Busy Week - And a Return to the Dark Side?

Phew, crazy week, or so it feels, though I'm not quite sure why. I had a birthday (we won't talk about how old I am), managed to take some pictures of some scarves this morning (and have several more waiting to be photographed):


(Mixed twill scarf, using Dragon Tales scrumptious variegated yarn, sett at 24 epi, IIRC). I just got it listed in my Etsy shop.

And I delivered two custom scarves, including this one:


for my friend Bob, a fellow artist on the fourth floor at WAS. It's 50% cashmere, 50% bamboo with a hem-stitched fringe and it's a scarflette, not full size. I loved weaving this piece! (Still loving working with that cashmere!) More to come from this warp...

Bob is a silver smith - and his jewelry is *gorgeous* - and he repairs handmade flutes, too! A weird little bit of coincidence, there, because I was a very serious flutist when I was younger, and my teacher repaired flutes, too. I even got to play one of James Galway's flutes when my teacher was repairing it. Amazing instrument. I won't comment on Galway's tonal quality. (It sucks.) (Apparently, I couldn't help myself, lol.)

And I also spent Saturday and Sunday in Boston! On the 33rd floor at One Beacon Street, right next to the Common and State House. The views are *amazing* I cannot believe I forgot my camera both days, oy. I love the city, and it was really fun to be in there again. To work.

Uh-oh. That's the Return to the Dark Side part. A former colleague of mine (yes, lawyer) is working on a case involving a *huge* amount of document production - which means the documents need to be reviewed (for relevancy and privilege), which means he needed lots of help... I actually never mind this kind of work - document review, drafting motions, etc. - it was the arguing with opposing council that I loathed (and which you do a lot more of as you get more senior). So, I'm hoping to get in 30 -40 hours on this case, we'll see how it goes, discovery can be a bit of a moving target as the parties involved negotiate what to produce. But, if I do get in about that much - hey, that's studio rent for the rest of the year + some yarn, too! (Or a ski trip!) I'm heading in again this evening for four hours or so...

Winter Weekend in Chelmsford

It snowed again this weekend, and I took a walk to do a little grocery shopping (we were out of coffee, a huge tragedy in our house)...

Side street near our house.

Fishbones! Love this restaurant in the middle of Chelmsford.

One of the older buildings in town (1726-ish, IIRC) - it's offices for lawyers now.


Episcopal church a couple doors down from our house - I could hear the organ playing during the morning service as I walked by, very nice.

Our cozy little house. (Love my buddlea on the right of the frame. Very worried about the crab-apple tree in our front yard, it was very unhappy this year!)

Bella and I making the most of our little yard by cross-country skiing all around it (and into the front yard, too, our neighbors are probably thinking - there they go again, crazy people!). With all the new snow, we didn't make it up to Pat's to ski this weekend, so it was good to get Bella out on her little cross-country skis - and she had a blast!

Me, being goofy. I love winter!

That's all, nothing newsworthy, just a nice winter weekend in New England...

Front Page! Whoop!

Wow, it's been a while since I've been on Etsy's front page, so I'm pretty tickled...

There's my green Ms and Os scarf in the third row - that thing has been featured *everywhere*!

Thank you to awesome Etsy seller ChelseaEBird for creating this treasury. Isn't her work gorgeous? I am in awe of silver smiths. And I really like this piece:


(Click on the photo to go right to the listing in her Etsy shop.)

My featured scarf didn't sell, but I did sell a different scarf:

It will be making it's way to its new home in Canada tomorrow! (Post office is closed today - and Priority Mail will get a rate hike as of tomorrow - and I haven't changed my shipping rates yet, whoopsie, think I'll go do that right now...)

I Love My Studio...

So, I posted this scarf on Etsy on Tuesday:

And somebody bought it last night! That was fast. So, it's heading off to it's new home. While at the studio, I re-did some of the photos I took earlier this week...

And for some reason, I just really love this picture. Not even sure if it's a really good photo of the scarf for selling, per se, I just really like the little bit of the view of the frozen canal outside my studio window...

(This scarf is from the same warp as the one that sold, but the weft is grey instead of icy blue. Both are a turned Ms and Os structure, using Silk City's Bambu7 sett at 16 epi, using various shades of blue and gray and a bit of black to outline the cells.)

I love my studio on weekday mornings. When I scoot over there before 9am, I'm often the only person on my floor, and it's very peaceful, and it's nice to see the artists that work there on a daily basis making their way in, too. I really am looking forward to when Conall is old enough to go to preschool a couple mornings a week, so I can spend more daylight hours in my space - does that make me a terrible, terrible mother? :)

Happy Birthday!

Little Man Conall turned two last week.

Or, not so little Little Man, that is (with Papi, here) - 92%ile height and 80%ile weight at his checkup this week - he's a big one, just like his sister. (Please, please, please, don't play football when you're bigger! Play soccer, or swim, like your Papi, please!!)

She really wanted to help him blow out those candles... He got a couple more Thomas the Tank Engine books and engines and some Play-Doh stuff; a nice, calm birthday after a pretty crazy Christmas this year.

And he wouldn't eat the cupcakes, funny man. He loves chocolate, so I thought he'd eat them, but he'd just take a tiny little nibble from the bottom of a cupcake and then put it back on the plate. Ah well, more for Ms. B that way!

Blues

I'm finally getting around to taking some picture of what I've woven lately, so I can get things posted in my Etsy shop... Lots of blues lately, and purples, too. And, if you peek, you can tell that I'm working on some teals on my big loom at my studio. Goodness, I'm going to need to work with some different colors after my custom orders are all done!!

Mr. Skiingweaver, wearing the scarf he got for Christmas (he's going to *hate* that picture, poor guy, lol). And, yes, our Christmas lights are still up. Finally took the tree down over the weekend - though I think I'll be sweeping up needles for weeks!

And a custom cashmere and bamboo scarflette that is on it's way to Los Angeles as we speak!

The whole scarflette idea has been kind of interesting. When I brought some to the Weavers' Guild of Boston sale this fall, the person who juried my work jokingly told me I should plan my warps better (i.e. she thought I was making a mistake by making them short).

And yet, they sell really well (including at the WGB sale)! I think it's because not everyone is tall, not everyone wants a huge amount of scarf, and, of course, I price them at about half of what I price my full-size scarves. I have found it difficult to find a balance between higher and lower price points (mostly because I absolutely hate to sew, so I have no patience for making little zipper bags/checkbook covers, that sort of thing), so the scarflettes seem to be a nice compromise.

Purple - Color of the Year?

I really enjoy checking out Pantone's color forecasts each year... I tend to really only pay attention to the fall/winter ones. And this year, the feature color in the fashion forecast was purple!


Since I like purple anyway, I tend to weave with it regardless - but boy were they dead on with this one! Everything purple that I made over the past few months (and I wove quite a few) sold really quickly... And I'm working on three custom orders right now - and, yup, each of them has purple in them.

It's also been kind of interesting to watch the color showing up elsewhere - Coach had some fantastic purple bags this year (drool) (and I'm not even a bag type of person!), even the ads in Dwell magazine (another fantastic design inspiration resource, I love this magazine) had lots of purple! Anybody else notice a lot of purple going on in the world, or am I just overly conscious of it (like when you get a new car and suddenly start noticing the same make/model everywhere you go...)?

This and That, Marketing and Lots of Little Flowers

Happy New Year to everybody!

Hope things are going well for everyone. That huge pile of snow we got before Christmas? It melted. It was 60 degrees out if you can believe it! Crazy! It's snowing again today, though - Bella is outside building a little snowman.

And we've gone skiing twice! Bella is tearing up the bunny slope at Pat's Peak, I'm so proud, it won't be long before she's back on the chair lifts again. And Conall is so much easier this year! He spent half the afternoon walking up the far side of bunny slope to watch Bella ski down (Bella was earning her turns, too - walking up, I mean - faster than taking the magic carpet lift) and had a great time. No photos, I keep meaning to bring the little camcorder up to videotape her.

I've been slacking a little bit in terms of keeping up with my Etsy shop and my blog... I have a bunch of finished scarves I just haven't gotten around to photographing them or listing them. (I'm liking the cashmere/bambu7 sett at 20epi, by the way, in case anyone is curious.)

I have been trying to figure out what to do with these, though...

I started making some to attach to Christmas presents for the various women/girls in my family, and I can't seem to stop making them! (They're little crocheted flowers made of cashmere and bamboo yarn, mostly, I've been sewing pinbacks onto them to make brooches.)

I was thinking of a couple of different weaving projects that could incorporate them, but I'm kind of in production mode right now (which I try to take advantage of whenever it happens!).

So, I'm thinking I'm going to contribute them to The Sampler. The way it works is - you contribute 25 or more (up to 100s, if you want to!) of little samples of your work, the Sampler people organize it all, and then subscribers pay a small amount (not sure how much) to purchase sampler packs and get all these little samples and coupons/marketing materials from the crafters/artists that contribute.

I've done it once before and got a sale from it, and since I've already got all these little flowers lying around gathering dust, I figured, well, heck, why not, I'll contribute to the February Sampler. Wish me luck!