Pet the artist!

Yesterday my inner artist got petted.  Project 3 for my sewing class was a lined vest. Not being satisfied with a store bought fabric, I bought brown fabric, stamped it with flowers, then quilted it to flannel. Here's Owl, my trusted assistant helping pin baste the layers by swatting the misbehaving pins.

And here's a picture of the finished fabric. With the quilting, it's more subtle... The front has some stamp free areas that are just quilted. I presented it to the class yesterday and got a quizzical look from the teacher; she was less confused and somewhat impressed when I described the process of altering the fabric.  Then I went to the art store to get some ink and got petted by the person helping me when she realized it has art-wear.  No pics of the vest, it's just a longish simple brown vest, very cozy for the weaving studio.

I took a marbling class sometime near the end of the last century... I'd marbled some papers, then stuck them in a box which found it's way to the garage. I cleaned up that box a few months ago and moved the papers/fabric into the studio, where they've cluttered the floor since. Last night I cut them into appropriately sized pieces and glued them to blank 4x5 note cards; there are 26 cards, so pretty much a lifetime supply for me. Maybe I'll start sending letters? Anyways, here's my favorite. There's still some marbled fabric on the floor; I'll have to give it a quick wash to see if it's good for anything.

Pleats! Napkins! Dumplings!

Lots to write about today!!!  I've spent the last month or so in class making pleated fabric... first a test piece and then a scarf; photos are of the scarf.  It's alternating blocks of 1/3 and 3/1 twill; I found I got sharper pleats when I gave it a good firm beat. Warp is handdyed 8/2 tencel, alternating with 8/2 tencel that's a dark blue green, sett at 32 EPI; warp is Spruce colored 20/2 cotton, 28-32 PPI. It'll collapse about 50%.
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The napkins are off the loom and table tested!!! I made Creole Chicken and Dumplings from Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen (for the cookbook challenge). I'd never fried chicken before (and not sure it added to the dish) but I'd make this dish again.  Anyways, now I have 8 color gamp napkins in 7 different twills and plain weave, plus I used the leftover on the loom to make a table runner with grey scale weft. The napkins are hefty but have a soft hand. I love them. Here's one napkin, still on the loom; the blocks are square after wet-finishing.
Should I do napkins again, I need to put a plain weave border on them, or at least make the outside blocks larger. Also, the plain weave hem was wider than the twill, so I had to futz that while hemming; that's why people do the hem in a smaller yarn. 

Old news: 
I reworked an old top that I'd knit that was 4 sizes too big into a skirt; basically straight up to the hips, then I added a 3" wide waistband out of cotton doubleknit. Super cute. I will remake the top one day; it's the Bonita Shirt by by Mercedes Tarasovich. That's Owl doing the photobombing.

For sewing class I did a shibori shirt, a pair of elastic waist pants that actually look good, and a lined vest. For the vest, I took solid fabric, stamped it with some flowers in black ink, then quilted onto flannel (for some warmth), then lined with a contrasting quilting fabric. I'll likely put a line of stitches around the perimeter to keep it from rolling. That's my final project, so now all I have to do is work on class samples until the end of the semester.

On the knitting side, I finished the A Capella wrap (super cute); Stitches folks will enter me in a drawing if I post the photo as I made it from last years stitches yarn.

New News:
Just put 20/2 silk on my loom for a scarf for Scott. Sadly, I'm 4 tie rods short of being able to tie up the darn thing so will call Macomber tomorrow. I suppose I could but a call out to Bay Area weavers to see if anyone has any to lend...

Knitting on a little shoulder shawl from yarn I bought in Amsterdam last year.

And I finally found where I'd stowed my drop spindles, so I might actually finish that silk cap and make it into yarn...

Two months later...

No excuse, no posts.

What's new? In no particular order. No pix this time.

• Sheep to Shawl! I was a spinner with Three Sheeps to the Wind in the Dixon Lambtown Sheep to Shawl Competition and we took 2nd!!! And I bought some zwartbles, and some alpaca.
• Working through the color gamp, and a little bored of it. I'm on napkin 6.
• At school, I did some woven shibori samples with tencel warp and tencel or polyester yarn. Then steamed the polyester, which takes the shape permanently. So awesome. I got great result painting one side one color and the other side another color. Love. Love. Love. I need to do more of this. 
• Started on two deflected double weave samples on the school loom.
• Finished the hybrid vigour shawl? Poncho? Anyways, it's adorable, and the perfect weight for summer; good thing we have a few more weeks of warm weather!
• I made 2 T shirts in my sewing class and have cut out the next project, pants, and a 3rd t shirt. TShirt 1 is hand dyed but too big, but looks well made (Size 42 with FBA and a lot of tailoring). TShirt 2 was a miserable color of grey before I shibori'ed it and slightly tight at the bust (Size 40 with no mods); it's now indigo with grey lines; I did a super cute mock turtle and 3/4 length sleeves. Tshirt 3 will be size 40 with the FBA, wish me luck.
• Attended a wearable art show and bought an amazing vest and an awesome jacket.

What's next? Hard to tell. I'm operating on my Bonita shirt, planning on making into my Bonita skirt. Someday I'll finish my napkins. I also need to figure out a class project for the weaving class.  I'll try to get some pictures to post...

Whales! And School! And Dyeing

I spent a couple of weeks in Belgium and Holland, and bought some Danish yarn in Amsterdam and Stephen and Penelope's: a sweaters quantity of a lovely heathered silk and a shoulder shawl's quantity of wool and nettle sock yarn. They have a lovely selection of stuff-I-can't-get-in-my-LYS and some actual wool from local sheep!!! Beautiful store, friendly people inside, and a hip neighborhood.  I could go on about the cycle node system in these two countries... Absolutely brilliant... but... Fiber...

I finished two of the eight napkins on the loom; the tie ups change between some of the napkins. In the case of napkin #3, it's just the treadling. So I'm ready to start but haven't yet; the room is a bit messy and it's putting me off. So I'll save that for next time.

I've been spinning the wool I dyed and carded... It's coming out a bit rustic, which is okay; my plan is to weave with it and then felt it a bit. I've spun up the fun colored bits on the new Louet and now have a pile of light brown wool to go. Tuesday I drifted to the coast with my wheel, and found a bench at Pescadero Beach, where I sat and spun for a few hours; the weather was perfect, a little overcast but warm and the local or visiting whale population entertained me by blowing and breaching right off shore. It was MAGICAL.  A mom came by with two small children; I showed them how it worked. The little boy wanted to know how the wool got purple, since sheep aren't that color!

Last night I got over my bad self and threaded up some cards; this morning, wove a band. There isn't enough contrast for it to be interesting, but it's better than other things I've woven. I started leaving a loop every pick, then pulling the loop in tight to the selvedge after rotating the cards... G had mentioned some people do it that way. My selvedges look much nicer. It turns out my issue with cardweaving is that I hate doing samples, and until I get some level of expertise, it's all samples. I think this yard long band will mark the transition to doing things "for-reals". I'm going to use it to decorate one of my little holding bags... See how nice it looks with a wood background?

8 cards of 5/2 cotton thrums from my Spring Weaving class project

Finally, I spent 3 days in Fort Bragg with some friends learning how to dye using fiber reactive dyes from a woman who can come close to duplicating color. Wow. As an output, I have formulas,  color wheels and other samples, which I've glued and arranged nicely in a binder. I need to go through the rest of the dyes I have in the closet to produce sample gradiations; would also like to do some other color wheels.

I did find some fun fiber stuff in Europe, and I'll post it here as I have time. Next week school starts and I'm trying to get some things done around the house in preparation for that... can't wait!!!

Three cookbook challenge meals, updates on fiber projects.

Well, looks like two weeks is my summer interval on this blog...

Food:

• I did two of the cookbook challenges. The first was from Mark Miller's Red Sage Cookbook; I made a marinated flank steak and some black bean tamales with a chipotle crema. The black bean recipe was fabulous; so flavorful! I'll make that again. Then you basically refry then beans and use them inside the tamale.  We had the penultimate bottle of '03 Columbia Crest Reserve Cab with it; very nice.   
• July's cookbook was Secret Ingredients (I can't find an online reference but will at some point put the authors name here). I grilled some turkey with a peanut marinade (this was fabulous) on Saturday, and some ribs with a anise marinade on Monday.  Both excellent recipes. I also grilled some napa cabbage with garlic/lemon/olive oil dressing, which was excellent. DH has selected an Italian cookbook for next month.

Fiber wise:

• There are a couple of projects that are not going well,  I'm not going to talk about these now, but will later.
• I carded a bunch of stuff. The wool I dyed (still in the garage) and some wool/tencel (for color blending). Then Ziggy slept on it. I think it's still spinnable, will start on that in a couple of weeks.
• The gamp is on the loom; the first napkin is finished and I'm part way through the second one.
• And I bought a Louet Victoria; it's a dinky travel wheel and it spins very nicely. Looking forward to putting it through it's paces.

Here's Owl on the color gamp:

Lots of new projects going on!!!

A picture of DH's cotton scarf, as promised. 

• I'm working on getting the color gamp on the loom; it's threaded and I'm about 1/2 through sleying the reed.
• I wet spun the linen/merino roving, and moved it to storage bobbins (using water, not spit). I'll let it sit a week or so to let the twist get less lively before putting it on the rigid heddle loom.
• I gathered together all of the quilt magazines for the block and setting that I want to do with the pub quilt blocks and checked to see if I already have templates for the pieces (I don't).  It's written for machine piecing, so I either have to adapt to hand piecing or buck up and machine piece it. 
• I borrowed a drum carder from the Spinning Guild... The DH immediately took it apart and fixed a part that was mis-installed, and made a new handle for it (handle had broken and was replaced by a crochet). I'm still figuring out how to use it; I'm getting a lot of buildup on the front wheel.  Then I'll need to figure out how to spin a batt.
• I took some of the white and brown merino fleece I had from G's destash and dyed it; it'll go on the drum carder later this week. I used too much dye, and didn't rinse it well, so I'll need to hit it with some heat and vinegar after I spin it. I used Saffron, Cayenne Red, and Plum Dandy.It suits the hot weather.
  
  
  
  

Hey! Goals work!

The goal thing is working. I'm setting 6-10 goals and finishing at least 3 of them. This way I have direction but don't feel like any project is work. Updates:

• DH's scarf is finished, and lovely; maybe a little short. I think he'd prefer silk or tencel to cotton, so next time, I'll do that. I screwed up the pattern; left off one of the shafts from a treadle and ended up with some horizontal floats that while wrong, are still quite lovely. I will post pics later of what it should have looked like (I wove off a few inches at the end as a sample) and what it does look like.
• I finished the pin drafted roving I was working on; 22 oz of it. It's roughly DK weight and not next to skin type of wool. I'm thinking of weaving it into some outerwear. 
• All the looms are naked, it's time to start on the color gamp.  I'm still working through the details of the design but it'll be 1 plain weave gamp napkin and 5 twill gamp napkins. That'll give me enough left over to do a table runner with the grey scale.
• Also I think it's warm enough to start on the linen for the Lobster Port scarf from Spin-off a few months ago. It uses Spunky Eclectic's merino/linen blend roving (I bought forest) and Habu's silk/stainless (I think mine is tea green). I need to make a final decision on wet spinning or spit spinning the linen/wool. The enzymes in spit apparently make the linen smoother; however, because of the high merino content, I'm likely to go with just wet spinning it. 
• On the knitting front, I turned in 11 chemo hats at Googleserve; I finished one more and have #13 in progress. I'm trying to knit A-Z hats (one hat with a pattern starting with every letter of the alphabet) in honor of my mother in law and so far have done A-J, L, and O; working on K right now. I'll probably try to do one a month to finish up the alphabet. I also resumed work on the piece I started that's woven and knitted (the cow coat); I ripped out the large unattractive white band and am doing a half linen with the remainder of the hand dyed. At some point I need to figure out the collar.

Today I'm avoiding going into the studio and cleaning it up enough to start working on something. I need to head south in time to get some 10/2 cotton at Purlescence and then run to a 3PM appt. I fear this will put me in the worst of the traffic coming home...

School's out for Summer!!! And I ironed my final.

I turned in my final a week or so again for the textile design class, and yes I ironed my final! How many people can say that? Anyways, I've had issues with the format of the class, but in retrospect I learned a lot and am really excited about that. The final exam was to make four fabrics in a collection following a mood board. I put together a New Zealand Rainforest mood board and here are my fabrics. The color is a bit off; the lower right is much greener. The two on the right are monoprints; the upper right is stamped with a linoleum block that I carved. The lower right is Elmer's blue gel glue resist with some black dye crayon added after to give it some depth. The upper right is painted stripes which didn't turn out that well; I added some black lines (string glued to a dowel, then rolled) which seems to smooth things out. The stripe looks a lot better in smaller bits. Each pieces is approximately 1'x2'; I'm going to try to make a table runner from them after taking a better photo for my class book.

On the weaving front, I finished the Dutch Flag napkins, and gifted them to their final home last night. They loved them. Here they are right off the loom.  Did I mention I'm a novice weaver? The selvedges were AWFUL so I turned them under 1/4 inch and hemmed; that problem was solved. The last two definitely showed some bowing toward the edges which was clearly a tension issue... And they're all slightly different sized. Still, what they lack in technical expertise, they make up for in exuberance.

And here they are all stacked up and ready to be wrapped up. Let me just give a call out to the textile designer who created the pattern, Erica De Ruiter; excellent stripe design, fun napkins!!!

What's next? I need a little more structure, so last week I put together a sheet of weekly goals. I'm not going to accomplish all of them since I do get distracted by shiny objects; also, as I'll be doing a bike tour in the near future, I figure I really ought to spend some time on the bike, eh?   I did hit 3 of the 8 goals (it was never going to be 8/8): I finished the napkins, unpacked the school gear and stashed in the studio, and decided on a design and wound the warp for DH's summer scarf. 

Wrapped warps..

I just love these colors... Half of my class loves that bronze, and several of us have used it in our dyed pieces.  Next Monday I'll try to straighten out the wraps, then I'll used the rest of the weft for some kind of art project.  I'll need to work on design over the weekend.

For my final in the other class, I need to design four fabrics; I'll probably start designing those tomorrow. Also no idea of what I'm going to do. 

Today I stamped flowers onto paper napkins (whee!) and worked on the Dutch Flag napkins; I'm about 1/2 way through the 8th one. Hmmm. I think I have to "design" what my next project is going to be.  I'm sensing a theme here...

A cat picture

I did promise a low number of cat pictures, but this one is too cute to pass up.

Back at school and ignoring the blog...

I think I'm getting a little overloaded on craft; especially after the intense dye, cleanup, dye, cleanup, repeat cycles I did for the surface design midterm. So I've been laying low for a few weeks, not really working on any wet projects and trying to figure out how to set goals and achieve them.   Meanwhile, here's a catch up on what I have been doing.

I have the school loom warped for doubleweave and have been happily weaving away.  I like double weave. The teacher drafted out a double weave twill for me after I asked questions about it and I have yet to try it cause the home loom is occupied. I dyed one warp with procion bronze; the other warp is forest green, all of it 5/2 cotton.  This is solid background with lace foreground; towards the bottom is leno, the top is brooks bouquet.

I have 5 yards? 6 yards? of 10/2 cotton napkins on the home loom; I'm on napkin 6 of 8. When I'm done I'll post pictures and also a list of all the things I did wrong... Good to document them so I don't make the same mistakes? Anyways, they're Dutch Flag napkins and the color is glorious... I hope they come out nice enough to gift to a friend.

I took Syne Mitchell's class at CNCH a couple of weeks ago in using handspun on a rigid heddle loom; great class!!! Most of what she talked about was in her book, but it always sinks in more when someone's looking over your shoulder, right?

It's about 10" wide and a couple of yards long. All of the warp is my handspun wool (except for a bit I picked up from a destash); the weft is my handspun (turqouise) pick and pick with a commercial dark blue sock yarn. It felt good to use a lot of those odds and ends from classes that have been in the handspun bin for years!!!  I think it's destined to be vest fronts.

I took another class where we tried to identify weave structure in already made fabric and chat about how the colors and weave structure worked together. I had a great time in this class too!!! Fabulous textiles on every table.

I also bought a color gamp kit, expect to see that on the loom this summer.

I did screen printing for the first time in the surface design class; I love these wolves (shamelessly snabbed image from the internet).

I put some wool that was gifted to me on the wheel; I have a pound and a half and sadly it's not suitable for next to the skin. I want to see what happens if I weave it and try to felt it. I took a break and tried to spin up some overspun singles for a collapse weave next semester; our teacher has suggested that it might be a cool idea and of course I agree. Yay! I tried with some merino and I can actually spin that fine. That'll be my summer project.

One last topic... I made some macarons; chocolate with peanut butter butter cream. They were a little subtle; I will make them again but try to make them less subtle. Someone suggested that I use peanut butter powder to cut some of the fat in them... I laughed out loud and made a snarky comment about it feeling ridiculous to try to cut the fat content of buttercream... Still laughing about that one.

My midterm needs to be ironed...

How many people can say "my midterm is drying"? Well, then it had to be ironed. Here's a photo of a part of it. It uses Shibori,  block printing, batik, and some dye crayon drawing. I LEARNED A LOT, including that a scale drawing with color would have pointed out that the brown rock wall makes the piece unbalanced... I'm still pleased with it, and turning it in on Friday.

We also did monoprinting; I failed to pre-mordant my fabric. Here's a photo of one before I accidentally washed the dye out.

I finished the scarf in the weaving class (I love it) and the silk one on the home loom (love it too).

What's next? Spring break, some napkins on the home loom, a double weave sampler on the school loom, and maybe some dishtowels for she who likes wolves.

March food challenge was Madhur Jaffrey's Indian Cooking.  I made the Lamb Biriyani (it's called something different in my edition) and yogurt with eggplant. The taste of the lamb was good but the texture was off; I think it would have been better with basmati and I used jasmine rice. The yogurt was excellent. We had a Doennhof Tonschiefer Riesling with it, which was a good pairing for the spices. The next day I made the cauliflower with tomato and onion to go with it; it was very good.

What color is Pompeii anyways?

I am finally weaving on the supplemental warp "eyelash" scarf on the school loom; I got a lot done this week and I am in fact nearly 1/3 of the way complete. After previewing 3 yarns, I picked a 8/2 tencel for the weft in a color called "Pompeii". It's a dark rust color, maybe a little more towards brick than towards dried blood, but frankly my mind went on overload trying to figure out how they named the color. Anyways, here it is, at the beginning of the piece. I slid my scissors under the part that will get cut as eyelash. I'm changing the treadling every inch; I'm going to change to every 3 inches for about 2 feet, then go back to every inch to match the first end. Note that the hand painted warp will be showcased when the floats are cut; those sections will also be a little more transparent, since they won't have the wool woven in. I'm very excited about this.

I'm finished warping and started weaving on the home loom until I was interrupted.

Last Friday we "stamped" in my Textile Design class. I was taken by surprise when the teacher asked us to carve a block. How surprised can one be, with carving tools and a rubber block in one's school bag? Anyways, I'm lousy at designing on the fly but came up with a repeating design that I found pleasing. This class is nearly all technique, which is fine; we're learning about a technique a week and that's about all we have time for. I need some design lessons. How do you know when you're done? How do you know when to stop adding detail? When does more become less? Art is hard.  I have some fairly pleasing fabric, I'll post pics once I set the inks (we were using textile ink). Midterm is due on March 18; I need to design a yard of fabric.

Shibori again, more lavender than chocolate...

Well I finally got around to my second dye day, which was supposed to be chocolate brown procion dyes. I prepped everything, through it all together, added the soda ash solution and let it sit for an hour while I tried my hand at stenciling.

Stencils are harder to cut out that you would think, especially if you're using an exacto knife that's not exactly sharp. I finally ended up using the double bladed quilt stencil knife I have which was not ideal but at least it cut. I used tape and some quail images I cut out of freezer paper and masked them off, then daubed procion dyes thickened with sodium alginate where I wanted it (mostly). DISCLAIMER: I didn't draw these.  Don't ask. But this is so darn cute I could giggle. The dye didn't migrate much; when I do it again, I'll keep the stencil cleaner and use a small stick to hold it down better. And remember to use masking tape everywhere I want to, not just on N-1 straight lines... And see? Chocolate Brown, right?

Then why is my shibori lavender? It's like ALL the dye washed out.

Retracing my steps, I realized I never added the soda ash to the soda ash solution. I'm frankly surprised it took any color at all. Not sure what I'm going to do with it, or if the color is permanent or not.

A good lesson...

V-Day Feast! Stitches! and what's on my looms!

Food!!!

February's cookbook, as I mentioned, was Commander's Kitchen, and our Valentine's Day treat. Dinner was:

• Pork loin over roasted winter root vegetables: damn tasty. I made 1/2 the recipe and it could have fed us for a week; I think their serving size is too big.
• Corn cakes: I'll make this one again!
• Onion marmelade: really, really good, especially with the corn cakes and the au-jus from the pork.
• Pots de Creme (Martha Stewart's recipe)
• And a nice bottle of red wine... Sorry, I didn't grab info from the label other recognizing "Oh! that's French!" and I took no pictures of the food.

Stitches, a knitting show and yarn extravaganza

Stitches was last weekend and I took a techniques class from Anna Zilboorg and from Candace Eisner Stick. I can listen to either of them for hours... Both educated, intelligent, articulate and fascinating women. Candace has a book out about skirts; I purchased the book and some appropriate yarn and you'll be seeing a knitted skirt on me in the near future.

I'm struggling with how to "set" the techniques I learned in class into my mind. I think the key will be to practice them all in the near future. We'll see.

Other trends I noticed: the severe over abundance of alpaca has declined, and the current hotness is sock yarn and gradient yarns. I also noticed there was a lack of larger quantities of skeins; so if you wanted a sweater quantity (or skirt quantity), it was not straightforward to find.

I got some yarn and some spinnables. It's logged into Ravelry, but I won't detail it here except to say that when I use it, I'll post it. Oh yeah, and Some Vendor Who Shall Remain Nameless put the hand dyed cashmere roving next to the cash register, which feels a lot like putting the Godiva chocolate next to the check out counter at Macy's. Two ounces of soft and lovely goat fiber came home with me.

Weaving

I learned something very important about warping, specifically, lock the cats out while winding on. Anyways, the Macomber is partly warped, I'm threading the heddles. It'll be a M&W pattern on the plainer sides, and a Z pattern on the hard painted part. Plus there's a surprise color in the border.... Pics to come once I'm weaving on it. I'm using the other 12/2 silk warp we dyed in Kris Abshire's CNCH class. I'm using the hand painted yarn originally designated as weft as more warp, and will use some skinny tencel  in grey blue for weft (it's sitting too far away for me to grab and describe more accurately).  Hoping it looks good; I'm having issues figuring out what colors to use. I

The school loom is mostly warped, I'm sleying the reed. School loom has hand-panted 20/2 cotton warp on it, dyed with procion fiber reactive dyes in burgundy, bronze, and chocolate brown; there's a supplemental 2/18 merino and merino silk in 3 different browns mixed it that will create alternate block floats that I'll clip and felt a bit.  I've also included a pic of the sweatshop we call our classroom. 

Textile Design

I create mood boards based on 4 countries (or regions), along with color palettes and some images that could lead to stencils; one of the ones I picked was the Czech Republic. I figured on using colors from Cesky Krumlov (imperial gold, that pinky color, plus a few others) but instead got sidetracked on the Soviet era concrete prefab housing units. Our historian guide had told us they were painted in bright colors after the fall of the Soviet Union, and I was fascinated to find that imperial gold and pink color, yep, still being used.

I was unable to attend the last class which was on stenciling and masking; I'm going to try it at home tomorrow, with some more shibori I have waiting to do into a dye pot.

Because of several Friday Holidays, we won't be doing Arashi Shibori in class which makes me want to cry. I think I'll be heading out to look for 8" PVC and give it a go at home.

Some of the Shibori techniques in the home environment are daunting. Like those little tiny circles. I happen to have 2 Shibori books and took a short class in Kyoto, so I can say without a shadow of a doubt that having the right equipment helps. Arashi Shibori is one of these techniques. I'll have to give some thought to how I can rig up something to make this easy at home.

Shibori dye day

I folded, stitched, clamped and knotted fabric in the centuries old Japanese tie dye technique called Shibori, working from two books I bought in Tokyo. Here's a sampling of round one, cotton dyed earlier this week with Procion MX fiber reactive dye in "Indigo" (not true indigo, but a synthetic dye in an indigo color).

Here's a few pictures of the mess before it went in the dye bath. These were really time consuming; not sure if I want to do them again.

But there were a couple techniques (not pictured) that yielded fabulous results with very little work; I'd do those again. And the multiple circles? Definitely worth the labor. I have a small collection of folded and clamped ones ready to go into dye later this weekend, in another colorway.

 

Yesterday I picked up my Leclerc Cendrel, which is a combination inkle loom and warping board. I got it for free some someone in the guild, but someone had thrown away all the pegs. I couldn't get my regular loom wrench to whip up some new pegs for me (hey, he refurbed a loom, so I'm not complaining), but Hannalore at Custom Handweavers has a guy who does stuff like this. He did a great job, and he cleans reeds, so I may take him the rust encrusted reed that came with my loom.  So now I have no excuses that include "but I don't have a warping board".

On the food front, we're continuing the cookbook challenge we started a couple of years ago. DH picks a cookbook each month, and I cook something from it. January was the Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook; I made the pinto beans, which were the best pinto beans I have every cooked, then a spice rubbed chicken with a raspberry chili sauce. Tasty food. Tomorrow is a Valentine's Day meal from Commander's Kitchen; I'll post details after. I'll leave off here with a V-Day picture from the macaron class I took today with J at Sur Le Table; this is before they went in the oven, later to be filled with either chocolate ganache and brandied cherries, or maple-bacon-salted-caramel.

The first six weeks of 2016 were very productive...

Spring 2016 semester, I'm taking Weaving 2 and Textile Design at CCSF.

In the textile design class, we've done immerison (low volume and high volume) and painting with thickened dye. We also have done shibori; my homework is in the dyepot right now and will come out later today; expect pics later this week! Meanwhile, I made a Lunar New Years present for my sister to show that I can paint thickened dye with a small brush. I seem to be obsessed with coffee cup cozies.

Our first project in Weaving 2 will be an eyelash weave; I handdyed a 20/2 cotton warp and am in the process of threading all the heddles with that and a supplementary 2/18 merino warp. The cotton is in Procion chocolate brown, bronze, and indigo; the merino is 3 shades of brown.  No pictures yet.

On the wheel, I finished 4 oz of Monster Kettle from Kitty Rabbit Creations; I just spun for the fun of it, and 3-plied without thinking about color combining.  It's roughly fingering weight; it had a lot of white fiber in it, so it's lovely pale hues... I'll post pics of it when it becomes a thing. Not that yarn's not a thing, just trying to not overwhelm with photos.

And the loom is functional!  I did a test piece that'll become a wine bag...  Here's the loom in it's state of disassembly.

What's on the agenda for the 2nd half of February?

• Starting weaving on my school project
• Warp up the other hand dyed silk warp from CNCH last year and get that weaving
• Warp up and weave some washcloths for DH on the rigid heddle loom.
• Maybe start on finishing the quilt that's been languishing in my closet for year
• A lot of Shibori at home
• Classes at Stitches
• Something card woven for the March Card Weaving Study Group Meeting

Well, you get the idea, I'm overcommitted.

What's up? And Fall, 2015

I left tech in September 2015 to pursue things I am more passionate about. This blog, although started 4 months after, is to chronicle the things I've been doing since.

My passions are primarily fiber and food, but you'll likely see some other topics percolating to the topics...

I'm going to publish a few posts in a row to get everything captured but will try to do weekly updates after that.

I'll do a brief summary of what I did in Fall 2015:

I signed up for Weaving 1 at CCSF for Fall 2015. They have a fabulously weaving teacher and I've been working on a Gilmore 4 shaft loom. We made a twill sampler for the first project, and for the second project I choose to weave some hand dyed silk I made at CNCH in a Spring 2014 workshop with Kris Abshire. Here it is still on the loom.  (12/2 silk warp/weft, 20 EPI, 1/3 twill)

The teacher challenged me to try overshot on my rigid heddle loom, using the Handwoven Nov/Dec 2015 Mermaid Scarf pattern. I look so happy to have it off the loom and around my neck! (3/2 cotton warp, 10/2 cotton base weft and Noro Taiyo as the supplemental weft)

I knitted 8 chemo caps in memory of my mother in law who lost her battle with cancer last fall, and finished knitting the Hitofude cardigan.

I also adopted a 41 year old Macomber Baby Mac with a rust problem. My DH has been helping me rehab it. More on that later!