Van Gogh and the weavers

I was reading about Van Gogh last night from the DK Eyewitness Book series. It's a kid's book series. I love the Eyewitness books. Anyway, the book talked about Van Gogh in Nuenen and his interest in the weavers there. The town of Nuenen is in an area of the Netherlands called Brabant, ... "an area in which weaving had always been important, and Vincent felt compelled to illustrate these 'Brabant artisans' ". He painted many pictures of the weavers of Nuenen and sent them to his brother Theo to be sold. He told Theo to keep the drawings and paintings if they did not sell; writing, "It would rather disappoint me if you sent these little weavers back to me."

I had never heard of these drawings and paintings before. I love Van Gogh even more now!

This one is my favorite. See the baby in the high chair to the right?

And speaking of weaving...this is the finished band from my first card weaving endeavor. I really like the way the pattern came out. I just kind of flowed with it and let it go whatever way it was going to go.

I've been a bad bad weaver

Bad because I haven't been weaving. That's because the waves have been good. It has been so flat here for weeks. Lake Atlantic. But this past week finally a little push. So I've been neglecting my looms. But I've been exercising at least. Yeah, that's it... exercise. We all need that, right? There, now I don't feel so guilty. (Can't help it...Irish Catholic...."Guilt" is my confirmation name).

I have been getting some card weaving in though. I've been watching the Candace Crockett video and bought the book. The video is really helpful. She's an art professor at that commie school out in San Francisco....I'm just kidding. No but she really is a prof and she explains things very well. I chose some of the yarns I've had sitting around for a while for my first band; white, gray and brown. I know...there's some bright sunny colors for ya! I just have to start using some of this stash I've got, so I have a good excuse to buy more.

So I've threaded 20 cards and will follow the pattern in the video. I'm not sure how it's going to come out yet. But that's sort of half the fun. I'm looking forward to being able to design my own patterns with this method. You can do some really cool designs, that according to the book, you can only achieve with card weaving.

Get outta town!

Gerry and I decided to take a little trip for our anniversary. We went up to Deland and stayed at a Bed and Breakfast. That was interesting. It almost always is.

We tooled around Deland. We're always in search of the perfect retirement location. While there, we went to Blue Springs and saw these lovely manatees...

We also went to the Museum of Florida Art. That was very impressive. We saw some really incredible pieces there.

This piece, by Ummarid “Tony” Eitharong, was called, Winds of Change: Totem for Sadako which features a suspended mushroom cloud made from 1000 white peace cranes in honor of the Hiroshima survivors that initiated the “peace crane” project worldwide. This was really cool to see in person. It moved with every little draft and was just so fluid.

This exhibit was neat too. It was a collection of woodcut prints by Mollie Doctrow.

I think my favorite part of the trip though was the Pioneer Settlement for the Creative Arts in Barberville. They're a non-profit organization for the preservation of history and crafts such as blacksmithing, pottery, weaving and spinning.

This is the loom room. Most of the looms were 2 shaft with one 4 shaft. 

Here's me trying to figure out how I can shove this loom into my purse.

And here we are at the old train station. That's a paper conductor hat on my head. I gave myself a paper cut trying to fit it on my fat head.

Here's Gerry at a Mensa mtg. Actually it's the old school house. Yeah, we have a thing for putting hats on and acting like jerks. It's just what we do.

Anyway, it was a blast. Ger bought me a really pretty clay bowl from the Pioneer Settlement for our anniversary. The restaurants were good in Deland, so we ate a lot! And they had a Sonic Burger so I was good to go. It's also the home of Stetson University, which is a really pretty, old Florida liberal arts college. We really liked it there and the surrounding area.

Here's some more pictures. I hope this works....

Sampler

Ok, so I put the rug aside for now. I decided to get back to my goal of learning from the Collingwood book so I'm going to do a sampler. The book is pretty good, except sometimes you have to do a little translation from the British, but not too bad. So far I've practiced the cross stripes and pick and pick. I love the way the pick and pick looks! I'm also throwing some twill in between the sample sections for good measure. Here's another view...

This afternoon I'll work on doing spots.

Isn't this a cool ficus? I took the picture at the park this morning at our outdoor painters group get together. We usually paint or draw every Sunday morning. I have a ficus fetish lately. Thought maybe I'd try to do this one as another charcoal.

Finger knitting

February Little Van Goghs meeting. This month we did finger knitting. The kids loved it! We tried single strand and double strand. The older kids helped the younger. One of the moms joined it. It was fun! Check out this video to learn how to finger knit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3LKAlDz9ig

I finally finished my Mother Bear Project bear. He is my very first bear, so be kind. I've never made a stuffed animal before. I love doing this and feel so stoked that a child in Africa will get my little bear and love him. He is very flamboyant, isn't he?

Haven't been doing much weaving. Been really busy. But I did finish the color variation project and I hope to make that into a bag. I've been toying with the idea of adding freeform knit scrumbles as decoration to the outside of the bag but I'm not loving it right now.

This little dude was hanging out in our yard the other day. I love cardinals! They are so RED! We put some seeds out for him and his wife.

Trip to St. Augustine

The trip was fun. But it was way too cold. I've come to the conclusion that I really hate the cold. The camper has no heat, so 39 degrees really sucked. We had the sleeping bag that goes down to 25 degrees and that helped. It does sort of feel like a large dead animal is laying on top of you, but I was really glad to have it. We would have froze. Hell, we would have gone to a B&B.

I took a bunch of pictures...mostly of rocks. I just got attached to these rocks. They were by the St. Augustine pier.

I know...you're saying, "please for the love of God, enough with the rocks!" They were very cool though.

Oh yeah...brains the size of my pinky toe. For those of you who don't surf, I'll explain. "Locals only" is a term used by really stupid, small minded people who think they own a certain 50 feet or so of ocean. They only allow, (or imagine they have that power), those of their mental gene pool to surf in their little 50 feet of the world. People like this are sad. They are the reason surfers have a reputation for being total dim bulbs.

I was real into patterns this day.

Here's Gerry sort of cold. He is able to take it better than me.

Here's me totally freezing my butt off. Did I mention how much I hate the cold?

A courtyard in St. Augustine.

Here's Gerry all frisky in the cold.

And here's me totally done with it. All I wanted at this point was a warm restaurant and a bowl of soup. Which we did find. An Irish place with the most incredible clam chowder I've ever had. New England clam. It had fresh rosemary in it along with a bayleaf and butter. It was incredible.

We also went to an arts and crafts show. Have to support my fellow handmade folks. Bought a really cool little purse made from recycled fabric for Che and a really neat hummingbird wall hanging for Bridget. The artist who made the hummingbird's name is Bruce Cook. We talked for a while with him and his wife. Real nice people. That's one of my favorite things about camping. We always meet interesting people.

Honey combs and color variations

I finally got the tie on done...sort of. It was still a little wonky but I said the hell with it. This is a learning piece anyway. I could have fiddled with it for days. The warp was doing some weird stuff after I started weaving too. When I put the heddle in the up position, the bottom warp was all loose. After I started working the pattern with the pick up stick, it started to normal out some.
This honey comb pattern is really fun. I love watching it take shape. I'm using a single ply funky cotton for the weft. It has like an uneven spin. I love purple and green together. Orange too. Big fan of the "secondaries" I guess.