't faint from the shock!

My mojo disappeared sometime back in March. It seems like the combination of my crazy weekend of warp painting during a power failure, followed by an unexpectedly warm spring that just stayed nice, totally crushed my creative energy.

That's OK though. I've definitely been enjoying this fabulous spring and summer while getting enough accomplished to keep my head above water.

It's sort of surprising what kicked me back into gear.

We had guests over for dinner, so I wanted to unearth the dining room table. It was my sewing room for the winter, but I wanted to clear off the sewing to make room for entertaining.

I decided to make the blue curtain that I so excitedly found fabric for after the Fuzz Fest in January.

This fabric is a curtain fabric that's pretty stiff. It has blue and black threads making up the fabric, and then gold thread machine embroidered in that swirl pattern. I used it unbacked, even though it technically has a right side and a wrong side. It's nice enough on the back that I'm OK with that.

My sewing machine had a little trouble with this fabric. I tried a bunch of different needles but if I was sewing through more than 2 layers my machine had trouble and sometimes couldn't pierce the fabric. If you have any tips and pointers for me regarding that, definitely let me know!



In bits and pieces throughout the week, I finished the curtain!!

Here are the steps I followed (for my reference as much as yours!)

• Get measurements of finished curtain
• Sew side seams
• Sew pocket for curtain rod at top
• Hang to check length
• Sew bottom hem
• Hang to check
• Store until winter!

We won't hang it until the fall, because it is used to separate our kitchen and sunroom, which we heat well in the winter, from the rest of the house that we let get pretty chilly during the daytime. It's surprising how well a thin curtain can keep heat where we want it.



Bailey immediately figured out how to get through the new curtain. (The old one was short, purchased inexpensively as a test, so Bailey could walk right under it.)

That's one project down.....too many to count to go!!

I even tackled the pile of mending next to the sewing machine before moving all of that gear upstairs. I repaired a pair of jeans, pajama bottoms and a turtleneck.

Hopefully I'll have a bit more creative energy over the summer, if only to hide from the heat and humidity. I have some weaving deadlines in the fall, so I'd better get cracking!

Design, Implement, Maintain

I've blogged about how tough it can be for me to devote time to weaving, even though I love it.

I've also had great project momentum in the last few months, carrying my projects forward.

I think part of my difficulty getting going sometimes has to do with what Barbara Sher describes as the amount that I like to Design, Implement and Maintain. She describes her balance of those types of tasks in this video:



I think I'm about 80% design, 15% implement and 5% maintain.

I like nothing better than to come up with ideas, plans, schemes, designs - no matter what the subject.

If I execute for about 15% of the time, that's about all I want to actually get done myself.

And I have to struggle with maintenance....I have a hard time getting motivated to do maintenance tasks.

Knowing my natural tendencies helps me cope with my tendency to have tons of ideas and plans, without the energy to follow through on very many of them.

What about you? What's your unique blend of Design, Implement, Maintain???

Guest Bath Towels: Yarn Miscalculations

In January, I started weaving some hand towels for our guest bathroom.

My original blogging plan was a beginning, middle and end post for each project. I'm realizing that I have a beginning and an end, as planned.

I also seem to have a post at every point where I get stuck on a project. Sometimes that's a lot of middle!

Here's the first sticking point for this project.


After choosing colors to coordinate with our bathroom, I started browsing handweaving.net for drafts. My plan is to stick with 4 shafts on my Toika for this project.

I searched through everything on handweaving.net, narrowing my choices down to three.

One of my favorites

I started calculating how I'd use my stash yarn to work with the drafts I like.

The yarn is an assortment of cotton, mostly 8/2 and 10/2 from lots of different sources. I want to use a light colored warp and weave each towel with a different weft. Using that method, I shouldn't have problems with different yarns shrinking at different rates. At least that's the theory, backed up by helpful advice from Sandra Rude.

The different wefts might have different shrink rates, so the towels may end up different sizes. I'm OK with that.


I love this pale blue-gray. It would make a great warp for this project.

I determined the sett, and used my McMorran yarn balance to calculate how much yarn I had.

2 problems:

1. I only have enough warp yarn for 2 towels...I don't like to warp the loom for such a small number of towels.
2. Because the sett is tighter than I imagined, the patterns I've chosen from handweaving.net will be very small - maybe 1 cm in width.
   

For every problem, there's a solution. (You know that one of my favorite solutions is "More Yarn".)


I ordered some cotton-linen from WEBS. I didn't have color samples, so I ordered a gray that looked like my blue-gray from stash. As a back up I ordered white.


Since I was ordering, I also scooped up two cones of merino-tencel. I'm not done playing with shadow weave yet. I thought this might make a nice scarf with one of the designs I've developed.


I headed back to handweaving.net to look for wider drafts so the patterns would show up better from far away.

Related posts:
Getting started

My Tangled Web

What have I gotten myself into this time???

From this picture, you can see a mess in my studio - yarn everywhere, sewing patterns out.


I've got the guest bath hand towels making their way onto my Toika. A doubleweave warp waiting to go on my baby wolf.

But, after the Fuzz Fest, a new project preempted both of these projects.

I'm getting a batch of mixed dye on Wednesday, so this time I'm going to try painting warps!! (You might remember my immersion dyeing experience in November.)

First I figured out projects. I decided to paint warps for Tencel scarves and pillow shams.

I did some calculations and placed an order at WEBS Tuesday afternoon. On Friday, UPS was at my door. (It helps that when WEBS ships in the evening, UPS gets it to me the next morning since I'm just one state away.)


I'm using 10/2 white perle cotton for the pillow shams, 8/2 natural Tencel for the scarves.


While I was ordering, I threw in two more cones of the 6-ply rayon that I used for my shadow weave bookmarks. The hand of those bookmarks seems like it would be good for scarves.

2 cones New Cream, 1 Suede, 1 Ash

I already have 3 brown colors from my WEBS trip in July: ash, suede and cardamon. I ordered two additional cones of New Cream.

Suede, Cardamon, 2 New Cream, Ash

Plus, I picked up a couple of patterns: 1 for perle huck place mats, and one for a Tencel shawl.

I've talked on the phone with technical support at ProChemical for warp painting advice. They are so helpful. Hopefully this project will be a success!

If you have any warp-painting advice for me, or if you've blogged about your adventures, I'd love to hear about it!! Wish me luck!!

Finishing Chenille

Today I got to touch the results of an experiment in finishing chenille.


Remember when we wove a scarf at the beach for my MIL?

Plain weave scarf with chenille weft, combination warp of cotton, wool boucle and a wool-rayon blend sett at 18 epi.

I ran out of time to sample before the trip, so to be on the safe side, I just handwashed and then air-dried the sample, and then the finished scarf.

Although the warp was originally intended to be a truly one of a kind, unique scarf, the kids were so good at weaving that we didn't have to have the long practice piece at the start of the warp that I'd planned on.

When I came home, I wove off the end of the warp myself, making another scarf. Last week, I finally finished it.


I consulted the blogosphere, turning up this very helpful post on Eva Stossel's Weaving Blog.

My finishing technique for this scarf was:

1. Twist the fringe.
2. Machine wash on delicate in cool water on the gentlest setting in my front-loading washing machine with a few drops of Woolite.
3. Roll in a beach towel and squeeze out the excess water.
4. Air dry in the dryer with two bath towels.
5. Once I got impatient with air-drying, I switched it to drying on warm, still with two bath towels.

Today, we had lunch with my MIL, so we could compare the hand of the scarf I air-dried and the scarf I dried in the dryer.


The winner: the scarf dried in the dryer!! Next time I won't be so afraid to dry chenille in the dryer.

Related posts:
Getting Ready for Beachfront Weaving
Finishing the Scarf for my MIL
Warp Left Over after the Beach

Bookmarks: Good Save

Remember last week when I lamented the sad fate of my pitiful bookmarks??

Your comments helped me so much....and in fact saved this project.

I was bummed enough to consider Susan's idea of building a bonfire and burning the bookmarks.

I loved Barbara and Charlotte's idea to make the bookmarks into cards. Luckily I didn't rush right out to buy card stock and accouterments.

Because the first advice I followed was to aggressively shrink the bookmarks as recommended by Susan from Thrums, Delighted Hands, Barbara, Lady of the Loom and Sara from Fabric N Fiber Fanatic.

To secure the fringe before washing, I zigzagged a piece of fabric to the loose threads. It worked fine, but I was curious if you know of a better technique.

And it worked!!!

I washed them on the delicate cycle with warm water, then dried them in the dryer with a few towels and a chenille scarf on warm. I pressed them on the rayon setting after they were dry.

They shrunk enough to tighten up and hold together as bookmarks without giant holes.


This isn't my most successful project ever - mostly because my idea that I could combine red and green in this way wasn't my best idea. (And a bazillion people told me that beforehand, but I still had to try it to be sure!)

Front and back views

I think these bookmarks will be fine tucked into Christmas story books as gifts next Christmas.


Thank you so much for your great advice in the comments on my original bookmark post! I'm so happy to have 4 bookmarks to give away, rather than a sad chain of 5 malformed bookmarks cluttering up my Completed Projects notebook.


Not to mention that it's still January, and now my gift bin is getting fuller!
Late for Christmas 2009 = early for Christmas 2010!

Guest Bath Towels: Getting Started

Sometime during the holidays, I started thinking about my next weaving project.

Motivation:

• My kitchen towel drawer is overflowing with towels
• I love handwoven towels and want to make more
  

Choosing yarn colors

Inspiration:

• The ocean-colored yarns in my stash seem like they'd make a great set of towels
  
  

Goals for this project:

• Weave towels for our guest bathroom that look good in the room and are nice to dry your hands on
• Use some of those stash yarns
• Weave with 4 shafts on my Toika
• If I end up with a few towels for gifts, that is never a bad thing!
  

Tile floor

Colors that look good in the guest bathroom

Colors that fit my ocean theme, but don't look good in that room

So it begins.....

Shadow Weave Bookmarks

Let me tell you about my sad Christmas bookmark project.

Why is it sad??

I really don't like how it came out. I will still blog about it because I'm fearless that way!!

(And because I still want to document projects, even when I don't like them!!)

Instead of my usual, beginning, middle and end posts for each project, I'm going to do just one post about this one....since it really didn't work.


When Jim and I were collaborating on his green scarf, I ordered this shadow weave book since one of the drafts he liked was shadow weave.

1000 (+) Patterns
in 4, 6, and 8 Harness Shadow Weaves
By Marian Powell

In November, I was thinking I'd weave something quick and easy to give as small Christmas gifts.

When the book arrived, I noticed a pattern that reminded me of a Christmas ornament. I decided to make bookmarks with it.

The book is a little confusing to look at, but the draft I chose is photographed on page 241, with instructions on page 207.

Photo: pg 241, 8 - 2 - 13
Draft: Page 207, Number 13


I had some red and green rayon mill ends from WEBS from my visit in July.

I wound the warp and dressed the loom in record time and wove my first bookmark (above).

I've heard that red and green look muddy from a distance when combined closely, but I hoped as bookmarks the colors would be OK together - since you'd only see them close up.

I made mistakes in this bookmark, but the biggest problem is that it's about 4 inches long and 2 inches wide. I wanted a longer, narrower bookmark. Or at least a longer bookmark.

I fiddled with the pattern and added more repeats of some of the sections.

I realized that I wasn't weaving a balanced weave (as I had planned). Instead the weft was packing in too tight making the bookmark too short.

For my second bookmark, I didn't beat as hard so I'd achieve a balanced weave and a longer bookmark.

I achieved that, but it's too loose and sleazy. (You can see holes in the picture above).

Sett is my Nemesis

In hindsight, I think my sett was wrong. I chose a sett of 15. WEBS recommends 15-18 for this yarn.

I thought that shadow weave should be sett like plain weave. (I read that in multiple sources).

Maybe if I had sett the warp more like twill, the weft wouldn't have packed in so tight.

Does that analysis make sense to you?? Is there something else that you think I did wrong or could have done to remedy the situation?

One thing that did work was putting cardboard between bookmarks to reserve warp for fringe. (I know I learned that from one of you brilliant bloggers, but I can't remember who!)

I got plenty of practice hem-stitching. I hem-stitched all the rest of the bookmarks.

After the long bookmark, I could have cut, re-sleyed and salvaged the rest of the very short warp.

I'm not quite sure what I was thinking (or not thinking), but I just wove the rest of the warp even though I could tell it wasn't coming out. I didn't want to cut it off. I didn't want to figure out how to improve it. I guess I was hoping for some kind of Christmas miracle?

Now I have this set of 5 hideous pieces of fabric that I have no use for. I think they'll go into my finished project notebook. I wonder if they'd somehow magically shrink if I washed them.

I guess I have to try it, now that I've had that idea!! I'm not optimistic, but I have nothing to lose. If a miracle occurs, you'll be the first to know!! (And if you have some other brilliant idea that would turn this into something/anything useful, please let me know!)

It's funny how I can be so attached to the outcome for some projects, and so detached about this one. I know that taking creative risks involves failures, and that's fine with me - as long as it doesn't make me stall out! (This project definitely didn't slow me down a bit.)