New projects and panties

My dear friend and fellow weaver, Kathleen, advised me to get a proper design book for up coming COE projects. I had previously been using any old lined notebook, but she was right. Large and unlined is visually clearer. Luckily Michael's is having a 2 for 1 sale right now. So I'm breaking in the new book with this design for a rigid heddle piece I'd like to start, (not for COE... but for me) using some gorgeous chunky teal/dark green yarn I've had around for a while. I'd like to make a shawl.

And even as I write this I've figured out what has been bothering me about this sample. The reason I want to use this yarn is because it is gorgeous... to me. And here I've been trying to force this bulky gray and silver yarn into the pattern because at first I thought it looked good. Then for some coo-coo reason, I tried to add a warm color that just isn't doing it for me. Sigh. So I'm going to try another little swatch using the teal chunk and a little of the sparkly Moonlight Mohair (love that stuff) along with a silver Paton's Grace cotton, which is a really nice mercerized cotton. I'll post a pic in the next installment.

My youngest, who is a crocheter, came by the other night to take that next step forward into the land of knitting. She brought with her this little hat that she crocheted for me in a mere couple of hours.

This child literally got the knit and purl stitch figured out in 5 minutes... ok, maybe 7 minutes. Reminded me of when I potty trained her. I showed her a pair of Little Mermaid panties and said, "You want these? You go in there." And that was it. Kid potty trained. Fast learner.

Not to rub it in or anything but...

... this is what winter in Florida is all about. Land of Flowers. We had the day off this past week, so decided to do some shopping for the pollinator garden. Flamingo Gardens Nursery is one of my favorite places. It's huge and they have a really nice fruit/veg stand with smoothies and candy shop. I just love going there. See the humongous wind chime behind me? Awesome! I would love to have that in our backyard! Of course our neighbors would probably kill us.

It was actually a gorgeous day in the low 70's with a wonderful breeze. It's going down into the 40's tonight, so that's sort of cold for us. Hope all the little flowers will be ok.

The New Year approacheth

The new year is here and of course I'm sitting here thinking of what I want to do differently this year. Everything! Well, not exactly everything but one thing I want to do differently is have a bit more control over how I spend my time and what I let into my life.

I've been re-evaluating social media. I found that FB and Twitter were eating up way too much of my time. Also, you may be friends with someone on either one, who is perfectly lovely, but they may be friends with total wacko's. This started me thinking... what am I exposing myself to? Who am I exposing myself to? And more importantly, why?

So now I do a quick scan of both, keeping it down to no more than 20 min. and that's it, once per day. I can't tell you how much time I've bought back for myself just doing this. And frankly, I have to say, I feel a lot calmer. I think social media feeds into the culture of fear and angst that we've created for ourselves, and too much time spent there is not good.

Another thing that feeds the fear is TV which seems to promote, and even revere, a very stupid and violent popular culture. So I'm watching less and getting more reading and knitting done as a result. ... and again, feeling calmer. There is too much noise and always from the wrong people.

All that being said and done, I have started work on the Handweaver's Guild of America's certificate of excellence, or the COE. I've pretty much put everything else aside for this. So far, I have gotten my binder in order and started collecting the articles and books I'll have to read. There is a whole lot of reading involved.

I started warping the inkle loom for a Finnish band, following directions from Mary Meigs Atwater's book, Byways in Handweaving. I began to feel like the pattern seemed like it was going to be way too wide for my Schacht loom and then I just wasn't "feeling it" at all. I've decided on a narrower Baltic style band, and so have taken on the tedious task of un-winding the warp. Luckily, you warp the same for Baltic pieces so this warp won't be wasted, just narrowed.  

Not quite the hot mess it looks like. It will be fine... keep repeating... fine, just fine. 

After I started this band, I saw an article on the Sami people's band weaving and would like to learn more about Scandinavian weaving (being as I'm of Laplander descent) and the article is from Handwoven, March/April 2013. 

Look at the reindeer's lovely handwoven bands. She is quite the classy lady. Coco Chanel would be proud of her accessorizing savvy. 

I got this nifty little beginner loom for Christmas and am hoping I can use it for card weaving. It's really a child's beginner rigid heddle loom, but I think it will work for cards. Beka makes this model.

The warp is measured out and I am going to see if this draft will work. It is a modified draft from one I found in Candace Crockett's card weaving book.  



Happy holidays and rigid heddles

Visited my friend this past Sunday. We get together once a month to drink coffee, eat banana bread and knit. She wanted to learn rigid heddle weaving, so I let her borrow my RH loom last month and said if she needed any help, I'd work with her. Well, she did need help. When I got there, she had put the warp on the loom backwards (front of work tied to back apron  and vice versa). She was sort of almost in tears. I said no worries, we'd fix it. We took the warp off the loom and turned the loom around. So... in answer to a question on Facebook, on the rigid heddle page, this is how I tie little bundles to the back beam bar. We took small bundles of the warp, being careful to keep them the same length, tied them together, then lashed them to the back beam. These are thicker bundles than I would do, but that was her preference. Now, you can also tie them directly to the bars themselves, but I don't like the Ashford bars. They are rectangular, flat pieces of wood instead of dowel shape. I don't like this design at all, thus the bundles. Then of course she will sley the warp, and tie the ends to the front apron bar directly. 

This is an odd sort of way to warp I suppose, but I am used to warping an 8 shaft, 10 treadle monster of a Kessenich, so warping a RH is no where near as time consuming and tedious. Therefore, I don't mind taking extra time doing it. 

Another odd thing she did was this... instead of using brown wrapping paper or butcher paper, she used a bunch of cut up little cardboards. See how uneven this can be? You can use flat, narrow, even sticks, but these are totally uneven and cardboard has too much give. So we got rid of that hot mess too and luckily she had some brown paper on hand so we rolled the warp onto the back beam, tucking the brown paper in and around as we went. Hopefully, she will call me if she gets in a bind next time. 

And now... Happy Holidays from the kids of Messy Art! 

My apologies

I'm really sorry folks, but either I'm a dope (and how could that possibly be) or blogger messed up, but I see I've gotten many comments and didn't even know they were there.

So if I didn't respond, I'm sorry... I just didn't know it was there. DUH!! I'm working to see how this can be fixed in future.

Influenza fun!

Oh yeah, we're having some fun now.... groan. I've been sick since Saturday. So this is day 5 and I had to drag my diseased butt into work or I would need to get the dreaded "doctor's note". I was even willing to do that, but upon calling Dr. Ting, I was told he left town and they don't know when he's coming back. Nice. So needless to say, I've gotten nothing done really.

I cut the last warp off the inkle. I had experimented with this piece, using different yarns, and I wasn't happy with the combination or the colors. Yuk!

That was about all the energy I had. But on the bright side, I dug out a bunch of my old weaving magazines and got caught up on my reading.

The Thanksgiving break

...where I didn't do a whole heck of a lot. I was determined however to rest. I really felt I needed it.

Also, a bit of time was taken up with Christmas decorating. I LOVE Christmas and really love decorating my house. Above is my snowman collection...

and the Christmas village over the TV and the constant hum of football (just kidding Jer). The tree is up as well but I didn't take a picture yet.

This week in art class we looked at the works of the British sculptor, Henry Moore. I gave each child a palm size lump of air dry clay and, after showing them pictures of his work, asked them to make their own abstract sculptures. I told them that I didn't want to see any bunnies or kitties or anything like that and if I did I would smash them mercilessly! Bwa ha ha ha ha!!! I told the kids that I didn't want to be able to recognize their pieces at all. ABSTRACT!

Ok, I forgot my camera and had to use my iphone, which only seems to be able to upload pictures sideways. But they're abstract... does it really matter? Kidding. Anyway, I'm well aware of what terracotta looks like, and let me tell you, it's about as messy as it looks, but the store was out of white air dry clay.

Hmmmm.... this one is interesting.

Now I know this is not abstract, but it is gorgeous. The girl that made it is about 13 and a sort of  "at risk" kid .... she's at risk of choosing men poorly the rest of her life because the boys she hangs out with are total turds. Anyway, I praised her for this and told her she should keep up with clay and sculpting. You could tell by her reaction that she doesn't hear praise much and she was very proud of her piece. And it is experiences like this that remind me why I do what I do.

Thanksgiving kids art

In art class this week:

 Hand and foot turkeys
Materials: brown, red, orange, yellow and green construction paper
scissors
google eyes
stick glue
pencil

The kids first trace around their shoe on the brown paper and cut that out... that is the turkey body. Then they trace their hands on the red, yellow, orange and green paper. That will be the feathers. They attach the feather hands to the turkey's butt for his tail with the glue. We saved yellow and red scrap papers and cut out beaks, feet and wattles. Then stick on the google eyes and gobble gobble... Happy Thanksgiving!

And to usher in the holiday season...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OATi34PKNPw