Handwoven By Kristin Kelley

Facebook Page

2011-02-09T11:11:00.002-05:00

Hello all! Obviously I have basically stopped blogging here...

But I do have a Facebook Fan page that I post weaving-related stuff on, if you'd like to check it out.

Click here to go to my skiingweaver Facebook page!

I just post some photos from my recent week at John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina - I took Dianne Totten's and Pam Howard's "Color, Crimp, Create" advanced weaving class and had an absolute ball.

Hope to see you around Facebook...

Ahts and Merino/Tencel

2010-06-10T12:08:00.005-05:00

Yay! I just received word today that I was accepted into the Boston Ahts Festival again this year! It's held September 10 -12, in Christopher Columbus Park on the waterfront in Boston. Even with terrible weather last year (Saturday was completely rained out) it was by far the most successful show I did. I was *really* hoping I'd get in again this year - but with completely different jurors and stiff competition for just 60-ish coveted spots, I wasn't sure.

(My booth, last year, nice corner location, I lucked out - though I was behind a pillar! LOL!)

It's a great time, with music and dance and demonstrations as well. Literally thousands upon thousands of people showed up last year (the free music is a huge draw! Local/emerging musicians from Berklee, the Boston Ballet, the Boston Gay Men's Choir, the list goes on and on).

Packed!!

A bit of Boston's waterfront, the evening of the last day of the show last year. I'm so excited to do this show again this year!

Maybe this will light a fire under my weaving rear-end. :) Speaking of weaving, how about a project round-up? I'm about to put a custom shawl on my 4-shaft loom, I've got Bonnie-Inouye-inspired echo weave going on the Weavebird, am about to warp up the Colonial with something or other (haven't decided yet), and I'm trying out a new-to-me yarn on my 8-shaft table loom.

Nothing too crazy - it's a 5-shaft waffle weave using three colors - I'm a sucker for texture and haven't tried waffle-weave with wool before (I did, of course, weave the obligatory cotton waffle-weave dishtowels years ago). The yarn is 10/2 Merino/Tencel from Webs and it's lusciously soft! If it comes out nicely, I'll be doing more - but with a floating selvedge and a couple shots of plain weave to begin next time. This one may be a little wonky in the end, but it's just for me, so that's ok. Love this yarn so far! (Yes, that's kid artwork on the table there...)

Osloom!

2010-06-01T10:18:00.002-05:00

Oh, how fun, I just got my laser-cut backstrap loom from the Osloom project in the mail today.

There are all the pieces. Yay!

If you'd like to learn more about the OSloom project (Open Source Jacquard loom), you can read more at the osloom.org website.

A Little Pile of Coptic-Bound Journals

2010-05-28T13:24:00.003-05:00

Hey, finally a little pile of coptic journals to list on Etsy! Always amazed at how long it takes to write that first listing for a series of items...

So I'm Not Exactly an Expert Seamstress...

2010-05-24T18:32:00.006-05:00

... but I do have fun with it! I made a fun little smart phone pouch earlier this week. The pattern is from the fabulous The Crochet Diva on Etsy, and the pattern itself is her Swanky Little Phone Case. It was a wonderfully clear pattern - even a newbie seamstress like me could follow the instructions very easily.

Here's what my version looks like folded up:

There are two pockets on the inside (I still need to add a snap to that tab I'm holding down) - that's my Droid peeking out of the lower one.

This is the back:
That's my fabric and button - the same organic cotton/Webs cotton in turned twill that I'm using for my journal covers - I used an organic cotton sateen as the lining fabric.

I had all sorts of fun making that pouch! I am, however, developing my own little pouch to sell, instead of using a pattern. I'm getting there - it will have an open top and an inside pocket. I've almost got the prototype perfected, but look what I did...

I sewed two backsides together (as opposed to a front and a back) - lol, whoops! Putting that little seam ripper that came with my sewing machine to good use... I think I need to tweak the little pocket a bit, too, it's coming out a little on the large side at the moment.

Never thought I'd actually enjoying doing some sewing...

Coptic-Bound Journal

2010-05-17T20:17:00.006-05:00

I've been obsessed with books lately... And have started learning sewn bindings. Fun! I started with just paper around the covers, to learn on, but have just made my first one using handwoven fabric...

So, here are the front and back covers - I've already covered them in handwoven fabric (turned twill blocks in organic cotton and 10/2 cotton from Webs), and the inside face has a nice sheet of Thai Unryu/Mulberry paper.

Next, I made folios of 6 leaves (12 sides) (I think that's the right way to say it) of handtorn paper, and used my awl to poke holes in them - the phonebook is a great jig!

There are seven of them, waiting their turn to be bound to the covers.

I've started binding the first folio to the back cover (note my daughter's Hello Kitty scissors...)

What the stitching looks like inside.

Getting there! (Neat little rows of Coptic stitching around the edge there). And, of course, I'm running out of waxed linen thread...

So I add a little more. That's a slip knot about to strangle the end of my thread that was getting too short. The book binding literature calls this a "weaver's knot" which actually kind of cracked me up, because I've never, ever used one before! (I assume it would be used to repair broken warp ends, but I do it differently, I don't like to leave a knot in the warp.)

Hey, it's done! Cool!

Really like how it lies open nice and flat. Great for sketches/journaling, I think.

Yay! I'm keeping this one, there are goofs in it, but I like it. :)

Kyna (pronounced key-nah) - my faithful assistant. (Yes, we have a puppy. She's half Lab half Golden Retriever and is almost six months old! Theresh a good girl, yesh.)

Love/Hate Relationships

2010-05-11T09:47:00.004-05:00

Any weavers out there have a certain task that they just really don't like doing? I like just about everything to do with weaving, but there are a couple of things that I just don't enjoy doing, for some unknown reason.

One has always been...

Hemstitching! (These are going to be little bookmarks to go with the journals I've been making lately.) I do it so rarely that I normally have to dig out a copy of Handwoven Magazine to look up the directions for it (love that they print them in every issue).

I don't really know why I don't enjoy it - I normally like needlework (I'm really enjoying sewing some coptic-bound journals, e.g.) (I'll post a photo or two of those soon). Maybe it's because when I sit down at the loom to weave, I really want to just zip right along and weave. But, I do like how it looks, so it's worth curbing my impatience!

Otherwise, I've been battling a cold (poor me) (<-laughing at myself) (more like poor family!), hope you are all well!

And a New Studio Too

2010-05-06T09:53:00.003-05:00

I have a new studio space at Western Avenue Studios! Very excited about it. It's on the third floor, instead of the fourth, near the passenger elevator, and a bit larger than my old one, so now when people walk in they don't walk into one of my looms. There is actually space for a little retail area.

This is what it looks like when I'm standing in the door looking into the studio - I have little shelves set up near the front where I put my journals during Open Studios, and where I wrap up scarves, etc., too.

Still has two big windows, but much less sun - I can actually see the back of the wing of the building that I used to be in as well as a bit of downtown Lowell. (I loved the canal from my old windows, but you had to actually walk over and look straight down to see it, which I didn't wind up doing very often.) I miss the sun, but I don't miss the heat at all! I really like the exposed brick, too (the brick in my old studio was painted white).

Terrible photo. But you get the idea - this is to the left of my doorway - I actually have a reasonable amount of space to hang up my scarves, room for my mirror, etc. That's my stash back there, more room for that, too, it feels like!

My main worry has been finding a good place to take photos for my Etsy shop - I don't get the natural light that I did in my old studio. I scouted around outside for places, gathered up an armful of scarves and the Scary Mannequin (so dubbed by Ms. Bella), and headed for the stairwell....

Where inspiration struck! Great natural light in the stairwell! Fun kind of industrial-looking peeling paint on the bricks, too. Problem solved. And the photos came out just fine.

Something New! Handbound Journals

2010-05-04T17:53:00.003-05:00

Once upon a time, ages ago, I bound/cased-in some journals in some turned twill tencel fabric that I wove. I had a great time, I used the journals (including taking one to France!), and kind of forgot about my small venture into bookbinding.

Obviously, I've decided to do some more (though these aren't in turned twill)... These are the first set of small journals that I bound - I start with a pre-made text block, cut acid-free book board to the right size for the covers and spine, and then glue on the fabric. And hope I don't make a big mess of things in the process!

Kind of a fun, different thing to do with handwoven fabric! I've got more in the works, and paper on order to do a bit more serious book construction - I think I'm going to try my hand at various stitched bindings.

And, even more fun, I'll be leading a hands-on seminar at NEWS in the summer of 2011 on this very topic! I'm experimenting a lot to see where I need to diverge from traditional bookbinding to make things work with handwoven fabric, and I'm also hoping to put together a couple of art books that have been floating around in the back of my brain, to give folks ideas of what you can do with fabric and books.

A (Small) Photo-Editing Tip

2010-05-03T10:41:00.004-05:00

I figured out something new the other day, to help make my photos a bit better, and thought I'd share! Some (most? lol!) of you have probably already figured this out, but I thought I'd mention it just in case it's helpful...

So, I've been taking pictures of buttons lately. I take them outside, in bright light, and use my macro button so I can get up close and personal. Then I copy them into Picasa (wonderful free photo editing software!) and crop them.

I've noticed that they have a tendency to have a kind of grey cast to the background, though. Distressing! So, I did what I normally do with my photos that look a little dingy and went into the "basic fixes" section and hit the "autocontrast" button:

Hmm. Only a tiny bit better. So, how do I fix this photo? Then - tada! - I decided to venture over to the "Tuning" tab and played with the "Fill Light" "Highlights" and "Shadows" sliders a bit - and, hey, much better photo, and much better representation (at least on my monitor) of what the buttons actually look like.

My photos always need work, but it was fun to find out one little thing to do to make them a bit better. Hope this helps you, too!

Open Studios and Open Source Loom

2010-05-01T14:41:00.004-05:00

Trying to keep true to my newly-turned-over leaf, and posting again. Short and sweet, right?

Open Studios has been a crush today! Western Avenue Studios was featured on Chronicle, a local Boston news magazine type tv show, a couple weeks ago, and the foot traffic has been great today. You can't buy publicity like that...

This scarf is heading off to a new home... It's got a nice backstory - a friend of mine from high school really wanted to give her sister, a breast cancer survivor, a special Christmas present this year, so we chose the colors together, and 10% of the proceeds from this one will be donated to the Susan G. Komen Fund.

Also got to meet a lovely Etsy customer in person - she knows somebody else in the building, compeletely by coincidence, and stopped by to pick up her scarf in person. Very nice!

Finally - have you heard about the OSLoom project? Margarita Benitez is heading a project to create Open Source plans/software/etc. for people (guilds, smaller educational institutions) to construct jacquard looms. How fantastic is that? And, happily, the project has been fully funded through Kickstarter - I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with in the coming months.

Hello Friends! How Have You Been?

2010-04-30T12:01:00.004-05:00

So, obviously, I've been neglecting my blog even more that I've been neglecting my Etsy shop for the past couple of months...

I hope all is well with all of you, and I thought I'd start trying this blogging thing again, but with a little bit different approach. Maybe short and sweet would be a good way to go about it?

So, with that said, I've been working on lots of random little projects lately and finally getting my weaving/making mojo back after feeling pretty burned out in January (it was a crazy fall - crazy busy, which is good, but I really needed to take time to recharge my batteries a bit). Here's a photo or two of the latest little project...

Yup, little silk buttons! I've been listing them in my Etsy shop, no idea if I'll sell any, but I'm having all sorts of fun making them.

Also - tomorrow is our monthly Open Studios at Western Avenue Studios from noon - 5pm. I'm participating in the Spring Art Thing - look for studios with the signs for the Spring Art Thing on their doors, collect punches on a postcard that you can pick up in any of those studios, and enter to win a $25, $50 or $75 gift certificate (depending on how many punches you collect). Fun! And a great place to get a unique gift for new grads, moms, dads, newlyweds... You get the idea.

If you're actually reading this - thank you! Nice to see you!

deCordova Sculpture Park

2009-11-09T12:46:00.003-05:00

... in Lincoln, MA. (Dropped a bunch of work off at the Museum Store there this morning.)

Llove this guy's expression, what is he thinking about? His misspent youth in Bora Bora? Catching the first snowflake of winter on his tongue? Or maybe just the fact that he has a mound of dirty socks that need laundering...)

More Letterboxing - and Some Fall Color

2009-10-28T12:08:00.005-05:00

Intrepid explorers.

And I'm behind on blogging! We did a bit more letterboxing - not this past weekend, but the weekend before... Found another box in Chelmsford, and it's really interesting how many little conservation areas there are in our town. Chelmsford is quite old for the U.S. (established in 1655, so it's one of the oldest in the Commonwealth - if not the country) - it's nice to see so much land has been set aside, here and there.

Pretty little stream - with a fun little plank bridge over it that the kids had fun crossing.

Stone wall where the box was hidden (not giving it away, though!). Old stone walls like this one thread through just about all of the woods in New England - hard to believe that this whole area was clear-cut 150 years ago or so, but it was.

Also hard to believe that people actually managed to farm here, it's so rocky! The glaciers just dumped tons of rocks and Glacial erratics (boulders) all over the place (check that link to Wikipedia for a picture of one of my favorite erratics - Doane Rock on Cape Cod, I've climbed up it many times!).

The fall color is almost gone by now! I got up one morning last week and our maple tree in the backyard went from green to yellow literally over night. And now it's pouring down leaves...

That's a peek at a maple in our neighbor's yard, actually. A bit more interesting than ours is at the moment.

This is what the backyard looks like, lol. Our maples in the back are actually Norweigan maples - a weed species, oh no!! They're pretty, but they don't change as spectacularly as sugar maples do... My mom's house has three gorgeous old sugar maples in the front yard, I miss their color - and the maple syrup we used to make!

Tail end of color over our other neighbor's house... I was lame and didn't manage to catch it at it's peak this year. Still, though, driving around this past week has been an absolute feast for the senses. Gorgeous, saturated color everywhere. I love fall!

Creativity...

2009-10-28T12:00:00.005-05:00

I was stuck in a jury room last week-ish (called for jury duty, but, luckily, the district court disposed of something like 15 cases that day without needing a jury), and read a bit more of Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit - it's an interesting book, I like to browse through it once in a while.

I think it's been stuck in my head since then, just a bit, and I've been noticing a bit more about my creative process. Like lots of weavers, I think, I tend to get ideas while I'm seated at the loom, weaving - especially when I'm weaving a pattern that doesn't take a lot of concentration. Leaves your mind free to wander, and, I guess, mine tends to wander to other weaving projects.

My only real observation, though, is that I find it interesting that I get the most ideas when I'm in full-on production mode (as I am now, weaving like crazy!)... Not sure whether they'll be good ideas or not, but they sure do seem to come, fast and furious. Maybe my creative weaving muscles, so to speak, are like any other muscles? When I'm using my basic weaving muscle a lot, the creative ones get all limber and productive as well? Just a thought...

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on creative flow.

And on a happy personal note - I've been on the Front Page of Etsy twice this past week (at weird times, but, hey, I'll take it!), and 1000 Markets just sent me an email inviting me to participate in a special Holiday Gift Market. (I adore 1000Markets, I have to say - it doesn't have the traffic that Etsy does, but, man, have they been good to me - lots of features, etc., love that they appreciate handweavers!) Also had a wonderfully successful Open Studios yesterday - thanks to everyone who stopped by! Back to weaving for me - have a big delivery to the deCordova Museum due tomorrow morning (eeps!).

What? A Weavng-Related Post? Get Out!!

2009-10-16T12:17:00.005-05:00

Busy, busy, busy. And a lovely customer from Canada just ordered ten (yes, 10!) scarves from me (basically doing all her Christmas shopping in one fell swoop), so I'm even busier, busier, busier.

It was interesting, she asked whether I give discounts for bulk orders as we were first talking, and I hesitated for a moment. I do, for wholesale and consignment, but I wasn't quite sure how to handle it with a normal customer.

So I just put it out there - I told her how many pieces I require my wholesale customers to purchase and the discount that I give them, thinking it would probably scare her off. Obviously, it didn't! She didn't bat an eyelash and is actually going to wind up buying quite a few more than she originally mentioned. And I learned to dare to be open to talking about things like this frankly with customers, you never know when somebody is going to order ten pieces! (Pricing work to allow for consignment and/or wholesale is an entirely different ball of wax, of course, and one I would *really* rather not discuss - people get so grumpy when it comes to setting prices. I mostly try not to worry about what other people are charging, one way or the other...)

Hey, plaid! Not normally something I do, is it? (It's just a 2/2 twill, nothing complicated.) This customer, again, asked whether I ever do plaid, and, I normally don't, but I bent another rule for her - I generally say I do custom work based on my current designs (learned that one the hard way) - but, I thought, you know, plaid might be kind of fun, and said "sure!". And she ordered four plaid scarves! (All bamboo, she is vegan and doesn't want any silk, wool, alpaca, etc.)

Anywho, I had fun poking around the clan tartans at Handweaving.net and made up my own kind of asymmetrical version. And I'm having fun weaving it! I thought the color changes would annoy me, but, so far, they aren't.

I'm using Robyn Spady's neat trick of working in the weft wends - when you're working with plied yarn, you split it in half, carry half of it back a couple of warp ends through the open shed you just tossed it through, then wrap the other half around a selvedge edge and bring that part back one or two warp ends past the first end. Then your tucked in weft ends don't bunch up too thickly at one selvedge, if that makes sense. Great tip from Robin's Tips N Techniques seminar a couple years ago at NEWS!

And, I'm looking forward to giving my second lecture in New Hampshire next week!

Letterboxing!

2009-10-10T16:30:00.005-05:00

So, yes, I'm supposed to be weaving, weaving, weaving. But gorgeous fall days are gorgeous fall days... So, I spent a good chunk of time in the studio this morning/early afternoon (and will return this evening), then came home to drag everyone letterboxing.

(Church in the middle of Chelmsford - bike path in the foreground.)

What, you ask, is letterboxing? Well, according to the Letterboxing North America, letterboxing originated in England, in the moors of Darmoor. It is "an itriguing mix of treasure hunting, art, navigation, and exploring interesting, scenic, and sometimes remote places. It takes the anceint custom of placing a rock on a cairn upon reaching the summit of a mountain to an artform..." The idea is, people hide a weatherproofed box somewhere, including a log book and a rubber stamp in the box, write out clues about how to find it, and post them to the Letterboxing website.

Hunters, like we were today, have their own personal stamps so that they can record their visit in the letterbox log book, and also keep their own journals to put stamps in from the boxes they find.

Needless to say, the kids had a great time hunting for our first (very easy to find, thankfully) letterbox today - it was right along the Bruce Freeman Bike Path, right near home! (There are 14 boxes hidden in our town alone!)

Bikepath...

Woodlot path along the bike path (that's Carlos, getting the kids out of the bike stroller, wearing his helmet, good boy.)

All ready with their journals...

Up the hill...

To find an old rock wall - and hey, there's the box!

Bella's letterboxing journal (The green butterfly is her stamp - the little red stamp was the one in the box). (I just love her kindergartener handwriting!)

A last peek at the trees (foliage is really just starting here - the mature sugar maples are starting, and those are the trees that have the *really* spectacular color, none in this photo!).

I'm really looking forward to continuing to do this... It reminds me quite a bit of our last trip to the U.K., when I was pregnant with Bella - we spent a good part of that vacation traipsing over hill and dale (literally), compass in hand, finding remote stone circles in England, Wales and Scotland. Looking forward to going to Dartmoor someday to find more circles *and* letterboxes!

Warping Galore

2009-10-08T10:09:00.005-05:00

Little Harrisville Designs at home...

Weavebird (and warping board) at studio...

LeClerc Colonial at studio.

Notice a theme here? Three looms and I'm in the process of warping *all* of them! LOL! (My thought was that, usually, I'd be warping/threading on one or so, weaving on others, so there's always something different to do, right? Not so, apparently!)

I'm under the gun, big time, and it's my own fault... I'm delivering an order to Art & Soul in Maynard this weekend, I'm going to be participating (by invitation, whoot!) in the deCordova Museum's Artists' Market and need to deliver a whole bunch of items by the end of the month, I've got a show in Holliston in late-ish November, the Winter Lights show at the Loading Dock Gallery at WAS in late November - December (even though I'm not listed on their webpage at the moment, hmph), and then two weekend-long Open Studios at WAS in December! Oh, and I need to follow up with 13 Forest, a gallery in Arlington, too. And my second lecture for the New Hampshire Weavers' Guild is in two weeks. Ahhhhh!!!!

Biting off a bit more than I can chew is always a fabulous motivator for me. Obviously. (LOL!)

OK, here's something to get our minds off the stressful couple of months that are looming (har) (yes, pun intended).

Yay Fall! (Can't believe how big they're getting.)

And, on a happy personal front - Mr. SkiingWeaver and I celebrated out 9th anniversary this week (more like 16, actually, but we took a long time to get around to making it official). We actually went out. Together. Without the kids. Had a conversation without somebody interrupting every three minutes. Wow. Thank you, thank you, Mum, for watching them!!

Feeling Fallish - and A Marketing Observation

2009-10-01T18:53:00.006-05:00

It felt decidedly nippy outside today (50s, blustery clouds, gorgeous)... I like it when I break out my fleeces and my favorite vest (purchased about 9 years ago in Alta Ski Area, and still a favorite!). We stopped to buy some pumpkins and mums on our way home from our weekly jaunt to Kimball Farm Ice Cream with my Mum...

We have moved the goldfish inside from the deck (they lived in the little fountain there for the summer), but the plants and snails haven't come in yet. Soon, I think, Mr. SkiingWeaver just needs to get it in gear. The sugar maples' leaves are just starting to get going here, I'll take some photos when they hit their stride... But in the meantime, I'm enjoying the mums. I LOVE fall. Love it.

OK, time for the marketing observation. I have a couple of different ways of displaying my work in my studio/at shows, but I generally use the Scary Mannequin (so dubbed by Ms. B) both for photo staging and for display...

(One of my favorite pieces ever! Sold it at the Ahts Festival - yay, but also - wah!)

So, I tend to put my largest/most expensive piece on the Scary Mannequin. People do tend to look at it and touch it first, so I make sure it's a "wow" type piece that feels just gorgeous in their hand. And their eyes tend to pop a little when they see the price. (If they *don't* pop, then that's a person I want in my studio/booth, most definitely, lol!) But then when they look at the other pieces... Well, the prices seem a bit more attainable, don't they?

I didn't do this intentionally, but it does seem to work that way, interestingly enough.

Of course, there are always the people that happily plunk down a large-ish amount of money for a special piece without blinking which, of course, works beautifully, too.

Just an observation. YMMV. (YYMV = Your Mileage May Vary)

Front Page - Whoot!

2009-09-22T16:21:00.004-05:00

Just a quick update -

Yay! Always nice to be on the front page! (See the Treasury and Alternates here.) A huge thank you to Etsy seller Earcandyarts who made the Treasury! (Go check out her shop!)

Happy Autumnal Equinox!

2009-09-22T11:57:00.004-05:00

Ms. B has had "First Day of Fall" marked on her calender for a while now and has been very excited about it. We've been talking about what the equinoxes and solstices are, and she gets that whole concept, but she's been convinced that since today it is officially fall, that all the leaves would start falling, right on schedule. I've been trying to explain that it might take a little while, but she was having none of it.

Huh. Should have listened to her! :) (Yup, they're starting a bit early this year, it's been a very cool year here so far - hoping that keeps up right through ski season!)

Did you notice the cardboard all over the backyard? It's a playground for their matchbox cars, they say. Proving yet again that all kids really need to have fun are cardboard boxes...

We do have a lot of cardboard at the moment, though, thanks to a trip to IKEA a couple weekends ago. We bought two new couches for the living room! Still deciding on the rug (may switch it out for a chocolate colored crazy deep pile shag, and move this one to their play area), but I'm liking it so far...

And, obviously, the arm of the new leather (yes, that's orange leather) couch makes an excellent roadway for trains... (Hey, there Madeline the cat in this photo, too!) That's my little 4 harness loom in the background - our living room is long and narrow - about 24' x 13' - so we've got it broken up in zones, sort of. Behind the camera is the natural disaster known as the Play Area.

Still have to switch out the artwork and finish painting the walls, but, it's getting there...

Boston Ahts Festival

2009-09-21T11:41:00.006-05:00

A long-overdue blog post! Finally! I've had an incredibly busy month so far, I'm actually pretty surprised I've managed to survive it.

September 11 - 13 (Friday - Sunday) was the Boston Ahts Festival - I had a booth in the artists' village and had fabulous time! Saturday was rained out, but I still managed to sell just a huge amount of work on Friday and Sunday, so I was really very happy... It was held in Christopher Columbus Park next to the North End in Boston, right on the waterfront. Here are some pictures.

Setting up on Friday... (the seated woman was my neighbor) - I was smack behind the pillar on the left with the vine growing over it. Argh! LOL. It didn't matter, in the end.

A shot of part of the harbor - it was very grey, rainy and cold on Friday!

Booth shot from Sunday morning - on a gorgeous day! I'd already sold what I think of as my signature piece (the shawl I use for my banner in my Etsy shop) by now... So the second 16-shaft advancing point twill scarf that I made on my new Weavebird was on my mannequin at this point. (Sold it, too!)

The foor traffic on Sunday was INSANE.

Harbor again, on Sunday evening, as I was heading back to my car, a happy weaver indeed...

So, that was a pretty busy three days, and, no sooner had I finished with that, then I was scrambling to finish my prep for a lecture to the New Hampshire Weavers' Guild on Wednesday. The lecture was actually a lot of fun, the attendees for my little class were fantastic, I talked a mile a minute, and the slide projecter worked with PowerPoint/my laptop on the first try! Yay! It was my first time leading a class, so I was kind of nervous, but I think it went well in the end, and now I'm not at all nervous for the follow-up lecture in October...

And in the midst of all this personal chaos, someone else in the family was having a pretty important day/reaching a milestone as well...

Ms. B started kindergarten! (Here she is showing off her new school backpack, about to head off with me on her first day - I swear I could travel to Europe for two weeks with only that backpack, lol - happily all she carries in it now is a file folder of papers and sometimes her favorite stuffed animal.) Her school is right down the street, so we walk to/fro every day, it's been very nice watching the leaves start to change... And she is loving school, that's my girl!

Lowell Spinners

2009-08-11T16:48:00.005-05:00

Double S affiliate of the Red Sox. Gotta love a minor league baseball team with a fiber-related name!

We went to the game on Sunday and had a great time - it was my first minor-league game (I've been to Fenway many times!), and it was a complete riot. And both kids got Jacoby Ellsbury bats (he's so dreamy! lol, channelling my inner 17-year-old).

Bella is all set to give them a helping hand (they could have used it, they got smucked by the Batavia Muckdogs).

Little Man fell asleep on the way. (I'm wearing my Sox cap, of course, old and beat up from years of gardening while wearing it.)

It's really a very pretty little park - our seats were down the third base line - you can see Wannalancit Mills in the background.

Just waking up...

Bella liked the making noise part.

Tickles for Conall from Papi.

Fun was had by all. :)

A Funny Thing Happened at Open Studios...

2009-08-07T15:34:00.004-05:00

Last Saturday was Open Studios at Western Avenue Studios (slow, as I expected it would be, it was a gorgeous summer day, finally!). Slow is actually kind of nice, sometimes, since I got quite a bit of work done.

WAS is an old brick mill building and sits alongside one of the canals in Lowell. The studios are really quite nice, and I'm lucky enough to have one on the canal-side...

Here it is, standing by my windows, looking back towards my door and the hallway. It's starting to get stuffed to the gills! Eeks!

Here's the view towards the windows.

And this is the view down the canal if I stick my head out the window.

Wait a minute. What's the HUGE crane doing there on the opposite side of the canal??

You have *got* to be kidding me...

Yup. They're actually pulling a pickup truck out of the canal!! Good grief. The scuttlebutt was that somebody parked it up the hill a bit (there's a parking lot there, offices, shops and such, it's a mixed-use neighborhood) and forgot to put the parking break on. Not sure if you can even see it, but the chain link fence that lines the bottom of the hill obviously isn't strong enough to stop a pickup truck. LOL!

Even more funny was when I poked my head out to take photos, everybody else was poking their heads out too, like a giant game of Celebrity Squares (the building has five stories, 20+ studios on each level).

The Painted Skein Becomes Warp - Part II

2009-07-29T10:05:00.003-05:00

From this...

To this. (Just the beginning, but I'm liking it so far!)

Handpainted Skeins as Warp

2009-07-27T14:06:00.005-05:00

I really like working with handpainted yarn... I really enjoying winding warps and painting them, but, with two kids and too much to do, I just haven't had the time (for about three years, lol!). So, the next best thing is all that lovely handpainted yarn that's already on the market.

When the color changes are relatively subtle, I just wind my warp as I normally would. When the skein is one of those really yummy, non-repeating, contrast-y ones, though, you run into the Cat Barf problem, as pointed out by Syne Mitchell in this Weavezine article. The handy-dandy Bonus Content to the article describes a nice way of working with non-symmetrical skeins. I had one of those - Why didn't I think of that?! Doh! - moments when I read the article...

Here's a picture of a painted skein being wound into a warp using Syne's method:

The skein I'm winding here is about 50" around, and I need about 100" for one of my scarves, so that worked out just right. I basically made a big 100" diameter circle with the yarn, making a cross on the left side. Any longer and I would need a lot bigger warping board!

Here's the cross. Looks weird, doesn't it? But since I generally warp front to back anyway, it's really the same thing. I'll just cut it a bit above or below the cross (haven't decided yet) and proceed as I normally do.

One thing I did notice is this:

The yarn tends to get a bit out of whack as I wind. But that's actually just fine. I wound the skein all onto the pegs and then I just sort of tugged/slid those upper, misaligned yarns back to where I wanted them:

Easy! They slid very nicely along their path, nothing tangled, and now the colors are placed more or less how I want them (I may have to mess about with a little more, but I like this so far.) (And pardon my messy dining room - it's basically a project room for Bella and me at this point...)

Just one more picture:

A bunch of scarves, hanging on the upstairs railing to finish drying. Right up above them (not in the picture) is bottom of the new sun tunnel that was put in when we got our roof replaced. I love it -the upstairs landing is now the brightest place in our little Cape!

Obviously I'm way behind on photographing/listing things on Etsy and 1000Markets. Ah well, it's summer, it's slow season for me. (And, yes, I do need to finish painting the stairwell... It never ends, lol!) Open Studios this Saturday, though, and I'm trying to weave like mad to have inventory for the Boston Ahts Festival in September as well as the big Lowell Open Studios, etc.

Tying On - Efficient or Not?

2009-07-25T09:46:00.005-05:00

I've always kind of wondered whether tying on a new warp onto an old warp is actually a time-saver or not... I don't often repeat weave structures from project to project (short attention span), but I'm in the midst of doing just that:

I finished up one set of turned Ms and Os scarves (neutrals) and decided to do another set (in greens/browns), so, there it is - tied onto the previous warp. I just hold the yarns together so the ends line up and tie an overhand knot with both threads acting as one, if that makes sense. The knots didn't slip at all.

A slight hitch in the process - my first warp didn't have a whole heck of a lot left over, so I tied my warp bar (temporarily, lol) to the fourth shaft on my little Harrisville loom, just to take the tension off the yarn and hold it in place while I tied on in front of the reed.

I timed the whole warping process for both sets - and, surprise, surprise, it actually took about 15 minutes *longer* to tie on than to just start over entirely! Interesting.

A couple caveats - I can do this threading more or less in my sleep. I'm also a relatively quick threader, from what I've seen (hard to tell, of course). But, I did come to the conclusion that for smaller projects and projects that I can whiz through the threading, tying on doesn't make sense for me.

For larger projects with more complex threading (like the 16s advancing twill on my Weavebird), I would probably tie on if I were repeating a design, even if it takes a long time, just because it eliminates all possibility of threading errors.

Anybody else try this little experiment? I'd love to hear if it's faster for you. Maybe I'm just incredibly slow at tying all those knots!

Summer Daisies

2009-07-17T10:45:00.004-05:00

Can you tell it's summer in my little garden? (Cone flowers, love them.)

The daylillies are incredible this year! Tons of scapes because of all the rain... (I need to deadhead!)

Bella standing next to her inspiration flowers...

And here is the present for Baby Daisy! Bella drew the pictures, then I embroidered it on muslin and made it into a pillow...

And her is the darling Daisy herself, completely charming her Tio Carlos (aka Mr. Skiingweaver). (If anybody wants to see a couple more photos from our trip to Brooklyn, I'll be putting them up on my Facebook page... I didn't take very many because I am lame, lame, lame!).

More photos of the Weavebird Project

2009-07-08T17:24:00.004-05:00

Finally managed some more photos of the 16s advancing twill project. I'm still not completely happy with how they came out (I'll be redoing them!) - purples are so hard to photograph sometimes and the natural light has *not* been cooperative lately.

The scarf shades from deep purple at the edges through blue, teal, a couple shades of green, to a yellow-ish green in the middle (and then back again). I'm thinking of doing a warm colorway next (reds and oranges and yellows)...

A bit more detail, here:

Hung up in the common area of the Fourth Floor at Western Avenue Studios, just for fun:

Yup, the color more or less disappeared on this shot, but you can get a sense of the repeat this way (212 ends! how fun!).

And, lest we forget that four shaft looms can be an awful lot of fun, too, here's the project that's currently on my little loom at home:

Some sampling to begin (just a little - the warp here is SeaSilk and is *insanely* expensive!) - I settled on a silvery 20/2 silk for the weft, and am combining these nice little waves with diamonds for the center 30" or so of the scarf.

I'm also completely dying to post photos of a fun collaborative project that Bella and I are working on for Ms. Daisy (my next-to-newest niece and Bella's next-to-newest cousin, lol) - but I can't because her Mom reads my blog sometimes and I don't want to give it away! Working on *another* project for brand-brand-new great-niece Ms. Kathryn (born on July 5!), too... I'll post photos of both once they're no longer surprises.

Incan Bridges - Recreated by MIT Students

2009-07-05T09:03:00.003-05:00

I have run across this rather neat article a couple of times, so I thought I'd share it (combines weaving and my alma mater!). I'm not sure how to post the article in it's original format here - but you can read it here if you want to.

The Last Handwoven Bridge, Rebuilt by MIT

Posted by Dylan Thuras, June 26, 2009 1:57 PM | permalink

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

When conquistadors arrived from Spain they were shocked. Spanning vast canyons, and longer than any existing European or Roman bridge was a type of bridge which they had never seen before: an Incan suspension bridge. Today only one example remains.

Made of woven grass, the bridge spans 118 feet, and hangs 220 feet above the canyon's rushing river. The Incan women braid small thin ropes which are then braided again by the men into large support cables, much like a modern steel suspension bridge. Handwoven bridges lasted as long as 500 years and were held in very high regard by the Inca. The punishment for tampering with one was death.

Over time, however, the bridges decayed, or were removed, leaving this single testament to Incan bridge engineering. This previously sagging bridge is now repaired each year, and christened with a traditional Incan ceremonial bridge blessing. The bridge is in extremely good condition and is a perfect location for all of us wishing to indulge in long harbored Indiana Jones fantasies.

Though the Spanish tried many times to build stone arch bridges all were failures until steel and iron bridges were introduced to the mountainous Peruvian countryside. Today the rope suspension bridges are being studied, and even recreated by MIT students. The students made a 60-foot-long version of the Incan bridge which was stretched between two campus buildings.

More on the Atlas here, more on the story of the bridge here, and about the MIT recreation of the bridge here and slideshow here.

********************************

Man, wish I had discovered classes like this when I was an undergrad!

Camping, Recital, Rain, Roofers... And My First Weavebird Project

2009-07-03T07:41:00.005-05:00

My card reader is working again! Hooray! (Was having trouble reading the memory card from my camera, and I just don't like posting photo-less blog entries.) So, brace yourselves, lots of photos to follow (including a weaving-related one at the end!).

Our campsite at Pawtuckaway State Park (everybody in jammies still) - we were right on the water! A mama duck with eight ducklings would visit every day - and we saw tons of egrets and heard loons and built a campfire every night, it was lovely. Apart from the rain (every day except one). And the fact that I came down with a terrible flu that basically knocked me out for 10 days (mostly at home).

The kids loved having the water right there - and nobody fell in!

Home again, and it was time for Bella's dance recital...

(These pictures are actually from the Dress Rehearsal - but she did wonderfully both days!)

And, we went to Kimball's Ice Cream with Ginga (my Mum) after the recital. Yum! (Isn't that a cute bag she's carrying?)

Notice the sun? About the only days it has been sunny for the entire month of June have been Saturdays, it's been awful! We are getting our roof replaced (as I type they're up there banging away) and we've been waiting forever - we signed the contract in May. Crazy. The poor roofers must be losing their shirts because of the weather!

And, finally, something weaving-related. I had to use my flash, so the picture doesn't really capture the colors, I don't think, but this is my first project from my Weavebird, going into the sink to be washed - it's a 16-shaft advancing twill (with a 212-shot treadling repeat!!) - in bamboo.

I figured I had enough to get used to on the first project (Texsolv heddles, which I like, very quiet), an overhead beater (which I also like, just a bit different motion to get used to, but also very easy), and a new treadling method (because the Weavebird is a compudobby - my brain kept expecting an open shed on both treadles, lol, but, no, one open the shed, the other closes it). So I stuck with a familiar yarn - Bambu7 sett at 20 epi for the twill - and am really happy with the end result.

I was a little afraid that I would find weaving on a compudobby a bit boring - I've always enjoyed the physical action of treadling, it reminds me of playing the organ, which I did sometimes back in the dark ages of my youth - but I loved it! The colors and pattern were just so much fun to look at, I didn't get bored at all. I've got enough warp left to do another scarf in this colorway, I'm hoping to get in to the studio sometime after the 4th...

Speaking of which - Happy 4th of July to everyone! Here's hoping for sunny weather for us Northerners and a bit of a cool-down for the South!

Camping!

2009-06-12T10:11:00.003-05:00

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

2009-06-08T10:03:00.003-05:00

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!

2009-06-06T13:49:00.007-05:00

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...

2009-06-03T13:18:00.008-05:00

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!

2009-06-01T10:12:00.004-05:00

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. :)

SOWA - Pictures, Finally

2009-05-21T07:36:00.004-05:00

Finally, a couple pictures from SOWA! The South End of Boston is a really cool, vibrant neighborhood, the South of Washington area is undergoing a rebirth of sorts, and I love that they have an open air market there every week over the summer now. The Art Walk coincided with the market's opening weekend.

We set up on Friday, in the midst of normal Boston workday traffic, it was a little crazy, but there was temporary parking for us, hooray!

The buildings where we set up - we were to the left a little bit of this picture, I just like the old brick smokestack here...

Here's my little set-up. Photographing indoors sucks, in a word. That flash just sucks all the color out of everything, doesn't it? The set-up worked out pretty well in the end, though. I'm not sure whether I'll continue to use hangers (like on the right in this photo), things do tend to slide off of them... And I like how the ladder display look. But the benefit of the hangers is that you can see more of the pieces that are to the rear. Hmmm. Must think on this more. The baskets hung on the gridwall worked really well for my eco-felt pillows.

I didn't do a very good job of getting around to take photos of other WAS people - but my friend Peter did! Check out his blog entry! (There's even a picture of me, eeks.)

I did manage a picture of my neighbor, though, the fabulous Ms. Vicky of Art by Verde:

Her work is just gorgeous. Love it. I came home with some of it. :) (One of the small landscapes to her left in this photo.) Vicky has a studio at Western Avenue Studios and was my first neighbor there (before she moved to the third floor, the traitor! lol!).

There was a *ton* of foot traffic through this show, but not a lot of bags going by, which means there were a lot of people just browsing. Not surprising, given the current economic situation, of course. I was pleased with how much I sold, in the end, especially since this really isn't the season that I sell well in, generally. Handed out a ton of cards, postcards and Western Avenue brochures, too, so that's always good, especially since last year people really *did* come back at Christmas time.

I also learned an interesting lesson, being next to Ms. Vicky - people seem to get stressed out about their booth location at a craft fair, etc. etc. Well, Vicky couldn't have had a tougher location, in my opinion (in the middle of a side corridor) and her stuff flew off of her pegwalls. Interesting, huh? A combination of really gorgeous work, that people really like, and reasonable prices (she paints a lot of small pieces, but she also sold one of her large pieces to a couple from Croatia!).

I'm trying to figure out how to apply this to my work... Weaving is very time-consuming after all, even if I am a fast weaver. It's interesting - I get two types of comments. Either raised eyebrows at the prices or comments about how *reasonable* my prices are. You can tell which group of customers know about fiber art/handwovens...

And considering my taste in yarn just keeps getting more expensive, my prices aren't going to be coming down anytime soon. I figure one way around it is to make sure my designs are interesting enough to make the pricetag not outlandish. And I'm also starting up a line of lower-priced, solid-color scarves, since I get requests for them quite often.

Anyway. The show was a lot of fun, and a really great way to try out my set-up, etc. I'll be there again next year, if they'll have me!

Front Page on Saturday!

2009-05-18T16:21:00.005-05:00

I'm still playing catch-up from this weekend, and I just realized that one of my scarves was on Etsy's Front Page on Saturday morning!

It was this one... It's been in a ton of treasuries lately, so it was really nice to see that it got it's 15 minutes of Etsy fame. You can see the whole treasury here on CraftCult. (For some reason I can't seem to embed the widget from CraftCult here in my post, argh! It's really a very nice selection, I'd love to put it all here.)

Hooray for StudioHaus for creating such an awesome collection!

An Award from the Weavers' Guild!

2009-05-13T18:30:00.003-05:00

Just a quick post - I'm up to my eyeballs in preparation for the SOWA Art Walk this weekend (gulp) (I'll take pictures)...

But I did manage to get to the Weavers' Guild of Boston Meeting today (I'm Yearbook Chair, I figured I should probably be there for the Board Meeting...) - and I got an award! I'm completely tickled!

From our yearbook:

"The Dorothy Glowacki Celebratory Award is given annually to a younger, newer member who exhibits steady progress and merits recognition for continuing his or her educational endeavors in the fiber arts field."

Hey, cool!

And, while I'm at it, I should plug the new and improved website for the Guild:

Weavers Guild of Boston (website).

Nancy Kronenberg, the Website guru for the Guild, has put a lot of hard work into the site, and I think it looks great. While you're at it, you can take a peek at Nancy's lovely weaving, too, at her website Rosepath Weaving.

SOWA

2009-05-06T16:34:00.005-05:00

Anybody out there on the art and craft fair circuit at all? I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences!

I've got my first real outside juried show coming up soon (so soon, in fact, that I'm kind of in denial about it)...

Yup, May 16 - 17 - is that really next weekend?? Gulp! Happily, I'll be going over with several friends from Western Avenue Studios, but, in the meantime, I'm really focused on building inventory. I'm weaving lots of pretty basic scarves:

A pile of bamboo huck lace scarves, taken right from my first Handwoven article and modified a bit, waiting to be washed. Eventually, I'm going to be able to list quite a few in my Etsy shop, I think, but not yet!

They would be more efficient if I wound enough warp to weave two or so at a time, but it turns out I have a short attention span when it comes to weaving solid colors. It is interesting, though - as a weaver, I enjoy complex patterns and colors, but as people come through my studio and comment on various work, I've found that basic colors and clean design sells just as well as, if not better than, the ones that are more interesting to my weaver-ly eye.

There is room for both, of course, and sometimes mindless weaving is just right - I find I spend a lot of time letting my mind wander to new and different ideas while weaving these guys, many of which never come to fruition, but some of which may just be pretty good, eventually.

Two Months?!

2009-05-02T22:00:00.010-05:00

Good grief - almost two months, that has got to be some sort of new blog-slacker-record... But I've been busy, I suppose - kids, house, working in Boston a bit in March and at the studio, and Carlos (Mr. Skiingweaver) has been working literally around the clock for the past six weeks or so at his start-up, it's been pretty insane. Add to that that I'm stressing about having enough inventory for an upcoming art show I've been accepted into...

But it should be fun - several people that I know from my studio building are going to be there as well - but in the meantime, I'm frantically weaving! (Click on the poster if you want to read a little more about it.)

Weaving some lace scarves...

This one has been in a couple Treasuries on Etsy!

I've been busy researching new yarn sources, too, and have some gorgeous yarn being dyed for me in Canada as we speak - I really can't wait to get my hands on it.

What else? Ah yes! A new loom is on it's way to my studio! Tom Beaudet (LeClerc's U.S. rep., at least in my area) is refurbishing a 45" 16shaft Weavebird (compudobby) for me! Hooray! I jumped all over it when it came up for sale - it is really, really hard to find used Weavebirds... I've been kind of holding out for either a new or used one, just because I love my LeClerc Colonial and they're built in the same way. Also like that you don't need to add any sort of lift assist mechanism to the Weavebirds... (If you go here you can see a video of the loom in action!)

Isn't she pretty? I wouldn't be terribly surprised if I end up trading up to a 32 shaft eventually, but, for now, I'm sure this will keep me busy. Although, considering we are also in the midst of getting estimates to get our roof replaced (ouch!), maybe this wasn't the best time to be spending $$$ on a new loom. Ah well! :)

I hope all of you are well, and I won't let it slip for this long again, I promise. Ive been thinking lately that I don't have anything particularly interesting to say - mostly just feeling tired and overwhelmed. Things are easing up for Carlos at work, though, thank goodness, so hopefully I'll have more energy for blogging!

Birthday Girl Goes Skiing - Warning, Lots of Pictures

2009-03-09T10:03:00.009-05:00

So, once again, I'm behind. But I did want to get some photos up from last weekends birthday trip to Stowe...

Friday, after school, Bella blowing out her candles (it's been a cupcake sort of year, I guess, but that's what she wanted!).

Ernesto joined us for the first two days! Here's Conall, hanging out with Tio Ernesto.

Bella getting ready to hit the slopes. Conall holding onto Percy and chewing his coat. Oy.

About ready to go over to the Inspiration chair lift...

Nice job, guys! (They're the two in orange, in the middle of the picture.)

Home again. Conall *really* wants a helmet of his own...

I will post soon about the shibori projects I've been working on!

Woven Shibori

2009-02-26T13:37:00.005-05:00

I've had Catherine Ellis' book "Woven Shibori" for quite a while now, but I'm just getting around to giving it a bit of a whirl:

My first attempt, on the loom, a simple four shaft monk's belt pattern in 20/2 silk and a tencel pattern thread, just so I can get the hang of the dying process, see how it works. Once it is off the loom, the idea is to pull the purple threads really right to create pleats so the dye won't penetrate to the folded areas.

I did experiment with a blank t-shirt and some nui (stitched) shibori, though! Dyed it chartreuse first, and then did a second dye bath with a deeper loden green after stitching just a simple pattern across the shirt. And it worked! I'm ticked! (And just so easily amused, lol).

With all this playing with dye going on, Bella thought it would be fun to paint a shirt for herself. So, I gave her some textile paints and away she went! It's a field of flowers and a sunset, with a little reflection of the sun in the pond on the right, she says. And the field got a little dug up, hence the brown. She's all about the process when she paints, it's interesting... Half the time she'll make a really intricate picture and then paint right over it.

I think regardless how the woven shibori comes out, I'll definitely be doing more stitched shibori. All sorts of ideas floating around in my head - lots of fun!

We're off to Stowe, Vermont, for a long ski weekend, leaving tomorrow evening! Bella will be skiing on her 5th birthday, how fun!

25 Random Things About Me Meme

2009-02-19T08:28:00.007-05:00

So, lovely Ms. Shannon of Sunrise Lodge Fiber Studio tagged me with this meme - and I'm actually going to do it for once! It's harder than I thought it would be to come up with 25 random things. :)

1. I didn't learn to ski until I was about 24. And I didn't learn to snowboard until I was 31!

2. I've been weaving for almost 8 years... (is that really random? probably not, oh well!)

3. I didn't drink coffee until I was in law school. Carlos got me addicted to espresso, evil man.

4. Carlos and I lived in Texas for five years. Talk about a fish out of water!

5. I lived in Mexico City for six weeks one summer.

6. I love to cook. And bake bread

7. I don't have a favorite color. Apparently, I'm hopelessly indecisive.

8. My laptop is purple. :) So is my mouse.

9. In no particular order, I absolutely loved visiting London, Madrid, Florence, Avignon, Edinburgh, Bath, Munich, Sienna and Rome. But Paris is at the top of my "absolutely MUST return" list. Followed by Barcelona, and then Venice.

10. In the summer, I grow tomatoes and zucchini in my front yard.

11. I REALLY need a haircut.

12. I loathe clothes shopping. Booooring. Unless it's for the kids or shoes. Then it's fun!

13. We have two adopted kitty cats. Meow.

14. I drove through Yellowstone Park in 1988 when the forest fires were raging.

15. I'm a complete nerd.

16. I have really big feet.

17. I always wanted red hair to go with my freckles and fair skin and green eyes. Bella got the gorgeous hair! :)

18. I have four older brothers, 3 nephews, 6 nieces, 2 great-nephews, 1 great-niece and another great niece or nephew on the way (hello to pregnant niece Timothea in England!). I was a great-aunt before I had kids of my own!

19. My snowboard cost more than my wedding gown. (Carlos thinks I shouldn't tell people this, but I find it quite funny and very fitting.)

20. We closed on our house on my 35th birthday. Some present!

21. I learned to knit while driving across the country during college (see #14).

22. I play piano. Badly. I also play flute. Well. :)

23. I read voraciously. (And I really do talk like that. Gah.)

24. I love Dwell magazine.

25. I'm trying to think of something else that's just about me. I keep wanting to talk about the kids or Carlos! Oh. Got one. I was a cheerleader in high school. Yikes.

OK, I'm off to tag my niece Timothea! :) I probably can't find 25 people to tag that haven't already been tagged, so I'm not even going to try... Though if you comment here, I'll tag you! :)

Waaaaay Behind

2009-02-16T13:17:00.002-05:00

Gah. So much, once again, for doing it all. I haven't posted in ages. I haven't visited other people's blogs in ages, either! Thank you so much to everybody who's been commenting on my blog regardless of my lameness, I promise I will make the rounds soon to catch up with everybody.

I don't even really have much of an excuse for it - the legal work has been on hold for a little while, so it's just life as normal around here. Sold a couple of scarves at Open Studios last week, that's always nice. I've also been experimenting with these little guys:

Little fibery beads! They're about an inch long, woven with 20/2 silk and that yummy Dragon Tale's variegated rayon. Making them stick has been a challenge, but I think I have it figured out. Though my brain might just be addled from the glue fumes, I'm not sure.

Purple ones, too!

And a bracelet that I made - one of my first attempts at actually making jewelry. I'm terrible. LOL. But I can completely see why people get addicted to it, it's so much fun!

I'm also conducting a little experiment... With the new-ish batch uploading at Etsy, views are a bit slower in coming. So I listed the berry colored beads on both Etsy and Artfire at approximately the same time, I'm curious to see where I get more views! (My money is still on Etsy, but this will be interesting.) I'm terrible about promoting, so we'll see.

OK, off to get some weaving done. Or maybe some cleaning. My house is a complete wreck, as usual... Time to print out my Fly Lady - inspired cleaning task list and get to it!

City and Skiing

2009-02-03T15:58:00.006-05:00

I'm way behind on posting, so these pictures are actually about *last* weekend! This is where my weekend started...

Just off the T (subway) at Park Street, the Boston Common is to the left, the Freedom Trail is right under my feet, and that's the Massachusetts State House and Beacon Hill straight ahead.

View across Boston Common towards Back Bay.

View looking out over the Financial District of Boston. Back when I was a full time lawyer, I worked in that smaller-ish skyscraper in the middle (with the pyramid shaped top) - back when I bought my first loom, actually, and taught myself to weave.

Ms. B on Sunday, a very different sort of day. I forget how little she is sometimes, pictures like this remind me she's still only 4!

Bella and Conall.

Yup, the bunny slope is officially way to easy for her. (She slalomed those little green whiskers without even thinking about it.) Think we'll be hitting the chair lift tomorrow!

See you on the slopes!

Busy Week - And a Return to the Dark Side?

2009-01-27T12:20:00.006-05:00

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

2009-01-21T11:09:00.006-05:00

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!

2009-01-19T11:19:00.004-05:00

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...

2009-01-15T11:00:00.005-05:00

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!

2009-01-14T11:32:00.003-05:00

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

2009-01-13T09:12:00.006-05:00

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?

2009-01-11T12:59:00.004-05:00

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

2009-01-07T09:40:00.006-05:00

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!

A New Twist on an Old Design

2008-12-30T12:38:00.005-05:00

So, I've fallen in love with this fantastic Mongolian cashmere that I found, as you may have noticed... And I'm also still really intrigued with shadow-weave (most of my bamboo scarves that I made over the past year have been in various shadow-weave structures). I did play around with using the cashmere as the weft in some mixed-twill scarves, and liked that, but I really do enjoy designing/weaving shadow-weave a lot more than just twill. (Who knew I'd ever find a structure that would keep me this occupied!)

So, I decided to give a mixed warp of Bambu7 and the 2-ply cashmere a whirl... I normally sett my Bambu7 at 16 epi (a little loose, perhaps, but I like to give the yarn room to move when I wash it), so that's where I started.

There it is, going into the sink to soak! The black yarn is the cashmere, and I used a couple shades of Bambu as the lighter blues and greys (hard to tell in this photo). It came out nicely after the wash (it's air drying at the moment) and now I'm warping another one to sett at 20 epi instead of 16, just to see how it turns out. I'll keep you posted!

It's fun to be back to weaving a little bit after the busyness of last week... we have Open Studios at WAS this Saturday, but I have nothing, basically, to sell! Eeks! Ah well, it's always nice just to chat with the people that come through, and get some work done, too.

Handmade Christmas Presents

2008-12-29T07:55:00.006-05:00

So, I've been meaning to post a couple of things that I bought from various artists on Etsy for Christmas...

Love this belt buckle from Etsy seller Metalogical (bought it for Carlos):

The whole idea of actually forging something in this day and age really caught my fancy. And Carlos likes it too!

Another present for Carlos - a t-shirt with a graphic of a Puerto Rican petroglyph of the Coqui (Carlos used to fall asleep listening to Coquis when he was a little guy):

This shirt is from Etsy seller AmaAmo - I was soooo impressed with her packaging and service. She's a newbie on Etsy but she is just incredibly professional.

And, finally, for me:

Hooray! A ring from TreAnelli that I've been wanting forever! I've been wearing it every day, middle finger of my right hand - that's one of the really nice things about Etsy, you can get something like a ring in whatever size you need, generally.

Merry Christmas to All

2008-12-24T08:11:00.003-05:00

Kind of a dark photo, but you get the idea, right? We got about two FEET of snow over the weekend. Crazy.

The kids stayed in, for the most part (painting in the kitchen, here, Bella paints practically every day, but this was Conall's first time - so happy he didn't eat any of the paint!).

I decorate the mantel in our living room differently every year. This year, it's little origami trees - I made one and then couldn't stop. Kind of like chips. Or ski runs.

Carlos and I were up far too late last night wrapping presents... I still have to bake cookies and start crescent rolls for the trip to Ginga's (my Mum's) house, plus we're seeing the Nutcracker today at noon - I have a feeling I won't be sleeping much tonight, either. At least there are no complicated toys to assemble this year! (Best toy of the year, IMO - a Harrisville Easy Weaver loom for Ms. B. I even bought Liz Gipson's Weaving Made Easy for her.)

Merry Christmas to everybody! If you're somebody who normally gets a card from us and haven't gotten it, it's because I'm hopelessly lame and haven't sent them out, I'm sorry. I'm hoping to get some out for the New Year - but, in the meantime, I hope you have a lovely holiday!

Snow!

2008-12-20T10:59:00.004-05:00

Well, I do believe we are going to have a White Christmas this year!

We got about 10 - 12" last night (still flurrying a little now), of fluffy white, nice snow. How pretty!

The kids are having fun, though Conall isn't too sure of the deep stuff.

Trying to get the driveway cleared out - we're thinking of doing some cross country skiing this afternoon, probably during Conall's nap (we have a big sled/poulk that Carlos made to pull the kids along behind whoever is skiing, but Conall doesn't want to sit in it, though he did last year).

I was thinking of dragging everybody up to Pat's Peak in New Hampshire tomorrow to get Bella's seasonal rental skis and maybe ski a little, but I've just heard that we're getting another storm tomorrow! And we're right where the weather changes in our region - Boston is supposed to just get maybe a couple inches, but we're just into the zone that is supposed to get anywhere from 5" - 10" *more* tomorrow. Crazy.

Hopefully the weather will hold on Wednesday... We're attempting the Nutcracker again, lol. We got completely stuck in a HUGE traffic jam on Thursday night trying to get in to Boston and Bella completely fell asleep, so we didn't actually see it. Argh! I managed to get more tickets for Christmas Eve, though, and it starts at noon, so no chance she'll fall asleep this time! (Learned my - VERY expensive - lesson!)

I love winter. I know I'm nuts, but I really love winter and snow....

Over the Holiday Rush?

2008-12-18T09:51:00.004-05:00

I can't seem to relax this week. I'm shipping out my last custom order this morning...

(It's an Ms and os bamboo scarf in shades of brown - had a hard time photographing it, the weather has not been cooperating lately!) I've had a busy week on Etsy and at the studio (Open Studios for the last two weekends means that my house is a complete wreck), but I think things should calm down now for a couple weeks.

But I keep feeling like I'm forgetting something.

Oh yeah! The Christmas tree!

LOL. We're really late this year. But I figure that's one week or so less of keeping Conall from trying to pull it over. And house cleaning, Christmas cards, wrapping presents (which I actually have managed to buy, amazing), weaving a couple scarves for some nieces, the Nutcracker tonight (Bella's first trip to see the Boston Ballet), Conall's second birthday is just two weeks after Christmas...

So I'm working on spending a day doing not very much today. My Mum will arrive this afternoon to go to the Ballet with Bella and I, there's a big snow storm on the way for tomorrow, I'm making slow cooker beef stew for dinner, and I'm thinking of making some little origami Christmas trees to decorate the fireplace mantle. I hope everybody is having a similarly relaxing day!

Ice Storm! And Handwoven

2008-12-13T08:05:00.006-05:00

Good grief. If you're not in New England, you probably don't know, but Massachusetts/Southern New Hampshire were hit with a HUGE ice storm Thursday night/yesterday. We lost power for the whole day yesterday - got it back around 9pm, I think. We spent the night in a hotel - it was supposed to get down to about 19 last night - too cold to spend the night in a house without heat! (And little man Conall is sick, too, to make things more complicated.) It looks like Worcester is a huge mess, yikes... (one of my brothers lives there - another lives a bit south of Worcester and didn't get any ice!).

On the bright side of things, the latest issue of Handwoven magazine arrived yesterday, and my ruffley scarves are in it! Hooray!

This was a fun project, I actually got a lot of input from Madelyn van der Hoogt on it. The scarves started out like this:

And, after a lot of back and forth, ended up like this:

(The photos in Handwoven are so good!!) The project scarf is actually in the berry colorway, like the little one above, but I didn't have a chance to take pictures of it, I was weaving right up to the deadline, it actually went into the mail still damp, lol! (After my dear little son got into the laundry room, pushed buttons on the washing machine and sent it - the berry one - through the wash a third time - ahhhh! LOL! It shrank a bit more than I expected, needless to say. This child, I'm tellin' ya...)

Anyway, it was such a fun project! And the Dragon Tales yarn is just so gorgeously colored, it's hard to go wrong with it...

Well, here's hoping today gets back to normal. I theoretically have Open Studios, and I also have a couple of cashmere scarves to send out to Etsy customers, goodness. Time to get going!

Open Studios Coming Up!

2008-12-01T11:07:00.006-05:00

So, did everyone go shopping on Friday? I'm actually pretty proud of us for *not* going out shopping, lol... We did buy some outdoor Christmas lights and put them up, though, so that was fun. It even flurried here a little bit on Sunday (didn't stick though, rats).

And I sold the sister to my cashmere scarf that I posted about earlier. Barely got it listed on Etsy, and now it's off to Chicago...

Love that cashmere... I've got two with navy stripes in the works (too dreary to take good photos, waiting for some sun), and have some on my loom with yellow in the stripe that are looking pretty cool, too. I'm pleased - and they're fast to weave, since they're twill (my shadow-weave bamboo scarves take two shuttles, so they're a little slower). I'm hoping to warp and weave a couple more sets of the variegated rayon scarves as well. All this because we've got the Holiday Open Studios coming up at Western Avenue over the next two weekends - Saturday and Sunday both weekends, from noon - 5pm.

And, finally, I'll be delivering five pieces to a new shop in Chelmsford, hopefully today - one of the WAS artists is opening a shop about five minutes away from our house! How fun! (We live near the center of our town, it's nice to be able to walk to the library, the grocery store, etc.) Even better, her shop is *right* along the new bike path that is being built through Chelmsford (as part of the Rails to Trails network, very excited to have it here). So, while I wouldn't exactly recommend biking while wearing a scarf, it will be great exposure for her shop...

(Oh - and I'm about halfway through New Moon, the second book in the Twilight series... Jacob has definitely taken a turn for the grumpier, but I still like him better than Edward, lol! I thought I was going to finish the book yesterday, but I was good and went to the studio to weave, instead...)

Twilight

2008-11-29T09:23:00.003-05:00

OK, so this is completely off-topic...

I'm finally getting around to reading the Twilight series (no, I haven't seen the movie, I probably won't.) I've finished the first book and have started the second (New Moon) - and I am enjoying it. It's schlock, but it's enjoyable schlock, if that makes sense. (I really enjoy indulging in this sort of escapism sometimes.) Very readable, generally quickly paced (dragged a little in the middle when it was just about the two of them being happy together - that's never particularly compelling reading, is it? lol!), and she makes the Olympic Peninsula sound wonderfully lush.

But, I have to say - and I can picture all the teenage girls out there wailing in disbelief - Edward (the male protagonist/vampire) annoys the HECK out of me. LOL!! Yes, yes, I get that he's stunningly beautiful in that cold, alabaster way, and noble and such, but, good lord, is he ever morose and boring. And Bella (the female protagonist, not my daughter, lol) is alarmingly calflike and moonstruck around him. Just what I always like to see - an otherwise interesting woman that becomes complete brainless mush around the guy she's in love with (that's heavy sarcasm, there).

So, at the risk of spoiling the story line a little bit - I'm really hoping that when (I'm assuming that won't be an "if" but I haven't gotten that far yet) Edward comes back that she'll keep a bit more of her backbone/wits about her. I'm also really REALLY hoping that she'll eventually chose Jacob (minor character in the first novel, may or may not be a werewolf, I haven't found out yet) over poopyhead Edward.

Of course, I may be projecting, here. One of my very loveliest friends in college was a whole heck of a lot like Jacob - 6' 4", gorgeous mahogany skin, long, dark hair (my college friend is Navajo), incredibly intelligent, just plain nice, generous and always upbeat - just the kind of guy you'd hope for your daughter to choose. C'mon, Bella Swan, smarten up!

Any other opinions out there? Am I in the complete minority by liking Jacob better than Edward? Or does that just mean I'm old? It will be interesting to see how the characters develop, at any rate!

Cashmere....

2008-11-25T11:39:00.003-05:00

Oh my. I splurged and got a bunch of skeins of cashmere yarn...

I used it as the weft in a couple of twill scarves - that's bamboo in the warp - and, oh my, they turned out so soft and snuggly, I love them! I actually wound all of my bobbins by hand as I was weaving, if you can believe it, lol, just because the cashmere yarn feels soooooo good. I could spend the day petting the stuff!

Not much else going on. My berry pie scarf is in a very nice berry-themed treasury on Etsy, that's always nice! (Click on that link to see it.) Thanks to Karen Garner (the curator) for including me in it!

It's raining cats and dogs here today, but Stowe (Vermont), at least, seems to be getting snow, hooray! Can't wait to hit the slopes! Soon. Still have to get Bella fitted for seasonal rental equipment, but I'm looking forward to it - it will be so much easier this year now that Conall is walking! (Kept worrying about him wanting to crawl around the ski lodges last year, not a good place for a little guy, but he'll be fine this year.)

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

A Colorful Weekend...

2008-11-18T08:52:00.004-05:00

Our family bid farewell to a very beloved friend this weekend...

Mr. SkiingWeaver's purple car has gone to a new home! (That's little man Conall on his "bike" next to it...) The poor thing has been sitting in our garage for about three years, not working, until my brother Andy decided to adopt it and do the little fix-ups it needed to get back on the road.

I suppose it's a little silly to be sentimental about a car, but it was Carlos' first-ever car (bought when he graduated from college) and we drove it all over the Southwest when we lived in Austin. Many fond memories of road-tripping in the purple car to Taos to ski, or off to explore Mesa Verde and Telluride... But, it's good to see it out and about again instead of gathering dust (literally) in our garage.

I was obviously having a hard time concentrating on actually *weaving* at the studio this weekend....

But at least I finally painted my studio door! This is the inside view, looking out to the corridor - the door frame is a dark chocolate brown, the door itself is teal, and on the outside there's a border on the wall of the same purple as the pillar in the studio.

So, not particularly productive on the weaving front, but I still feel like I got something accomplished. We're having Open Studios the first two weekends of December (Saturday and Sunday both weekends), and I was really wanting to paint over the boring grey on my door, and get some color out in the hall, too... I have very little inventory for those Open Studios - eeks! - but I'm working on kind of letting go of the stress and just going with what I'll be able to get done before then... I've sold a whole heck of a lot of work already this fall, so it's ok if I don't sell much more... Or so I keep telling myself!

Spinning again - and a Drumlin

2008-11-10T12:43:00.010-05:00

So, I spun a bit again on Sunday, how fun. Here's the results of my second ever attempt:

Ha! How fun! I'm really enjoying it, and it was a nice little reward/break after threading a new warp on my loom at my studio...

Sold yet another piece today:

It's tencel and variegated rayon from Dragon Tale yarns - I used this same colorway for my project that is going to be published in the upcoming January/February issue of Handwoven. (The directions will be for a different colorway, though...)

And, finally, while downloading photos from my camera today, I found this one that I took about ten days ago - we were on a little trip down to Lancaster to buy some apples and stopped by the drumlin there (it's preservation land now, and it's lovely). Aren't drumlins neat? (Click here to read about them on Wiki if you don't know what I'm talking about!) (Yes, I admit it, I'm a bit of a geology nerd.)

Hard to capture the shape of it, this one might do a little better...

Spinning! And Weavers' Guild of Boston Sale

2008-11-08T20:11:00.004-05:00

Can you believe how completely lame I am about blogging lately? I guess when things get hectic, this is one of the low-priority items for me, sad to say...

At any rate, in fiber news, two exciting things happened today. First, I learned how to spin! Really, really badly! But I think I may be hooked. I took a beginning spinning class at the Fiber Loft in Harvard, Mass., got my knuckles good and bloody learning how to card fleece and spun some really lumpy yarn on a Louet S10. Which came home with me after the class. (No, I didn't buy it, I'm just renting it for the month to try to get the hang of this a little better. I'll definitely look for one with two treadles when I buy a wheel...) The teacher said I took to it like a duck takes to water, but I think I'm going to need a lot of practice before I get usable yarn (I'm picky).

So much fun, and my respect for the fantastic handspinners on Etsy has gone through the roof. Like lovely Ms. Maple of North Star Alpacas - wow, how on earth does she get her handspun so beautifully even??

I mean, look at that! Wow. (And click on it to buy it!) I bow to a master...

The other bit of fun fiber news was that the Weavers' Guild of Boston annual sale was this week, Thursday evening through this afternoon. I just popped down to Weston to pick up my unsold items - and found out I sold 12 pieces! (Half of the items I brought to them.) I'm most pleased! My etsy shop and studio are going to be pretty darn bare again, and the holiday open studios at Western Avenue Studios are still coming up, gulp!

No wonder I haven't been blogging much lately... I'm off to make the rounds and read some of my favorite blogs, I feel like I haven't visited anyone in ages! I'm sorry!

Anniversary and Another Loom?

2008-10-06T15:24:00.006-05:00

Happy Anniversary to us! Carlos actually had to remind me this morning, how lame am I? (Work has been completely insane for him and I'm stressed about finding time to weave and take care of the kids, and the date just completely slipped my mind...)

We were married on October 6, 2000 - although we were together for so long before we got around to getting married (nearly six years) (good grief, we're going on 14 years together!), the wedding was almost an afterthought. We were all about the honeymoon, anyway (three weeks in Spain!), the wedding was more for our families than for us.

There he is, our very own Big Papi. (This was taken outside of the Palais du Papes in Avignon, France, just about two years ago on the nose - Ms. B certainly has gotten bigger since then!)

And there he is on our honeymoon in Segovia, Spain, in October 2000. Fewer grey hairs then! (Kids will do that to you, won't they?)

And, in weaving news, I think I may have stumbled across a new (to me) loom... Uh-oh. A used 40" AVL 16-shaft compu-dobby with two sectional warp beams, six reeds, spool rack/tension box (no idea how to use these, lol, but I'll learn, I'm sure!), electric bobbin winder, ball winder and a very good price... Oh my. I'm hoping to go see it in action when the work craziness dies down for Carlos after this weekend.

Apple Picking Trip in New England

2008-09-30T12:34:00.005-05:00

Bella and I went on her nursery school's annual apple picking field trip yesterday. Kind of a misty, cool day - a real switch from last year, when it was blazing hot.

Drew is prepared... (Bella thinks he's wicked funny.)

Yum! Though, while we were picking apples, the mosquitoes were out in force - we need a good frost to kill those little suckers off.

Some fall color for niece Timothea, who is missing it while living in the U.K. It's just getting started here...
Classic New England stone wall.

They had a little farm area for the kids to run around in, too, after we picked apples.

Comparing pumpkins with her friend Regan...

Neat. If we ever have a farm, she can handle the tractor-driving duties. :)

A really fun trip, and it certainly makes it feel like fall!

Second Day of Open Studios - Wow Am I Tired

2008-09-28T21:47:00.005-05:00

Phew, nothing quite like being "on" for two days in a row, I was really drooping by the time 5pm rolled around yesterday at WAS. I thought the foot traffic was a little lighter, but I still managed to sell two more scarves (despite the sparse look of my display racks - they really do sell better when they have company), and I wrote my first-ever wholesale order (six scarves, to be delivered on November 1st).

So, all in all, a very, very successful weekend! Man, though, I don't know how people on the art/craft show circuit do it. I feel like I could sleep for a week. But I get to do it all over again this coming Saturday for our normal First Saturday Open Studios. Here's hoping I can get a couple of pieces finished before then - my racks are looking pretty sadly bare.

The other fun aspect of the weekend was having my little loom set up with a play warp for people to try weaving on. A surprising number of people gave it a whirl - mostly kids, but some grown-ups, too. I had a huge amount of fun explaining a little bit and then watching them try.

It's interesting how you can kind of read how much information people want - some people just want to throw the shuttle, make a mess, and have fun with it for a couple minutes, others want to learn a little bit more about what makes good cloth. Also interesting to see that sometimes thinking too much about things bogs people down - some of the best novice weavers were kids that listened just enough but then didn't worry about things too much and actually managed to have a reasonably even beat and non-wonky selvedges. The whole experience made me realize that I might really enjoy teaching, some time down the line (enough on my plate at the moment!).

Open Studios - Holy Smokes!

2008-09-27T17:54:00.005-05:00

Wow!

So today was the first day of the Lowell-wide Open Studios - it was a rainy but not particularly cold day today, so I was really unsure of how well I'd do... Happily, I was an early bird today (setting up my small loom with warp for people to try weaving on), and I sold several scarves before the Open Studios even officially started at 11am.

(A pretty bad picture of my inventory in my studio before Open Studios actually started.)

All in all, I sold TEN scarves! Wowzers! Five of them never even made it into my Etsy shop - including all three scarves from the Not for the Faint of Heart warp (loved weaving those, such fun colors)...

Turns out I only took photos of *one* of these completed scarves - whoopsie...

Another lesson I learned today - I need to come up with some kind of code to write down on receipts so that I know who bought which scarf. I know which scarves sold, but mostly just be default, not to due to any kind of competent book-keeping on my part.

So, all in all, a very successful day. No idea if the success will continue in to tomorrow - my racks are starting to look a little sparse, I need to rearrange things a bit. And boy do I need to weave more!!

Weaver's Guild of Boston

2008-09-23T08:10:00.004-05:00

Goodness, I meant to post about this a while ago - we had our first Guild meeting of the year a couple of Wednesdays ago now. Always nice to catch up a little bit with people - and I'm finally starting to get to know some of the people there. (I'm pretty shy in social situations, not that great at putting myself forward, so it's nice to be getting a bit more comfortable with this lovely group of weavers...)

It doesn't hurt that I volunteered to be an officer of sorts - I'm the Yearbook Assistant this year, and will take editing the whole thing next year. Not a hugely terrible job, but you have to be comfortable with computers. A nice side bonus is that I got to install the Guild's copy of Pagemaker on my computer.

The afternoon speaker was the very engaging Patricia Palson - a former Guild member who now lives the weaving life full time, selling at various high-end craft shows throughout the year - including Paradise City, coming up. (I really, really want to do this show.)

I so want to be her when I grow up! Not sure if I'll ever get to the point of sewing jackets like she does (I loathe my sewing machine, and I'm pretty sure the feeling is mutual), but I would love perhaps to expand into custom yardage, and create fabric for people that are on speaking terms with their sewing machines... Maybe someday. For now, my plate is quite full enough. (Stressing out this week - Open Studios, plus a custom order, plus the project for Handwoven, I've bitten off more than I can chew, I fear.)

Lowell Open Studios - Coming Up!

2008-09-21T19:39:00.005-05:00

Goodness, I can't believe it, but it's almost time for the Lowell-wide Open Studios - this Saturday and Sunday, from 11am - 5pm each day. Check out this link for a list of participating artists!

I'm actually going to bring my little loom over to the studio, warp it up with some 8/2 cotton that I have lying around, print out some treadling patterns, and let people have a go at weaving. It'll be interesting to see what kind of fabric results!

So, things are pretty crazy/hectic, trying to get things off various looms, finished, tagged, etc. To say nothing about cleaning up my studio, rearranging things a bit - I still haven't painted my studio door! Completely lame. But I have been weaving...

And I made some good progress this morning on a custom piece, which is always satisfying...

My lovely yummy toffee scarf has found a new home!

I engaged in a bit of bartering for it with my absolutely fab friend Eve who has a studio down the hall from me (La Sal Mountains Studio) and will be getting a really lovely piece of glass artwork made by her in return for a lucky relative's Christmas present - shhh, don't tell!

Happy People Dancing

2008-09-17T15:41:00.004-05:00

Oh my gosh. My fantastic niece, Timothea sent me this link today:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080722.html

(It's a video on the Astronomy Picture of the day website).

I'm too lazy to figure out how to embed video in blogspot, so, run, don't walk, and watch it! I'm serious. It completely made my day. I bawled like a baby. Stuff like this (almost) restores my faith in humanity.

Busy Season?

2008-09-14T17:46:00.005-05:00

Fall is in the air in New England... (Though, of course, as I write this, a warm front is coming through, bringing heavily humid air with it, yucko.) The leaves are already starting to change a little bit - kind of early this year, but not surprising after a very cool August.

We had Open Studios at Western Avenue Studios on Saturday September 6, and I swear if was the hottest day of the summer, it was horrible. Humid, rainy, everybody was sweating - not a great environment to sell scarves in!

But, when I got home, I discovered that a very lovely customer had purchased this scarf:

from my Etsy store. Excellent.

I shipped it off to her last Monday morning and then got a lovely note from her saying that her husband had appropriated it as soon as it arrived and could i please make another one for him? Even more excellent! so, I'll be making one in more manly colors (black, greys, blues) as soon as I can manage to finish weaving this warp:

I am seriously thinking of calling this series of scarves Not For the Faint of Heart or something like that. The colors are a lot of fun - black, purple, deep red, orange and bright pink in the warp, mostly purple and black in the weft with stripes of orange, red and pink at each end and in the middle. Yeah, it's colorful.

Apparently, I'm in the mood to work with bright colors. Does anyone else get those moods? I try to kind of balance out my color schemes for my store and studio, but sometimes i just a hankering to mix, say, orange and pink and make my eyes pop a little. And other days I prefer working with more serene color combinations...

A Long Summer Hiatus

2008-09-10T17:36:00.007-05:00

I can't believe it has been so long since I posted... Life got pretty crazy there for a while, and I lost my motivation for blogging, as well, though not my motivation for weaving. Never that!

To sum up about Convergence - it was a whole heck of a lot of fun. The second two classes that I took were about color theory - no pictures, really, to post, but they were good classes, and kind of confirmed for me that I do better than I think I do with the color stuff... In the first, we did a series of exercises with hues (setting up a grey scale and then choosing colors from a huge amount of color chips to go with each hue on the scale - a great exercise, and, I found, a lot easier when I just went with my gut and *didn't* use the little grey scale finder that the teacher gave to us). In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have signed up for two classes on color theory - they were both very good, and either one on it's own would have been sufficient (the teacher for the second one, Ruby Leslie, brought a huge amount of her very fun samples with her to illustrate how colors work together - also fantastic!).

Those colors work together, I think, at least in real life... The scarf is a little more warm than this picture shows. Kind of toffee-ish. Yum. (This is one of my old standby patterns, made in Bambu7 from Silk City.)

The exhibits were amazing - I didn't get to see as many off-campus as I would have wished, including, I'm ashamed to admit it, missing Kathy Roig's piece in the Weave and Resist exhibit (wah! lame!). But the exhibits that were in the Conference center were a lot of fun to explore... And the yardage exhibit took the cake. They hung the pieces from the center of a rotunda in the conference center - really gorgeous, so you could get the full impact of them length of cloth, or go up to the second floor and see them up close.

I've been playing with some really yummy variegated yarn that I found at Convergence lately:

I am actually going to be working on a project using this yarn for Handwoven Magazine very soon! More of the yarn is on it's way, courtesy of Earth Guild's Dragon Tale Yarn. I'm very excited about this - the design is based on the ruffled scarves that I've posted here before, and, hopefully, the project will turn out as Madelyn van der Hoogt and I hope it will and it will get published... Fingers crossed!

In family news, Ms. B started preschool today...

Who is that big girl? Goodness. (Took this picture a week or so ago, actually.) And Mr. Conall is growing like a weed...

Who is that big guy?? These pjs are a riot - I didn't realize it when I bought them, but all the little animals on them actually glow in the dark. He glows all night long. Hooray for Carters!

At any rate, for anyone who has actually been wondering - sorry about the long break, I hopefully it won't happen again. And very many thanks to anyone taking the time to read this now, after all this time... I hope all is well with all of you!

Convergence - Part Two (Classes)

2008-07-13T13:25:00.008-05:00

Good grief, so sorry about the delay to those who were looking for more posts about Convergence. I managed to get a lovely kidney infection and landed in the hospital last Wednesday with a 104.9 degree temperature after running low-grade fevers since last Saturday evening. (I kept thinking I was going to recover and it kept coming back!)

At any rate, I'm up to my eyeballs in lovely antibiotics and am feeling mostly human again, so I thought I'd post about the first couple classes I took at Convergence.

To keep this post from getting hugely long, I thought I would break up my classes into two groups of two. As you'll be able to tell, I lean towards more theory based seminars, rather than classes that teach a particular technique (I learn very well from books and actually really enjoy doing the research and learning and experimenting with various structures, techniques, etc.)

First up, The Art of Business - How to Approach Galleries, taught by Kate Anderson who used to be the director of the Duane Reede Gallery. She gave lots of good advice about what galleries look for in artists (for example - maturity of vision, consistent style, originality, whether the work is sellable, and whether it is comparable in vision/pricepoint with other work in the gallery), and how to put together a professional marketing package to send to galleries you are interested in. Kate did a wonderful job in letting us - the students - direct the discussion, and was very encouraging of questions/concerns, etc. The discussion covered a wide range of marketing-oriented topics from taking decent photographs of your work to how to put together a good C.V. I'm nowhere near the point of being ready to approach galleries yet, but I'm hoping I will be in a couple of years, so this was all very useful information.

Interestingly enough, she did make a comment in passing about Etsy when one of the other folks mentioned it - as I've been hearing quite a bit lately, it seems one needs to be cautious about mentioning Etsy in a fine art or fine craft context. On the one hand, a gallery obviously wouldn't appreciate the competition. On the other, I got the distinct impression that - how to put this delicately? That Etsy can be viewed as unprofessional/low-end, which is such a huge shame. I mean, I know there's a lot of not-too-wonderful stuff on Etsy, but there are some artists there that just blow my socks off as well - the trouble being finding the latter... But, that's a whole other - huge - topic.

The second class I took was called "Complex Pleating" and was taught by Joan Michaels Paque. Do yourself a favor and trot right over to her Flickr account and check out her fiber, paper and mixed media art, she's really very amazing. Seriously, go now!

(See what I mean?? This is from Joan's Flickr account - wowzers!)

When I first walked in, I almost walked back out, it wasn't what I was expecting from the looks of the samples on the tables at the front of the room. But boy am I ever glad I stayed! Joan was a bit disorganized, but charmingly so, and the whole topic is just fascinating - I think that she just has so much knowledge to try to instill that it's overwhelming to try to squish it into a little seminar.

I also have the feeling that if I had been able to attend her three day workshop "Experience and Explore Kinetic Dimensional Weaving, Pleat Folds and Tessellations" I would have absolutely loved it as well. I'm jealous of the people that did attend it. I'll just have to hope that I have another chance in the future (three more days away from home at this point would have been cruel and unusual punishment for poor Mr. SkiingWeaver).

Mostly what she showed us was her work with folding paper, but the mind boggles with possibilities in applying this to textiles, in my opinion...

The top piece, in orange, is actually made from fabric - the pleats and creases are ironed right in so that the fabric retains the shape. The bottom, white piece, is paper. Isn't it a great shape??

Paper again.

I absolutely fell in love with this little piece. Figured out how to make it and everything - if anybody noticed a dark-haired woman sitting at various tables in the Convention Center between classes obsessively folding graph paper (took a while to work out the angles to that it would curve enough when I did it myself) - that was me! And then I was coloring on graph paper and folding it to work out design possibilities...

Now that I've done the Convergence thing, I really, really wish I had signed up for more classes! I followed various peoples' advice (probably for the first time ever, lol) and only signed up for four classes, thinking I'd be overwhelmed with the exhibits, vendor hall, etc. I should have known myself well enough to know that four wasn't nearly enough. (I hate to say it but I'm really not much of a shopper, so I didn't spend a lot of time in the vendor hall...) When I think of those two empty afternoon slots that could have been filled with more learning, well, phooey.

But that's also a comment on the quality of the classes I took - I thought each of them was fantastic! Wonderfully friendly teachers, interesting classmates, very well done.

So, for my next post, I'll talk about my final two classes, which were on Color Theory - both very different, but both excellent as well.

Convergence - Part One (Tampa)

2008-07-02T10:36:00.005-05:00

I think I've been avoiding posting about Convergence. Probably because there is *so* much to talk about that I don't even really know where to begin...

So, I'll just begin with talking a little bit about Tampa. And then the classes I took. And, finally, some of the absolutely fantastic work (and some less than fantastic work - eeks) that I saw there. So, the easiest first - a bit about the little corner of Tampa that I was in for the Conference.

The Tampa Convention Center, where Convergence was held:

Palm tress are interesting beasties, aren't they?

Here's the view from my hotel room (I stayed at the Westin Harbor Island):

And, to get to the Conference Center, I took a short walk over the bridge...

One of the days, during lunch time, I poked around a bit in the business district of Tampa. It was sooooo HOT. Unbelievable, actually - mid-90s and crazy humid. I could never, ever live in a climate like that, I'd melt. (Made me remember one of the reasons why I was so gung-ho to move away from Texas all those years ago, Irish girls from New England literally cannot take the heat!)

Carlos (Mr. SkiingWeaver) says it sounds a lot like Puerto Rico in the summer, which makes sense.

Very neat fountain, reflected in a building. What completely cracked me up were these guys:

Check him out! Isn't he neat?? I kept seeing them meandering around downtown. I'm sure to Tampa/Florida people he's just like a pigeon, but I still thought he was pretty cool. Crazy tourist lady taking pictures of the pigeons. LOL (Is it an ibis? I'm not sure!) Hey, warm climate people take pictures of snow after all...

I took the trolley out to Ybor City (an older neighborhood, it used to be full of Cuban cigar factories), but didn't take any pictures - it's mostly restaurants and college bars now with just a few interesting shops thrown in, so it was a little disappointing. I was hoping for a little bit more of an ethnic vibe, but, no dice, rats. (To be fair, I am a tough customer - I lived in Mexico City for six weeks one summer, and we've spent a lot of time in Spain, too...)

OK, now that I've gotten started, I'll keep going. Stay tuned, I'll post about the classes that I took next (they were quite good - and now I wish I had signed up for more of them!).

Super-Mom?

2008-06-20T08:17:00.006-05:00

I often get the question - "How do you do it all?? How do you take care of the kids, the house, weave, run your Etsy shop, blog, etc.?"

Honestly - I don't. No Super-Moms around here. Though there is a Super-Bella and Super-Conall-Baby:

(They've got capes on - Bella will stand in superhero pose, fists on her hips, cape flung over her shoulders and say "Fly my cape for me, Mum!")

I neglect the housework pretty shamefully (really really need to get back on the Fly Lady schedule - I don't follow it to the letter by any means, but her idea of spending 15 minutes a day decluttering is brilliant, I think...).

And when we're getting out and about and doing summer stuff, everything slips... We've had a fun couple of weeks though.

A birthday party:

Trips to the playground with friends:

Just playing out back:

I have actually managed to post some things in my Etsy store last week and this week, too, after most of them sitting around, finished, waiting for me to get around to taking pictures of them for quite a while. That actually has gotten easier - the only tough part now is catching the good morning light in my studio.

I'm still weaving the second scarf using my second batch of hand-dyed tencel, so no updates there. (Ridiculous, those scarves are very quick to weave and I just haven't gotten around to it, argh - I did weave off the warp on my big loom in my studio on Wednesday evening, though!)

So, I neglect the housework, I neglect my blog (oops), I'm haphazard about updating my Etsy store, and I even wimped out of the June Open Studios at WAS!

And I have a super-secret weapon. Carlos (Mr. SkiingWeaver). He's fantastic. He gets up with Conall at 5:30/6am most morning and lets me sleep until 7am. (That alone is cause for sainthood.) He does dishes, handles bedtime when I go to the studio in the evening, mows the lawn (usually with only minimal prodding, lol), scoops the cat litter *and* is the V.P. at his company. Goodness.

So, obviously, I don't do it all. :) And I think anybody with kids under five years old who says they do is either compulsively organized or has a cleaning lady (wouldn't that be nice??). LOL. I just muddle through and thankfully my family doesn't freak out when I get behind on vacuuming or laundry...

Well, rats...

2008-06-11T20:26:00.007-05:00

So, a little while ago, I dyed some tencel using a new (to me) two color gradation dying technique described on the Prochemical webpage. I even posted this picture:

Well, I wove what was intended to be another ruffly/differential shrinkage scarf with the warm toned tencel, washed it, and look what happened...

Gah! Yuck! Blech! What happened to all that gorgeous color?? LOL. (Good thing I have a sense of humor about these things...)

I've dyed tencel before and had the colors stay just gorgeously, not all come out in the wash. I think it was probably the process outlined by ProChem... Normally I use urea water instead of tap water with salt in it to form the basis of the dye bath (as they describe in their Low Water Immersion dying process), so perhaps that was the problem. So, I've dyed another batch in the same colorway, using a hybrid technique to do the gradated dying, but with the urea water. Hope that does the trick! I'll keep you posted.

On other fronts, I actually managed to get a wrap listed in my Etsy shop today - my first new listing, apart from commissions, in forever. Truly lame. And this poor wrap has been waiting to be listed for weeks...

I'll be listing more this week, so stay tuned!

Artist Profile (Really Late!) - Sunrise Lodge Fiber Studio

2008-06-07T07:50:00.008-05:00

I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't even have the word "Wednesday" in my artist profiles, and instead just aim for once a week. Since I seem to be hopeless at actually getting them done on Wednesday...

At any rate, this week, I've chosen a small group of fiber artists - Shannon, Ursula and Christina of Sunrise Lodge Fiber Studio. All three women are spinners and dyers, and Shannon is a handweaver as well (and is teaching Christina how to weave, how fun!).
Oh my god. Isn't that *gorgeous*?? I so want this yarn... At Night in Gethsemane handspun yarn. The colors are just fantastic - it's a 2-ply, 11 wpi (wrap per inch) yarn with 556 yards in the skein. They're not kidding when they say you can make a whole project with one of their skeins of yarn, I love the generous size! (Oh, and if you're like me, you might want to read about the Gardens of Gethsemane, here.)

More yumminess. Sea Foam Worsted Weight handspun, 192 yards of 2ply, 10 wpi yarn.

How about some self-striping sock yarn?
If Only I Were Argyle sock yarn - I love that name! This skein has 420 yards of super wash merino/bamboo/nylon (love that bamboo!) sport weight sock yarn, plenty for a pair of socks.

How about something for the spinners out there?

Misty Morning Hand-carded Batt. This batt is 4 oz. of hand-dyed and hand-carded merino wool with a little bit of nylon and natural-colored grey alpaca. Makes me want to get out my drop spindle (though I'd never do it justice...).

Shannon of Sunrise Lodge Fiber Studio has also set up a sister Etsy store for her handwovens, Sunrise Handwovens. Check out her handwoven shibori scarf:

Yaknow, once again, somebody is proving me wrong - I've mentioned before that I'm not always wild about woven shibori, because it can come out looking really muddy, in my opinion (which I'm sure lots of people disagree with, lol). But this piece is gorgeous. Clean and beautiful, and you can actually see the results of the shibori dye technique. Bravo, Shannon!

Late Night

2008-06-02T09:36:00.007-05:00

I was up far too late last night, playing with chemicals...

So now I'm imbibing too many chemicals of a different kind (caffeine, baby, and the possibility of some extreme sugary yumminess from Fat Daddy/Bangerang Bake Shop) to stay awake...

The oranges/peaches/yellows on the left is sure to appeal to my Mum. :)

Isn't dying fun, though? These are just some sample skeins of tencel and bamboo yarn, using MX Dyes from Procion. Easy to use, it's all done a room temperature, and tencel and bamboo both take dye really nicely. The bamboo yarns are a bit lighter, it's interesting, the tencel sucks up the color a bit more intensely. So much fun to get back into this! It's been a while (since before I got pregnant with the Little Man), I had to relearn it a bit, but it's easy and fun, appeals to my nerdly sciencey side to be measuring and mixing in buckets...

Can't wait for it to dry enough to get it on my looms!

The Grace Kelley Story

2008-05-30T23:15:00.004-05:00

My big brother Owen is the family storyteller... And he sent along this wonderful story a little while ago - and I just had to share it.

So, without further ado, here is The Grace Kelley Story as told by my brother Owen (isn't Owen a great Irish name? I was dying to use it, but, yaknow, already taken and stuff, so the little man got a different Irish name instead, to go with my hubby's Puerto Rican last name.)

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On March 30 I met my friend Kevin Rich for a day of ice fishing at Tully Dam in Athol. ( Well; the dead end road where we park to get onto the reservoir is in Athol.) Kevin had some errands to run before meeting me so I had some time to wait for him. After waiting only a couple of minutes I heard a truck approach.

I thought it was too soon to be Kevin, I was correct. A young man pulled up in his truck. He got out of his truck with "Grace" in his hands. He informed me that he was abandoning her. I asked him why he wasn't bringing the kitten to a shelter. He didn't answer.. He jumped into his truck and sped away. ( I should have noted his plate number but did not.) I was sitting on the tailgate of my truck and "Grace" ran right over to me and jumped onto my lap.

A few minutes passed and Kevin showed up. He got out of his truck and asked what my new friends name was. ( Grace is completely gray.) I said she must be named "Smokey" and told him the story of how I had just met her. As we were offloading gear and firewood from my truck I dropped a piece of firewood onto "Smokey's" tail. She let out a screech and ran up a nearby pine tree.

We went fishing for the day. When we came up the hill at the end of the day Kevin must have seen me looking for the kitten. He called out "Here kitty, kitty" a number of times. I said Kev, I already have a cat at home, I don't need another one. We packed up the trucks and headed home. I was looking for "Smokey" as I drove up the dirt road. There are houses just a short way up from the dead end. I thought hopefully that she would find a home at one of the houses on the road.

Norma [Norma is Owen's wife] puts our cat Smokey out each morning on his rope in the front yard. The next morning was a rainy Monday. Norma called to me that Smokey was hissing at a small gray kitten in the front yard. I immediately thought "it can't be"; it was.

"Smokey" from the reservoir had crawled into the underside of my truck and stowed away. This kitten rode for approximately 40 miles under my truck as I drove down route 2. Needless to say; "Smokey" was brought into the house and placed in a cat carrier cage.

I thought about bringing her to the Sterling animal shelter. I slept on it for the night. When I woke the next morning I informed the family that we had a new member of the family. Her name is Grace; for only by the grace of God is she in our lives. I have never thought of myself as a cat person. I do now. When I go to bed at night Grace comes along and sleeps by my feet.

It is a remarkable story; one that I share with all who meet Grace.

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Isn't that great? Route 2 is a pretty major road that runs across Massachusetts - not a ton of traffic out in this area, but everybody moves right along at 65+ m.p.h. That cat really was meant to belong to Owen, I think!

Wow, I'm pretty lame, this is the only picture I found that included a shot of Owen (apart from our wedding photos, but those aren't in electronic form...) That's him, in the grey sweater in the middle of the doorway, facing away from the camera, talking to two of his children. Norma is the lovely lady in the purple shirt sitting in front of him. That's my oldest brother, Mark, in the plaid shirt on the left.

This is from Christmas at my Mum's (she's in the front of the picture, sitting, in the red sweater, in profile) house several years ago - it's always a complete madhouse, with over 20 people packed into not a lot of space (I have four older brothers, 6 nieces, three nephews, a great-niece and two great-nephews [with more in the works, lol, my oldest nieces are closer in age to me than most of my brothers, I was a real tail-ender], it's a big family when we all get together and spouses/significant others all come along...).

I'm going to have to do a better job of taking pictures of everybody next time we're all together!

Wednesday Artist Profile - Gock's Frocks

2008-05-28T13:10:00.006-05:00

We were walking back from the library a little while ago and I realized that I hadn't done my Wednesday artist profile yet - oops! At the same time I was thinking about how nice Ms. B looked in one of her new summer outfits, and thought - oooh, kids clothes, that's fun!

Which led me to thinking of the absolutely delightful Kristen of Gock's Frocks. (Even if she is a Yankees fan, lol...) I love the clothes she makes! For example...

Check out that beautiful skirt! Made with gorgeous Moda fabric - I love those colors (perfect for red-headed Ms. B! Hmmmm.....) And, as an add-on, she can make you a custom shirt to go with the skirt:

Great outfit. (And absolutely darling model!)

How about a three piece outfit?

I love the detail! The ruffles on the pants, the coordinating kerchief, it's fantastic.

OK, one more item. Something for my little walking man:

So adorable!!

One last thing - if you would like to check out her wares in person and you live in the New York area, visit Vida's Market on May 31! It runs from 10 am - 7 pm and is at Wallace Hall in Saint Ignatius Loyola Church at 980 Park Ave. (between 83 and 84th Streets) in New York City. For more information about the Vida's Market, visit its website. And to learn a little more about Kristen, visit her blog!

About Time!

2008-05-27T11:47:00.006-05:00

Hooray, the Little Man is walking! (He's 16 1/2 months at this point, so he's a bit late - his big sister walked at 15 months just about on the nose, also on the late side - they're both quite large, I guess large kids tend to walk a little later, according to their doctor, who wasn't particularly worried - I love their doctor, he actually *listens* to me, amazing, he's great.)

Want to see some pictures? :)

There he goes! Too funny, they're so cute when they're first figuring it out. I guess he was just finally ready - he's been pushing one of his trucks around a lot lately, and Sunday was just the day! (Shaggy grass in the back yard.)

He's feeling *so* much bigger lately (I swear they grow overnight), but he's still pretty darn little next to our Big Papi...

Somebody likes the camera.

He's been walking all over the place since Sunday - backing up, turning around, going around things, squatting down and picking stuff up... Ginga (my Mum) called it - he waited a while to get around to it, but now he's a pro, with very minimal wipe-outs.

Hope everyone had a nice long weekend!

Front Page - Thanks to the Storque!

2008-05-22T18:21:00.008-05:00

So, for those of you who aren't Etsy-people (Etsiers? Etsians? Etsites? Something like that...), a little explanation is in order. The Storque is Etsy's online Newletter for sellers, buyers, browsers, anyone who just wants to keep up a little bit with the goings-on in the Etsy World.

They have a series of Spotlight articles - including the recent Gift Ideas: Teacher Teacher. And my lemongrass green tencel lace scarf is one of the featured gift ideas! Neato! Always tickled to be noticed by the PTBs (PTBs = Powers That Be for you non-Buffy fans out there).

And to make it even more neato, it made the front page! Let's see if I can manage to get my screencap here for you (saved it in a little different way this time, so we'll see...)

Itty bitty. LOL. But there it is! :) It's this scarf/sash, in case you're interested:

It's the sister to the green lace scarf that sold in about two seconds flat. (It's cousin, a similar one but in solid adobe also set a speed record - for me - for selling!) And it's also part of the series that I developed based on my design that was published in Handwoven.

Hmm. Maybe this is the figurative kick in the rear that will get me going/motivated again. It's getting really hard to make myself go in to the studio on weekends, which are usually my productive time! And this is theoretically the time of year when I should be stocking up for fall... Not happening so far, but that's ok, it's nice to be selling still when I thought I'd be well into my summer slowdown by now.

Anybody else have motivation problems when the weather gets nice?

Wednesday Artist Profile - Amanda Sainsbury

2008-05-21T09:00:00.003-05:00

Finally, another profile! I've been having severe motivation problems now that the weather has gotten nicer... Even finding it hard to get my rear over to my studio. (Not good! This is when I should be building up inventory!)

I've seen Amanda Sainsbury's work around Etsy a bit lately - she has a really strong design sense, in my opinion, and her work catches my eye every time.

5 Small Knitted Buttons. Aren't they neat? And aren't her colors great? (Maybe that's why I like her work so much, I love her color sense.)

She makes trim in all sorts of lovely colors, too!

Or how about a selection of knitted beads? In purples, too - purple is sooo the color this year. :)

She also makes fabric that you could use to make something fantastic... (She has some Orange Circles fabric that just really appeals to me. Go check it out.)

OK, one last photo of some of her yummy Spring Knitted Buttons...

Lovely shop. And outstanding photos, don't you think? I've been noticing that the overall quality of photos on Etsy seems to be improving... Or maybe there are just enough experienced sellers now that the folks that wind up on the front page are just all doing a stellar job with their photography. It's great to see!

Wednesday Artist Profile - KMR Handwoven

2008-05-07T09:32:00.009-05:00

After last Wednesday's lapse (sorry!), I thought I'd profile a handweaver as a special treat. The fantabulous Kathie of KMR Handwoven really caught my eye when she joined EtsyFAST (the Fiber Arts Street Team).

Isn't this towel great?? I love a weaver with a sense of humor! And she did a great job photographing it, too - that yellow pepper is a very nice touch - as we all know, decent photography for an Etsy shop is not only crucially important, it can also be pretty darn difficult.

More goodies...

She has several handwoven check book cases and coin purses in her shop. See what I mean about that good photography? More great pictures. And, since I'm terrible about sewing with my handwoven fabric, I have great admiration for those who do!

Tote bags too!

While chatting with Kathie, I found out all sorts of interesting things about her weaving. For instance, she weaves on a drawloom. I've never seen one in person, but she got me all interested in them and I've been doing research (even found a place near here where I could take a little workshop on one, how fun). Here's a picture she sent me of her drawloom:

Hmm. Kind of small, but you get the idea - it's a beast, isn't it?? It has two sets of harnesses - one set for structure and one set for a pattern - and with a drawloom you can weave any sort of pattern that you can draft on graph paper...

Can you see the detail in that photo? These are some baby bibs that she wove on her drawloom - adorable or what?? She needs to get these in her Etsy shop, pronto. :) Boy, though, does the idea of a drawloom appeal to me...

A couple of notes for the weavers that may be reading this - if you are going to Convergence in Tampa this June (I am! I can't wait!), you can see some of Kathie's wall pieces in the Weave and Resist Exhibit at Hillsborough Community College in Ybor City, Tampa. (How cool is that??)

And she is also in Catherine Ellis' book, Woven Shibori. Her piece is on p.86 - and, once again, it was woven on her draw loom before she did a shibori discharge. It is *gorgeous*.

I'm not always a huge fan of woven shibori (sorry, folks, but in my opinion, I think people can make some very muddy-looking pieces using this technique - though I must say I really like Catherine Ellis' work, not muddy at all), but Kathie's piece is beautiful. I'm looking forward to seeing her work in the exhibit at Convergence!

And, just on a personal note, I have had a fabulous time chatting with Kathie over email. She's just one of those lovely people that you would love to live closer to... (I've met quite a few of people like this through EtsyFAST - maybe it's something about working with fiber.)

Follow- Up On the Time Question - and a Teaching Question

2008-05-04T07:09:00.009-05:00

First of all, a big apology to anyone who was looking for my Wednesday artist profile this past week and missing it... I was just swamped (and, let's admit it, completely lame). But, for a special treat, I'm planning to profile a weaver this coming Wednesday!

She is lucky enough to live near here!

So, folks, thanks so much to everyone who commented on the previous post. I took all of your advice to heart, as well as some wonderful advice from the EtsyFAST folks, too - and put it to good use at yesterday's Open Studios at Western Avenue Studios.

First of all, despite kind of a record low turn-out (it was kind of a yucky day here yesterday, it didn't surprise me that not a lot of people showed up) - I sold four pieces! I was tickled!

So, this scarf, among others, has a new home. (Always had a soft spot for this one - I wear it's twin sister that has a threading error in it - I took the colors from a painting that my daughter made.)

Secondly, I think I came up with a way that works for me to answer the dreaded "time" question. First, I changed my attitude and decided to attribute the question just to curiosity. Especially since during Open Studios my loom is right there, often with work in progress on it, of course people want to hear about the process. So, I spend a lot of time giving a quick run-down of the warping process and how a loom works to folks - it's really wonderful to see how interested people are!

And, when they ask the time question, I usually give a bit longer answer, based on some of the replies I got here, actually! Something like: "Well, I've been weaving pretty steadily for seven years now (funny how as a weaver that makes me a neophyte, but non-weavers think that's a long time, lol), when I first started it probably took me about 3X, though I didn't time myself then. Even a year or so ago, it took me about 2X. I've gotten really efficient in the past year and a half since I've started selling, though, and have my time down to X. Unless I make mistakes that need fixing..." (I'm a typical NorthEastern Yankee fast talker, so that goes by faster than it looks.)

OK, if you've made it this far - I have another question for you! Do you have people ask about you giving lessons? I'm amazed at how many people ask me if I teach when they come through during Open Studios.

I'm thinking that for the big Lowell-city-wide Artists Open Studios in late September that I'm going to bring my little four-shaft loom over, too, and set it up with a sample warp and let people have at it. We get a lot of kids through, too, and I think they might get a kick out of that...

I would love to teach someday, but at the moment, at least, I barely have enough time to weave! Maybe when both munchkins are old enough to be in school.

Any teachers out there? Do you give private lessons, one-on-one, or do you teach groups? I imagine it's a lot of work, but also really rewarding.

Anybody who happened to read my Endnotes column in Handwoven will probably realize that Rita Steinbach, my teacher at the Worcester Center for Crafts, was just crucial in giving me that push that I needed to move into designing my own work. (Thank you, Rita!!) Anywho, I would love to hear about your experiences!

Time - How Do You Answer?

2008-04-25T10:11:00.005-05:00

OK, first a picture, just because a blog post without any pictures is kind of boring...

It's spring! :) (Thanks so much to Tia Lexi and Tio Ernesto for sending along Conall's funny little ATV.)

So, my question is for the weavers/craftspeople out there who sell their work - when you sell in person and somebody asks you how long it took to make them, how do you answer?

I just know that people that don't know a lot about weaving will take my answer and think "Hmm, she's paying herself X per hour!" And that makes me really uncomfortable. Especially since it's taken me years and years of practice to get to the point where I am an efficient/relatively fast weaver. Oh - and an EtsyFAST person raised a good point - I definitely take *all* of the process into account when figuring out my time, including designing, dressing the loom, the actual weaving, twisting fringe, finishing, etc.

I often try to dodge the question by saying something like "Well, it depends on how complicated the weave structure is, whether I'm using two shuttles, the size of the yarn..." But some people are really persistent... I don't mind telling people that I give things to if they ask (but, understandably, I guess, they tend *not* to ask). But it bothers me in a business context.

Anybody else out there bothered by this? Am I being overly sensitive? Should I just lay it out there and then talk fast about how they're getting unique, high-quality item, blah-blah-blah? (I'm not one who loves to give a pushy sales pitch, either...)

Wenesday Artist Profile - JeMSjewels

2008-04-23T09:39:00.009-05:00

And now for something completely different... I love my fiber friends, but I thought it might be nice to feature a different kind of seller this week. Mindy's shop, JeMSjewels has really managed to catch my eye.

Isn't that a lovely necklace? It's a Made to Order Mother's Day Birthstone Necklace. You let Mindy know the birthstones that you want included (for your kids, hubby, yourself, whomever you wish), and she'll make you a lovely, custom necklace!

(Are you reading this Carlos? HINT HINT! January, April, February and another January...)

Next up, a bracelet that really appeals to me, too:

Jade and Pyrite bracelet. I'm a sucker for jade, for some reason, and circle motifs get me every time, too. I like that the clasp on this bracelet has a swirl design, too... Another piece I'd love to own!

Another necklace that I really like -

A really strikingly simple design. Love it! Buy it here before I do! :)

Well, I was going to stop there, but then I noticed this necklace:

Yup, more jade. Chunky carved jade and moonstone necklace (yes, I really am a sucker for jade...). It even comes with matching earrings! Beautiful!

Mindy, by the way, is a stay-at-home-mom like myself. As she puts it "But every piece of jewelry I make is my release from poopy diapers, snot noses and questions that start with "Why"! A big salute to all you mom's out there!!!"

LOL. I love a lady who tells it like it is. And I also really, really appreciate all the hard work that moms do, from when our children are small right on through to adulthood...

Having a creative outlet is so key to preserving sanity sometimes, in all stages of life - am I right?

Tune in next Wednesday for another profile! (And hopefully a post or two before them, I've been lax lately, and I have some good weaving stuff to talk about too, argh!)