More photos of the Weavebird Project

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.

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

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!

Pinwheels

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


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

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



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

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

On An Etsy Roll!

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


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

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

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

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

Yarn...

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

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

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



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

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

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

Front Page on Saturday!

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!

SOWA

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.

I Love My Studio...

So, I posted this scarf on Etsy on Tuesday:

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

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

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

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

Blues

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

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

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

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

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

This and That, Marketing and Lots of Little Flowers

Happy New Year to everybody!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Twist on an Old Design

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.

Over the Holiday Rush?

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!

Open Studios Coming Up!

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...)

Open Studios - Holy Smokes!

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!!

Busy Season?

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...

Well, rats...

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!

Late Night

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!

Productive Weekend!

Wow, I am loving having the studio, I must say. I spent a good part of the day there on Saturday, a little time on Sunday morning (after the munchkins hunted down some Easter eggs), and then went back just for a little while last night. And I finished four scarves and a scarflette in two different color ways! Good grief!! Still have to twist some fringe, but I'm feeling very encouraged.

Managed to take some photos using my new mannequin (Bella says "She's a little scary, Mami..."), too...


Got it from eBay for about $50, including shipping. Not bad.

I feel like I haven't done a good job of showing scale in the photos for my Etsy shop, so hopefully the Scary Mannequin will help with that!


So, apart from twisting fringe on the second batch of scarves I wove over the weekend, I'm thinking of weaving a shawl/wrap for my shop, just so folks know that I actually make them. The idea being that they're nice for spring/summer weddings, and also customizable for, say, the bridesmaids or the mother of the bride or groom.

I've been hesitant to make one not as a custom item, just because they are kind of big, and I feel like it's one of those items that people are going to want very specific colors... But, hey, maybe I'll venture into Pantone's color forecast for this spring (check it out with that link!) and see if I can come up with something...

Front Page, Baby!

Whoo-hoo! Another front page appearance on Etsy!

Awesome friend Liz of MadeInLowell (check out her shop!!) took a screenshot for me:

A little small - but there it is, third row, left side, my sage and smokey blue scarf that I posted about here. I didn't even know I was in the treasury! I love it when it comes completely out of left field like that!

And, argh, I can't believe I didn't get my purple scarf posted today. Whoops! Missed opportunity!

Wet Finishing

I just thought I would post a couple of photos to demonstrate the difference wet finishing makes in handwoven textiles. This first photo is of an Ms and Os scarf that I wove recently, in bamboo, with lots of fun colors (purple, teal, yellow, caramel...):



I actually took the color inspiration from a painting by my daughter! (When she paints, I give her three little pots to fill and she chooses what primary colors to mix to get the final shades she wants.)

Anyway, you can see that it looks kind of flat when it comes off the loom. It also feels much stiffer than it will after it is washed. There's also a threading error in it, so that means I'm keeping this scarf instead of selling it (I know others sell less-than-perfect work for a discount, but I just can't bring myself to do it!)... I love the colors so much, I'm wondering whether I did it intentionally, lol! I fixed the threading, though, and wove another one to put in my shop.

And, here it is, after washing (photo taken inside, normally I take them outside, in the shade):



Can you see the difference? (I hadn't trimmed my ends or anything yet at this point.) The structure has really softened up, the Os looks like Os, and the whole thing shrank a bit as well. And it's beautifully soft to the touch now, too!

Man, though, it looks like it's going to be tough to photograph it's sister (the one without the goof) and really capture the colors... It's really quite a bit prettier in person, I think!