Don't Tell Bailey!

I wouldn't want the pup to think I'm dissing him, but he really doesn't like walking on snow barefoot.

I don't either!


He has this pair of dog booties that he sometimes wears. Unlike most dogs, he took to them right away.

We purchased these booties several dogs ago, for a dog with bigger feet. They're a little too big for Bailey.


I'm saving these fleece scraps for when he loses the current booties. I can make more!

I will try not to cringe at the fact that I could wear a matching fleece sweatshirt and headband and dress my dog in matching dog boots!!

Perhaps I experienced Bailey's revenge today when I went running. It's a gorgeous day here - sunny, bright blue sky, snow on the ground - and I was running along and noticed myself singing that song B-I-N-G-O. (YouTube will start playing the song if you click that link - be careful!) Somehow I kept repeating that line over and over.....Glad I wasn't running a super long run!!

Two Highlights of My Saturday

A cool woodpecker at our suet feeder.... I think it's a female red-bellied woodpecker.


Lanterns lighting the way for a full-moon snowshoe with friends.

Fun stuff!

Blue Crepe Towels Project Wrap-up

I ordered the yarn for these blue towels years ago, as part of a series of dishtowels. My whole goal was to produce something useful, while improving my selvedges enough to tackle other types of projects where smooth edges might be more important to me.


I intended these towels to be a set for our master bathroom which is blue and white. I got side-tracked by other events in my life, and then by not having good weaving habits.....There were long gaps between winding the warp and dressing the loom, another gap of several months between when I started dressing the loom and when I started weaving the towels.

I also got side-tracked when one of the towel hems unraveled during wet-finishing. But now, this project is officially done!


At the end of the warp, I had a bit left, so I made a facecloth using cotton flake for 3 repeats of the weft, then one repeat of the blue.


I haven't used cotton flake before, so I'm not sure how it will hold up.


Currently, three of the towels have been wet finished by washing in warm water, and drying on low, then removing from the dryer when damp and pressing.

The fourth towel went through that same process, but has also gone through a regular cycle in the wash with clothes and household items. That fourth towel shrunk more....so I expect my other three to shrink more once they're in use.


You can see that the towel on the right has shrunk more - the threads are more tightly packed.


This towel ring is where I originally intended these towels to hang, but I didn't carefully check the dimensions of the project in Handwoven, and the resulting towels are shorter than I like for that use.


Project Details:

Project Plan: 8 shaft crepe from
Handwoven Sept/Oct 2003 "Bath Accessories au Naturel"
by Karen Tenney, pages 52 - 55.

This same author's work is featured on the cover of the September 2008 Handwoven.

Warp & Weft: 8/2 unmercerized cotton in royal blue
(Homestead cotton from Halcyon in Color 9)
This yarn choice differs from the author's choice in both color and brand.

Sett: 20 epi (2 threads per dent in a 10 dent reed)
PPI: 20 ppi
Total warp ends: 360

Width on loom: 18 inches
Length on loom - 30 inches per towel: 2 inch hems on each end, 26 inches crepe

Wet finishing: warm water wash, warm dryer, iron while still damp

Dimensions after finishing and hemming: 15 x 22
Dimensions after washing with regular laundry: 14.5 x 21.5
Shrinkage: Width 19.5% Length 23%

What I learned:

• Good idea to leave some sample space at the start of your warp to get the correct beat
• Sometimes beating is more like placing the yarn - not "beating"
• How to rescue a fraying hem
• My preferred hemming method right now for towels is to straight stitch by machine, wet finish, cut apart, then hand hem.

What I loved about this project:

• Weaving with 1 shuttle was really nice
• Love this blue color
• I am capable of making a matching set
• My selvedges, which I can still improve, are good enough

What I'd do differently next time:

• Make sure the finished size that the author is suggesting will actually work for my purposes!
• The plain weave hem wanted to ruffle - so I think a different weave in the hem might have been more compatible with this weave structure. There's some discussion on Weaving A Life about ruffling hems.

I'm glad I tackled this project, even though the towels are too short for their intended use. I always need more towels in the kitchen or to give as gifts, so that's where they'll end up.

In the end, I'm happiest that this project is complete and I can move on to other things. I'm also really glad that I am creating good weaving habits and doing a better job fitting weaving into my life. There are just so many things I want to explore!

Up Next: Tapestry

In my on-going quest to finish some projects, 15 minutes at a time, I'm ready to open the next project bin. Ooooh - tapestry!!


What's in the bin? Yarn, a ski shuttle that I forgot I owned and the book Tapestry Weaving by Kirsten Glasbrook.

I even left a note about where I stopped on this project! Bonus!!! (I haven't worked on this since last February.)


I have my rigid heddle loom set up for tapestry. The tapestry book has beautiful, colorful examples of the author's work, as well as a detailed, step-by-step teaching sampler in bright colors. I'm working through the sampler in more subdued colors.

(Oops! I just realized this morning that I have the tapestry on the loom upside down - so I don't have as much space to work between the heddle and the beam as I should. That's OK this time!!)


Since I started this project, I was lucky to attend a two-session tapestry workshop at the New Hampshire Weavers Guild taught by Micala Sidore of Hawley Street Tapestry Studio. She said it was possible to weave tapestry on a rigid heddle loom - although now that I've tried a vertical tapestry loom and tapestry bobbins, I must admit I miss them!!


Inspiration: My inspiration for this project is the beautiful scenery of Chile, and this yarn I bought in Ushuaia, Argentina at the bottom tip of South America. I'm keenly interested in different ways to create figures and complex patterns in weaving - although I'm very much a beginner in that very broad arena.

Project Hiatus: This project stalled because I envisioned drawing a cartoon, and making a tapestry following the cartoon. I can't draw!! To help me create my Chilean tapestry, I took a drawing class a few years ago at a difficult time in my life - and that class was too much for me. I got frustrated with this project, and let it languish.

Meanwhile, I know that people make tapestries in many ways, from cartoons or from photos, as in these examples from Argonaut. I'm certain we have plenty of photos from that trip to Chile! My tapestry dream is not out of reach.

Motivation: Why do I want to work on this project now?

• I want my rigid heddle loom for a scarf I have in mind!
• To free up the energy sapped by this blocked project
• To make room in my studio for new projects
• To learn some tapestry basics

So far I've just done some basic techniques using Halcyon rug yarn and some left-over Lopi.

The Glasbrook tapestry book is wonderful to follow....lots of pictures and good explanations, so I'm confident I can complete this sampler!

Washing Texsolv Heddles & Cords

The previous owner of my Toika Liisa converted the loom to Texsolv at least fifteen years ago. In fifteen years, dust, dirt and lint builds up!


With some advice from the Weaving group on Yahoo groups, I decided my washing machine would do the best job cleaning the heddles and Texsolv cords.


I tied the cords and heddles with light-colored string or shoelaces, popped them into a mesh bag, and washed as usual with a load of white laundry. Then line-dried them overnight.

They came out looking shiny and new!


I'm also cleaning up the first two shafts worth of moving parts for the loom. This wood is unfinished. I'm wiping off dust with microfiber cloths, and then cleaning farther with Orange Oil. My studio smells like an Orange Creamsicle!

For any really caked on grime, I'm scrubbing with fine abrasive pads.


The loom is getting closer and closer to warp readiness!!

Currently I'm trying to figure out what to do about a couple of large splinters on one of the shafts. It seems like heddles could snag on them - so I should somehow repair them. Not sure how yet! Let me know if you have ideas!

Gotta Stay Warm!

Last summer, I was very frustrated with my lack of productivity. I'd have a bazillion ideas, but wouldn't finish anything. Even starting projects - my favorite part of the creative process - didn't happen as often as I liked.

One of my local weaving friends is very prolific. She weaves five hours a week on average - and her five hours includes planning, ordering yarn, dressing the loom, weaving and finishing.

I thought....well, I can do a few hours a week in my studio and see how it goes. Maybe if I treated weaving more like I treat running - planning to do it and pushing through parts that are hard for me - I'd develop better creative habits. I started with two one-hour sessions in my studio a week. At the start of each month through the fall, I'd re-evaluate and decide what level of commitment felt right.

Now, I'm up to three weekly sessions, for a total of six-and-a-half hours per week. If a project is going well for me, or is fun, I'm free to spend more time on it. But I commit to those three sessions, schedule them, and definitely work during those times.

By the beginning of winter, these creative habits were ingrained, and instead of facing resistance and avoiding anything creative, I went upstairs and got to work with excitement and ease.

At the beginning of January, I decided to spend the first fifteen minutes of each studio session finishing up a project. I made a list of projects that were stalled and would just feel good to get finished....and I'm working through that list.

These headbands are the first of those projects!


It feels really good to be finished with this project! It feels really good to know that I'm in the habit of being productive in my studio and that my unfinished projects won't languish forever.

I've still got projects that will be completed in this fifteen minute manner. The beauty of fifteen minutes is that I can get a step or two done, it doesn't feel too long, and when I stop (I actually set a timer), I'm almost always at a point where I want to continue - so re-starting the next time isn't hard at all.


Meanwhile, I love spending time outside - running, hiking, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing - so these headbands will be put to good use!! Perfect for keeping me warm, but not too warm!

Lumpy Bumpy Texture Sampler

My favorite thing about this project was that it was a nice short warp with a ton of different yarns. I never had a chance to get bored!


It could be a useful reference for using some of my yarn in future projects.


One surprise was that the Lion Homespun yarn (the blue-green yarn in the corner) was fairly well-behaved as warp and weft, and it looks pretty good woven. The yarn snob in me confesses that I thought it would totally shred when I was using it. I was surprised that it behaved well. And even more surprised that I liked how it looked when woven.


I used linen singles for the first time. I really liked its stiff and plant-like nature. I also liked how it tried to make the other yarns behave and do its bidding. I had been afraid of linen before this experience (well, aside from my beloved cottolin). I'm glad my first experience with it went well.


This green color....I picked it up for a great price at the New Hampshire Weavers Guild yarn table. I have plans for it. But every time I look at it, I think "Ewwww - I don't like that color!" I've done a little color rehab by holding it up to other similar greens that I do like. But I still struggle with this one. I'm trying to like it.


Everything in this sample is plain weave. This piece with green wool as weft, and white mohair blend, and burgundy mohair boucle as warp looks more interesting than expected. Not sure I'll ever do anything with that tidbit of knowledge, but you never know!


This piece shows the yarns I yearn to make into a scarf. The wide knitting yarns were not well-behaved at all as warp. But the flax blend weft was really nice to work with. I definitely need to play with this combo more. I have my heart set on the knitting yarns being lengthwise stripes on the scarf - so I'd love to figure out a way to use them as warp somehow on some kind of loom.


Sometimes samples are nice....quick, messy, no worries, new ideas!!