Plants, Not Flowers

This week at Digital Photo School, the assignment is "Plants, Not Flowers."

Outside in NH it's a riot of green right now. So many great subjects!

Wrinkled Shield Lichen

I love lichen. I'm not totally sure it counts as a plant. It's a combination of algae and fungus....

Fern in the woods

Looking skyward through sumac leaves

Climbing off the stone wall where I photographed the sumac, I heard movement in the grass - sure enough, there was a 2 foot long milk snake.

Startled, I gasped, jumped, ran away.....but inspired by Sharon's recent snake photography, I tried to photograph it. No luck. He'd slithered away. He was pretty colors of white, black and orange. (Like this one.....from a Wikipedia photo.)

Red Milk Snake

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

I'm glad that NH does not have poisonous snakes....that helps keep me slightly calmer when I see one. (Technically, there are occasional timber rattlesnakes, but there are so few that I'm extremely unlikely to see one.)

Poison Ivy

Maybe I should retreat to my yard? Snakes, poisonous plants.....

Fern, Climbing Hydrangea and Hemlock

Plume Poppy

Fern without Bailey

Bailey struggled mightily to get in the picture with this fern, but for today I resisted his cuteness!

Bent Birch

Some assignments come naturally to me, while others push me to explore subjects that are not exciting to me.

I always learn from the assignments I do......I suppose there's a lesson in there somewhere!

Blanket from Mali

A friend let me borrow a handwoven blanket from Mali that was brought to the US in approximately 1979.

I photographed the blanket on a lime green sheet on our front porch.

The blanket was woven in strips that are 4.5 inches wide. There are 10 strips in this blanket. The blanket is 45 inches wide and 87 inches long.

Although I have never been to Mali, I did find a photo of a weaver producing similar cloth in Mali.


The turquoise, red, black and white bands are made from commercially produced cotton. The white bands elsewhere in the blanket are made from handspun cotton. The warp is commercially produced white cotton with 16 ends per inch.

The handspun cotton was spun using a stick with a small ball of gum from a tree at the end. I'm not a spinner, but I'm guessing that was a drop spindle.

The fabric is weft-faced, with the handspun white cotton at 26 picks per inch and the commercial cotton at 56 picks per inch.


The strips are machine stitched (zigzag) together.


The weft yarn was carried up one side of each strip as weaving progressed.

The commercially produced cotton is doubled in the weft to make it roughly the same size as the handspun white cotton.


In each strip there are 2 areas of inlay - one near each end of the blanket. The area may be red, turquoise, or a mixture of red and turquoise.

On one side of the blanket, the ends from the inlay hang free.


The ends of the blanket are not stitched or tied.


The person who brought these blankets from Mali, collected over 200 pounds of textiles at that time. He tried to find out about the history of each blanket, and sometimes met the weavers.

Some blankets were wool, handspun from local sheared sheep. Those blankets were woven on a loom made from sticks and strings, with rock weights to weight the weft.

Other blankets were checkered, with fine, imported thread and very crisp patterns. Some of those blankets were woven on commercially produced hand looms. That style of blanket was very geometrically uniform, but sometimes included symbolic animals and other patterns.

Some blankets were a mixture of handspun wool and cotton, which were sometimes dyed with a very pungent indigo dye. Years later, a visit to the dye pots stands out for the strong smell of ash and cow manure that the visitor to Mali remembers.


I'm very glad I was able to examine and photograph this blanket, and I appreciate that the person who traveled to Mali remembered details of the textiles he collected all of these years later!

Summertime and the Weavin's Easy

A couple of learning opportunities for people interested in weaving, dyeing, photographing textiles, and batik are coming up this summer in New England.

NEWS

NEWS, a regional weaving conference, has openings in classes about weaving, dyeing, photographing your work, and batik. The classes are July 10-12 (Fri - Sun) in Northampton, Massachusetts.


You can sign up for single day registration if you're just interested in one or two classes. The class list indicates which classes still have space available.

There will also be exhibits in the gallery show, the static fashion show (where garments are displayed, not modeled on the runway), and some special exhibits that are open to the public.


Plus, Northampton has all kinds of great weaving, knitting and felting shops.....in addition to the vendors at NEWS.....so you could get inspired, then go shopping!


I'll be attending the whole conference. I'd love to see you there!!

Woven Voices

If you want to give weaving a try, Sarah Haskell needs volunteers to weave for even just a few hours on her Woven Voices prayer flag project.

No experience is necessary, and weavers of all ages are welcome. (So far, I think the youngest weaver on this project was 5 years old.)

Sarah's studio is in York, Maine - a beautiful destination in the summer - so if you're looking for a free summertime weaving activity, visit Sarah's website to get in touch with her!


Although it's not officially summer yet, I wish you a wonderful summer full of whatever you love!

In Search of Horseshoe Crabs

In May and June, at the evening high tide during the full moon, horseshoe crabs gather to spawn.

Today we kayaked during the daytime high tide, hoping to see lots of horseshoe crabs.

Farmland in Stratham

Just like last time, we launched at Chapman's Landing in Stratham, NH. The morning was cloudy, but warm.

For tide charts, the Squamscott River Railroad bridge tide chart is most accurate. The bridge is about 1 mile toward the Great Bay from Chapman's Landing.

Great Bay is amazingly calm today

After we kayaked down the Squamscott River and poked our noses into Great Bay, it was extremely calm. Often Great Bay has a lot of chop and whitecaps from the wind whipping across it.

Edge of Salt Marsh at Sandy Point

This area is prime horseshoe crab spawning area. Several years ago, we launched our kayaks from the small boat launch at Sandy Point Discovery Center, and could barely walk in the water because there were so many horseshoe crabs.

Osprey Platform at Sandy Point (never occupied as of 2008)

Horseshoe crab at the edge of the marsh

After kayaking along the edge of the bay, seeing a few horseshoe crabs, and many nesting ducks, we kayaked across the bay to Nannie Island.

Nannie Island

Common terns have nested on Nannie Island in the past. Nannie Island also boasts the largest oyster bed in Great Bay, approximately 30 acres in size - but it is in need of restoration.

If we'd snorkeled, we might have seen juvenile flounder, pipefish in the eelgrass or green crabs in the shallows around Nannie Island. It was warm today....but not that warm!!

Just a note: Nannie Island has a lot of poison ivy. Be careful!!!!


We're a short distance from Great Bay National Wildlife Refuge, visible across the water.

Cormorants on a small rock island

Horseshoe crab in the eel grass

It's a long way back to our launch!! We have to kayak basically all the way across this water. Good thing it's so calm today!

Leaving Nannie Island

We kayaked straight across the bay and back up the Squamscott River to Chapman's Landing.

I did try to snap a few bird pictures....but everything was coming out blurry.


We did see a changing of the guard at the osprey nest on the Squamscott River. One adult osprey flew to the nest. The adult on the nest flew off. That probably means that the adults are taking turns incubating eggs in that nest.

Once the young hatch, there will be a lot more visible osprey activity at the nest.

At the end of the day, my GPS read 9.58 miles. My arms were super tired. That's a long paddle for me - especially for my first week of paddling season!!

(We did kayak an extra mile at the beginning of the day when we arrived at the launch early and took a few pictures. Today maybe I shouldn't have gone the extra mile!)

Pink and Blue Times Two

In the garden today....

Forget Me Nots

Iris and Azalea

What To Do, What To Do

My borrowed table loom has warp left over from Ruby Leslie's Color Workshop in April. I need to weave it off.


When Ruby sent me the warp, we had 15 people registered for the class. I was going to be the only person warping a loom for this design.

By the time of the class, we had 5 more attendees. Another weaver was able to bring a floor loom warped with the exact same thing as my table loom. It seems like about half the class wove on each loom.

I might have a yard or two of this warp left. I don't want to unwind it to measure it because the tension has stayed even so far. (That's not always the case for me.)

Goals for this project:

• Weave the warp off this loom so I can return the loom to its owner in a timely fashion!
• Make something that I like out of this warp

At the end of the workshop, Ruby told us to go ahead and wind quills of the colors we'd need to finish our warps. I should have wound more of every color.

What I did instead (besides weaving up to the very last minute), was run around taking photos. I ran out of quills and managed to borrow a few. I did wind a few full quills of the dark blue. I'll have to figure out what to do about that.

Meanwhile, my loom is threaded with a straight draw on 4 shafts. I scoured Handweaving.net for drafts with this threading.

I'm not crazy about twill or plain weave for this project. I want to experiment with different options and pick what I like best.

I packaged up about 20 drafts on Handweaving.net, downloaded them to my PC, and slurped them back into Fiberworks PCW. Very cool and very easy.

Then I could start experimenting with my favorites.

I'm new at using weaving software, so I need to practice visualizing what the drafts will look like when woven. I really like this draft that reminds me of fern fronds.


But I'm not as crazy about it when I weave 2 repeats.


These crescents seem kind of cute.


And I like them when they're woven.

I love these fusilli and am curious about the little diagonal bricks.


But when I weave both the fusilli and the bricks, they kind of disappear. This picture has 2 rows of the fusilli and one of the bricks.

I decide to go with the crescents - which are in the middle of my samples in brown.


I had also picked out this draft....but didn't even try it. I think it will just get lost like the fusilli.

I still face the issue of weft yarn. I did try a few yarns from my stash as part of the samples. I was hoping I'd love one of them and weave the whole warp with one weft. I had high hopes for a certain marine blue (used for the fusilli and bricks).

But I didn't love any of my stash yarns with this warp. I'm definitely big on following my intuition and trusting that I really do like what I like. It doesn't have to make sense to like it, but if I like something, I move toward it! I almost always sense either a strong "Yes" or strong "No" when faced with a question.


I ended up dividing the weft colors into 3 piles: blue (I have 3 full quills!), greens (5 quills of different amounts), reddish colors (3 quills, including the very bright pink that's in the warp.)

My plan is to make an asymmetrical plaid with 4, 2, 3, then 1 repeats of the crescents. I'll change colors in each segment and I'll work in blue, green, red, blue, green, red, etc.

Bailey's scratching the floor, trying to get me to play. But I want to weave and see what happens!!!

Related posts:
Cutting off one towel

Samples from the workshop
Day 1 of color workshop
Day 2 of color workshop (I guess I was too tired to write about day 3!)
Ruby's Teaching Schedule