Purple - Color of the Year?

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


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

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

A Colorful Weekend...

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!

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!

Purple Scarf Needs Some Love - and Cordoba, Spain, for Something Completely Different

Well, phooey, my blogging roll ended with a resounding thud. So did Cyber Monday thus far. (Though last week went very well for my little Etsy shop!)

But, I did manage to take some better photographs of this poor purple scarf:

The poor thing was posted in my Etsy shop pretty early on - before I sort-of got the knack for taking ok pictures of textiles. So, it wasn't getting many views. Or maybe it's just a really homely scarf, lol! Poor purple scarf needs some love.

Natural daylight really does seem to work the best for me...

I have kind of an old digital camera - an Olympus C-3030. We bought it in September-ish 2000 to take on our honeymoon with us, and digital cameras were still pretty new then - and it was state of the art (and wicked expensive, no way would anyone pay $1000 for 3.3 Megapixels now, lol!!). Amazing how fast technology changes, isn't it?

At any rate, I remember we were in the Mosque in Cordoba (Spain), and this (American) guy walked up to me while I was trying to take pictures of the arches (beautiful) and was amazed at how you could see the photos *on the camera*! LOL And our kids will all grow up saying - you mean you had to wait to get the photos developed?? And what exactly *is* an "album"?



There are those beautiful arches. Also took this photo from the window of our hotel room in Cordoba:


Yup. travel bug is biting. Niece Timothea was in Paris this past week for her 30th birthday (she's living in the UK at the moment, lucky kid), took some *fantastic* pictures and has me all jealous.... Maybe by next fall Mr. Conall will be big enough to travel. Can't wait!

Apple Cider Tendel

Another productive morning! Ms. B was at preschool again (for two hours this time, wowzers), and I managed to photograph and post another scarf in my etsy shop:

And here's a close up of the structure (it's a turned twill, I used six colors of Tencel, ranging from deep brown to lemongrass green, olive and purple - a lot of fun to weave!):


(And, no, my selvedges aren't uneven - that's just a fold in the scarf near the bottom.)

I listed this one as part of the EtsyFAST September challenge - looks like apple cider to me!

Two Posts in One Day?

I have the feeling I probably won't manage this very often in the future!

I did manage to list another scarf on etsy today, though, here's one of the pics. It takes me forever to list items, I don't know why. Hopefully it will get faster as I get more used to it... A dress form of some sort would probably help quite a bit.

Man, though, I am loving shadow weave (this scarf is in a rosepath shadow weave pattern). So many pattern possibilities! And so far I've only done it on my little four-shaft loom - when my hubby manages to find time to set my 12-shaft loom back up for me, there will be so much more to try out.

It can be a little difficult to photograph the patterns - natural light really helped with this particular piece, I think.

It came out so wonderfully soft... I love Zephyr (wool/silk blend) and bamboo yarns, and together, they're even better.