Camping!

Cute little picture. We are heading out camping this afternoon! This is a picture from the park we're going to in New Hampshire - not sure if it's our site or not. But we do have one on the water... Just for four days, we're coming home on Tuesday afternoon, but it should be fun. I camped a lot with my family when I was young - my dad would close his bakery for three weeks every summer and off we would go, all over the Northeast. I remember spending a lot of time in the Adirondacks (upstate New York) and loved our trips to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (and visiting Green Gables, of course).

I took some pictures of my soggy (it's been rainy here all week, clearing up, thank goodness) little garden to post, but my computer has decided it's not speaking to its little built-in card reader. Argh! Another thing to straighten out after we get home.

And, lastly, the white/green/grey pinwheel scarf that I posted below was bought last night! It's going to go live just outside of Paris as a present for a very lovely customer's father for his 70th birthday, how fun.

Pinwheels

I've always like the pinwheel weaving designs out there, and recently bought "The Pinwheel: An Exploration in Color-and-Weave Design" by Margaret Windeknecht. I've been poking through it, and this scarf was my first project from a draft in the book:


It's an 8-Shaft pinwheel design, and, of course, I had to mess with the colors a little. I kept it simple for the first warp - I wound enough for two scarves, alternating white with grey and green, wove one scarf with white and grey (this one) in the weft and a second with white and green.

It's woven with Bambu7, sett at 20 epi - I actually like the hand of the scarf after wet finishing. Beefy, but still with a very nice drape. I'm thinking of trying 18 epi at some point, but, for now, I kind of like this sett. I used floating selvedges and started the shuttles from opposite sides, so the white carried a little up one side and the grey (or green) carried up the other (this pinwheel pattern is woven with 8 shots of one color then 8 shots of the other). Not sure if this is standard practice or not, but I love the resulting selvedges.



So, onto the next version! Much less traditional, this is much more in my style. I like asymmetry (and Fibonacci!), very much, as well as the pseudo-decontructed nature of the pinwheels that you get from using mostly one color in the warp and weft, with just a bit of secondary colors. I'm planning to have another couple stripes of color in the weft further along, so that it will accent the wearer's face. Not quite sure what to do yet with the second scarf on this warp, but we'll see...

And, nope, this isn't the Weavebird - this is my 12-shaft LeClerc Colonial, also in my studio. I'm about halfway through the threading the Weavebird at this point, nice to have another, easier (simple straight draw threading and treadling), project to work on to keep my eyes from crossing too much!

On An Etsy Roll!

It's an Open Studio day at Western Avenue Studios today... And I'm actually wishing I were outside instead! It's beautiful out - 70s, sunny, absolutely perfect - and, not surprisingly, there aren't many people coming through the building. They're all outside gardening (as I should be) or kayaking (as I really want to be) or planning a cook-out for this evening. Hopefully Mr. SkiingWeaver is doing that last one!


This guy was on the front page of Etsy this morning! In this treasury. It was an Etsy-Admin curated list - thanks to whichever kind Admin liked my work enough to put it on the front page! That makes two Saturday mornings in the past couple of weeks. Crazy!

And I've sold five scarves through Etsy in the past couple weeks also - this normally only happens during the holiday season. Two went to San Fran (man, do I love that city!), two went to Texas, and this one:

Is on its way to South Korea! How fun, I love the global market aspect of Etsy... Thanks to it, I've sent work to Australia, France, the U.K., all over the United States and Canada, and now to South Korea.

Warping is underway on the Weavebird. I'd post a picture, but I left my camera at home, argh. Another argument for getting a Blackberry.... (Mr. SkiingWeaver calls them "crackberries" - lol.) And to think I didn't even *have* a cell phone until I got pregnant with Bella. Good grief, how low I've sunk.

Yarn...

Not a lot going on around here. Though I did get a box of bright colors today, always fun:

Fun. :) (Bamboo yarn, was running a bit low on black and thought I'd order some other colors while I was at it.) I'm working on setting up my first warp on my Weavebird, I'll post pictures when it's ready to go - hoping to get over to the studio tonight for a little while.

The kids have been outside practically all day lately... We found a neat moth yesterday...



The photo is kind of blurry. Isn't it beautiful, though? Love the false eyes on its wings and its gorgeously fuzzy antennae. (And, serendipitously, Bella got her first issue of National Geographic for kids yesterday and we learned that some butterflies have ears on their wings. And that camels can drink 500 cups of water in ten minutes. Who knew!)

The moth was bigger across than my palm - and, unfortunately, dead as a doornail. Anybody know what kind of moth it is?

Bella took this photo of Little Man and me - she's getting quite good with the camera!

Weavebird!

The Big Red Truck. With the Weavebird, in pieces, in my Mum's driveway in Orange, on the way home from Tom Beaudet's in Westfield, last weekend.

And, this weekend, I actually got my rear into my studio - and finished setting up my new loom! Hooray!

There she is, making friends with her big brother (my LeClerc Colonial 60"/12 shaft, in the background). Notice the purple laptop? LOL. (Florence Feldman-Wood, eat your heart out!) (Florence is the very lovely past Dean of the Weavers' Guild of Boston with a decided penchant for purple.)



Another view, with new shelving for my yarn stash in the background, and my inventory covered up back there (the studio can get dusty, I like to keep things covered except for during Open Studios).

The new shelving was very necessary - when Mr. SkiingWeaver and I tried to move my old wire shelving it fell apart! An avalanche of yarn. The kidlets thought it was hilarious....

Could actually use another shelf like this, there's no room at the moment for my Tencel, cotton, skeins of silk and cashmere, etc. Hmmm.

Anywho, I haven't warped the Weavebird yet, but do have my first project all planned out - an advancing point twill, in shades of purple/teal/green bamboo, probably just for me, since it will be the first project from the new loom and all. I'm dying to dive right into fine silk, but I thought maybe I should rein in the enthusiasm a little bit and just work with easy yarn for the first project or two...

But I did manage to get the loom to make tabby sheds, hooray!


1-3-5-7-9-11-13-15



2-4-6-8-10-12-14-16

Now I'm hoping I didn't get the pictures reversed. :)