Saturday, May 26, 2007

Brilliant suggestion

from Pamala Rose about the scarf I'm working on - variegating the white and pink yarn would have been beautiful! I've ended up making some stripes, but gradually blending out the pink would have been much better. Phoey. Really not in the mood to back up *again* lol. I've done blending like that before and it's worked out great. Why didn't I think of it here??

Now I'm kind of bummed about the scarf as it is and I need to get it off the loom ASAP to work on some swatches for a custom project... Time to get weaving!

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

A fuzzy scarf and a dead computer...

My poor laptop was on the fritz for quite a while there - we finally figured out it was the keyboard. All sticky and ooky from toddler fingers and Little Girl's (black cat) habit of sitting on it in the winter because it's warm.

Wonderful hubby Carlos ordered a new keyboard for me and replaced it. Hooray for nerdly husbands. Should we take another gander at his nerd score??

I am nerdier than 95% of all people. Are you nerdier? Click here to find out!

LOL! (Not that I should laugh too loud... see my score if you want.)

In the meantime, I finished the first scarf that I'm making with some yummy pink yarn from YarnChef at etsy. That same shadow-weave pattern with the pseudo-circles, I keep using it!

Anyway, I combined the pink merino with chocolate colored bamboo and fulled it a bit unintentionally when I finished it - but I like how it came out.



My only complaint is that it's hard to see the lovely variegation in the pink yarn - I'm currently weaving another scarf in Ms&Os that will show it a bit more, I think...

Although I'm also thinking I'm going to back up quite a bit and start the second scarf over - I don't have enough of the pink yarn left to use as all of the warp and all of the weft, but I do have enough for the warp plus some weft. So, I wove about five inches using the pink as the weft and then switched to a white Zephyr:


The idea is to then duplicate that pink portion at the other end of the scarf. It's ok, but I'm actually thinking of backing up and making pink and white stripes at the ends with white in the middle - less jarring, but I'd still get to use the pink yarn in the weft too. Off to unweave...

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Argh!

Let's play spot the threading error...


Can you see it? It is about halfway across in the photo. Ugh. See, this is what I get for my hubris/tempting the PTBs by saying that I rarely make threading errors. LOL. Serves me right!

Glad this fabric is just for me and Conall - if it were for a customer I'd have had to fix it. This way I get to be lazy. Now that it's off the loom, though, there's another problem - I think it's too short! Argh! Could I have made any more mistakes with this project? Well, yes, I suppose so.

Maybe I'll think of something else to use the fabric for... Little bags of some sort? Promo samples? I've covered journals with woven fabric before and they came out quite nice...

Oh - Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there! And what a gorgeous day for Mother's Day here. Sunny, low 60s, perfect weather, the lilacs are blooming (YUM). Not too hot, not too chilly, warm in the sun, but not too warm - I actually got some gardening in today as well as weaving. And I had the audacity to stop watching the Red Sox game before the 9th inning - oops. Missed the hugely dramatic come from behind win. Rats. A very nice, low-key Sunday!

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

Hemming and Hawing

Kivy's shawl is off the loom!

I took this photo outside, so the colors are closer to how they look to my eyes, though now, if anything, they look a little over-saturated. Hmph. Who knew photographing textiles could be so difficult??

I remembered which is my "bad" selvedge, by the way (the left). And now I'm hemming the shawl:


Not too shabby! The stitches don't seem to show on the front at all to my eye (I'm proud of myself; a seamstress, I'm not, lol).

Anywho, I was thinking of adding some tassels on the corners of the shawl, but now that I see it, up close and personal, I don't think I will. I like the clean lines of it as is and think that maybe tassels would be a little overly fussy. I'm dithering, though. I should ask Kivy what she thinks, it's for her, after all!

I hem and twist fringe during Red Sox games. The kids are in bed and I can spread out with no fear of curious - and grubby - fingers. I got half of it done last night while the Sox tromped on Toronto - here's hoping for another win tonight!

On other fronts, I went to the final Weavers Guild of Boston meeting today - what a lovely group of women. We had the yearly business meeting, lunch, a little fashion show and then a lecture about collecting coverlets given by a former curator of the American Textile History Museum. It didn't quite get my creative juices flowing as much as last month's meeting, but I did get to meet a lot more people this time, which was very nice - adult conversation! Wow! A novelty for a stay-at-home-mom... I actually missed my munchkins while I was gone. Silly, I was gone for all of 4 1/2 hours or so, that's all. Mommy love is pretty powerful stuff.

I also got some delicious yarn in the mail today from Yarnchef at etsy - check out her shop! Lovely stuff. I got some gorgeous variegated pink merino yarn from her, I'm thinking of combining it with some dark brown bamboo. How Mod. Yum.

Monday, May 7, 2007

Baby Slings and Travel Musings

So, I'm attempting to make a baby sling. So far, all I've accomplished is this:


I keep coming back to this shadow weave pattern - I guess I really like it! Maybe because it ends up with a nifty little pattern of almost-circles, or at least as close to circles as I've managed on the loom without any warp manipulation. I'm using the leftover lilac bamboo from the wedding shawl that I made for a customer and white zephyr - very pretty combination, I think. I'm hoping to get it woven, finished, sewn, etc., and have it come out ok enough to wear (with Conall) to my niece Marissa's wedding. Wonder what the little guy will think of it? Supposedly babies love slings. He certainly likes the Baby Bjorn.

Phew, I'm tired today. Hooray for naptime for Conall. Bella is making a puzzle (of the solar system, no less) on the kitchen floor next to me and things are quiet for a little while. It's amazing how babies can just make you feel beaten down some days. And Conall is a relatively easy baby, I don't know how parents with collicky babies, e.g., survive. It's a gorgeous spring day and I'm too wiped out to even think about going for a walk and enjoying it. Well, maybe later on if he takes a good nap now. Of course then Bella will probably take a nap right when he's waking up, lol!

Tired days like this are when I start dreaming about travel - escapism, I'm sure. We took a trip to Provence and Paris for two weeks this past September when I was still pregnant. What a wonderful time! My Mum came with us for the whole trip and my niece Marissa (the one that's getting married) and her boyfriend, Michael, joined us for the second week. We stayed in a lovely gite just outside of Avignon:

Bella at the Moulin de la Roque. Absolutely fantastic. I recommend it without hesitation. Baron Guy (the owner) was wonderful, the location was perfect, the grounds were great for a kid, too - lots of room to run around - we even loved the freezing cold pool in the afternoons!

Carlos was a champ. He had major back surgery (one of his discs basically imploded, it was horrible) three weeks before we were due to leave - crazy!! Poor guy couldn't even pick up our cats, never mind luggage or Bella. I hauled the luggage and Bella all over the place - I could just see people thinking "What is that big guy doing making his pregnant wife stuff the suitcases in the overhead compartments??? That's horrible!!" LOL. He was a really good sport (and, thankfully, his back felt soooo much better immediately after the surgery that it was just fine to go according to his doctor and physical therapist).

It was our first big trip with Bella (apart from a road trip to the Outer Banks the previous Sept.) and she did really well - plane, train, everything, no fussies, she was a champ... Helped to have Ginga (that's what she calls my Mum - a term coined by niece Marissa - the first grandchild - when she was a little girl) and then Marissa and Michael along.

And it slowed us down - we've always been the crazy whirlwind type travellers, backpacking around Italy, zooming around Spain on our honeymoon. It was nice to have a home base (necessary for naps) and to just slow down, find the local boulangerie and produce market:

That's Carlos and Bella, on one of the few rainy days, coming back from the morning trip to the boulangerie with yummy bread. "Merci beaucoup!" It gave us more of a chance to get a feel for the area.

Provence was fantastic. So gorgeous. We were all agreeing via email the other day that we'd go back to this place in a heartbeat. Still so much to see and do.

How about another picture?

That's the Pont du Gard, a Roman Aqueduct. Second in height only to the Coliseum in Rome (for surviving Roman structures, that is) - largest arches they ever built.

We'll definitely go back...

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

ACEO

Hey, I finally got around to taking some pictures of my first ACEO! For those of you who don't know what an ACEO is (I didn't either until a couple weeks ago), Wiki has a nice explanation.

So, anywho, here it is:


Cute little thing, huh? It's woven in doubleweave pickup, which can be insanely slow, but allows you to make fun patterns even just on a little four-shaft loom. EtsyFAST is doing a little group project of sorts to make fiber ACEOs, which I think is a great idea...

On other fronts, the shawl is progressing! I've woven about 27" so far - and have discovered that since it is so wide I can't weave for more than a half hour or so at a time without getting a big ol' backache. Sigh. Getting old. The shawl, though, is lovely, love that Zephyr yarn! Almost feels like cheating when you start out with such a lovely fiber...