This morning I had a delightful brunch with Claudia Chase (owner and founder of Mirrix Looms) and her daughter Elena (marketing director of Mirrix.)  Claudia was in town visiting her daughter after a video shoot in Ohio, and it was a fun opportunity to hang out.

So many ideas were flying around back-and-forth that we almost forgot to eat!  I enthused about my latest passion, eTextiles, and Claudia and Elena talked about this cool new bead/tapestry fusion bracelet they developed.  Soon our ideas collided and we were talking about eTextile/bead/tapestry fusions!

When the dust cleared, I’d cut my long-unfinished tapestry sampler off my Mirrix loom so I can put on a two-inch prototype warp.  (Claudia made me do it, and it felt to have the loom freed up for a new project that I’m excited about.)

I gave Claudia some LED sequins and conductive thread to go home and play with.  Bringing artists together is great brain-sparky fun!

The only thing keeping me from leaping up and warping right now is I’m feeling pressure to get the Viking Coffee Cozy pattern out the door.  Tune in tomorrow to see which impulse won out.

Yesterday was a very good day.  I lucked into an invitation from Madelyn van der Hoogt to come weave on her 32-shaft Megado.  I’m not 100% sure why she extended this generous offer to me.  Perhaps it’s Madelyn’s inherent awesomeness (vast, BTW), or maybe it was the way I kept caressing and hugging the Megado during the Weaving II class I took with her at The Weaver’s School.  I was quite shameless in my admiration of it.

As if that wasn’t enough coolness for one day, it turns out that the brilliant electronics technologist I’d been corresponding with via WeaveTech, John Acord of Flatwater Electronics, also lives on Whidbey and that he and his wife Claire are both weavers (and own sheep and border collies!)

Lunch was arranged.  We all talked about many things fiber and fiber-animal while we ate a lovely meal at a restaurant overlooking the water.

Afterwards, John gave me a wonderful present, I squee-ed with delight when I saw it!  It’s a solenoid prototyping board that can be driven with a Lilypad Arduino.  I’ve started playing around with micro-controllers and solenoids and John’s been generously sharing his knowledge on the subject (you can see his files on WeaveTech.) He even provided notes on how it works, how absolutely cool is that?

After lunch I went back to Madelyn’s to weave.  I’d planned to spend the day before designing 32-shaft weave drafts, but events conspired against me (child-related homework freak-out.  We got through it; it took four hours.)  So I arrived sans weave drafts but with Alice Schlein’s excellent book, The Liftplan Connection: Designing for Dobby Looms with Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, at my side.  If you ever need to create a 32-shaft woven-words weave draft from scratch in half an hour or less, you want this book to hand.  It’s both brilliant and easy to understand.

Also, if you’re using a Mac and you want a program that makes it super easy to take the bitmap peg plan you created in Photoshop Elements (ala Schlein’s book) and turn it into a weave-able WIF file, I highly recommend pixeLoom.  You simply copy the BMP file onto the clipboard and then choose Edit→Paste Liftplan from pixeLoom’s menu option.  That’s it!  pixeLoom is now my favorite weaving software for the Mac (I’m so thrilled they now offer a Mac-native version in addition to their Windows version.)

My original plan was to weave the first five lines of my favorite Coleridge poem:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome degree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
In caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea
But, given that I was working fast, on a laptop with a small screen, I settled for the first two lines so I could get to weaving as soon as possible.

One of the reasons I was there (in addition to playing and making cloth) was to test-drive the Megado and give my impressions and feedback. This is a prototype, so some things make have changed in the final version (ie: YMMV), but here’s what I found:

• I loved the ease of treadling and the compactness of the loom.  The Megado uses a wacky back beam that raises (yes! The whole back beam raises!) when you treadle, and this acts a counterweight for treadling and allows you to get a good shed with a short loom footprint.  (Other looms use the length behind the harnesses to get a good angle.)

• John had tuned the loom the day before, so the harnesses worked wonderfully for over 2100 picks.  There was one treadling error in the cloth, but it was at the end where I was weaving crazy fast and may have been user error, me not pushing the treadle all the way down between picks or some such.

• One of the criticisms I’d heard about the Megado was that it “wove slow.”  While Madelyn was upstairs working, I opened up the throttle and wove as fast as I could. The loom kept up with me flawlessly.  I have woven on computerized looms where you press the treadle, then wait, then weave.  This was not like that at all.  As soon as you finished one pick, the next one was immediately ready to go.

• The ergonomics of the loom are great.  There’s just one big treadle to push.  So if your left foot gets tired, switch to your right, and vice versa.  During the weaving session I switched back and forth several times.

• The Megado had a very simple-but-elegant way to ensure an even tension on the warp during weaving.  There’s a piece of Texsolv on the front and you crank on the tension until the Texsolv is taut.  It’s not as automatic or adjustable as the AVL cloth advance, but works quite well indeed.

• All-in-all, I still have serious Megado lust.  Don’t get me wrong, I still love my vintage 16-shaft AVL, but I find the Megado a very elegant solution for a weaver who wants many shafts in a sturdy loom with a small footprint.

Here’s the cloth I wove yesterday.  It’s about 2-1/2 yards of satin weave. (7/1 satin foreground and 1/7 satin background.)  I’ve decided it’s going to be skirt fabric, and I have some cunning ideas involving a peplum and el wire.

In addition to making cloth, while I was on the island I interviewed John about the cool work he’s doing making hardware interfaces that will enable older computer-driven looms like the J-Comp and Schacht Combby to work with modern operating systems.

That’s right! Owners of these looms no longer need to hoard Windows 98 machines!  While I was at Madelyn’s I saw a Schacht Combby being run off a Windows 7 laptop.  Tres cool!  Watch for his interview and Jacey Boggs talking about spinning art yarns on the next WeaveCast, due out December 15th.

To finish off a day replete with geeky goodness, on the late-night ferry ride back from the island, I started sewing the electronic circuits of the Know-it-all Bag from Knitty.  Here’s what it’s looking like thus far.

(Note: Embroidery is not my specialty, and I don’t recommend trying to learn how to back-stitch by a car dome light while riding on a moving ferry, unless it’s an I-wanna-do-it-now emergency, which it totally was.)

My guild is putting on a fashion show, and I am one of the models.  One of the things I love about this event is that the models come in all sizes and shapes and ages and colors and we are all fabulous!  I love cheering on my fellow guild members as they strut their stuff.  Too often our culture celebrates a small sliver of beauty, missing out on all its  glorious permutations.

And then there are the clothes!  Fabulous handwoven garments ranging from the everyday practical to art-to-wear fanciful. My only regret about being a model (aside from the fear that’ll trip on the catwalk and go sprawling) is that I can’t simultaneously sit in the audience and take in the show.

I’ll try to get some behind the scenes pictures tomorrow, if I’m allowed.  I think it’s going to be a wacky fun time.  One of the things we’re modeling are socks!  Socks in a fashion show!  There’ll be 12 of us on stage high kicking and showing off our feet.  Given that we’re all (as far as I know) amateurs at this…should be a wild time!

The other thing that’s keeping me entertained right now is this:

It’s a microchip for fiber artists! It’s purple and you can sew it on clothes! It’s even hand-washable!  But it’s also a real honest-to-goodness microcontroller that you can hook up to your computer via a USD port and program and hook up to sensors and motors to do amazing things.

If you listened to the first WeaveCast, you’ll know that I owned a Baby Wolf and didn’t have great results at first.  In fact, I was so traumatized by my first attempts to weave that I gave the poor loom a two-year time out in the corner before I picked it up again and became enthralled.

This microcontroller is the Lilypad Arduino, and it’s been sitting in my stash since Christmas 2008, when I was delighted to get it as a present, but too intimidated to dive in.

That’s all changed.  I’m building the Know-It-All bag from Knitty, and in the process I’ve played around with the Lilypad, and you know, it’s not that hard to hook up and program. Neurons that have been gathering dust since I took digital electronics classes back in the day are perking up and coming alive again, whispering to me of Ohm’s law and Zener diodes and other wondrous things.

I find myself online reading and watching Arduino tutorials when I should be getting work done.  Ideas for new uses and applications of the things I’m learning are whirling around my brain like dust devils.  I am completely, totally, smitten.

I haven’t been bitten this hard since the weaving bug got me.  Handwoven, eTextile goodness, oh yeah, this is gonna be fun.

Note: Posting this blog entry was delayed due to a DSL outage at my house.  I’m back online now.  Hurrah!

Wednesday November 23rd was all about the post office.  Specifically about getting bookmark kits out in the mail.

The first challenge was the complete and utter lack of internet access at my house.  This is still going on, and I’m not 100% sure how I’ll get this blog post up.  I may have to sneak out to Starbucks.

So in order to find out who ordered what, I had to use my cell phone to track orders and look up things on the website.  There’s no way to print from my phone, a lack I hadn’t noticed until yesterday.  (Seriously, wireless print drivers for mobile phones, is that too much to ask?)  So no one got pretty invoices with the lovely logo and nice fonts.  After spending way too much time feeling bad about that, I thought about the last time I got a package, and how many of the invoices I’d actually framed and hung up on my wall (answer: none) and decided that kits sooner with an ugly invoice was better than kits later with a pretty invoice.

Next was the volume of orders.  I am thrilled, delighted, that so many of you responded.  It caught me unawares, however, so I had to hurriedly wind off many more kits.  Which was an excellent opportunity to catch up on my book-on-tape listening.  I indulged in Water for Elephants, which lived up to the hype.

After the kits were wound and packaged, I hired Kai to be my “picker”.  In the mail-order business, this is the person who takes an invoice and pulls the products from inventory to ship.  He was great to work with.  We put labels on the piles of colors and I would shout out the colors I needed for a given order and he’d grab them up.  I double-checked every order, but he never got one wrong.

My plan was to pay him cash for his work.  But after looking at the colors all day, he asked whether instead he could be paid instead with a bookmark kit all of his own.  (Doesn’t that just make you go, awwww….)  He selected Delphinium and carted it off to his room.

Next it was a trek through the snow and ice.  Where I live (a rural area about 25 miles east of Seattle) got six inches of snow yesterday.  Now while I know that people in Canada and Wisconsin are reading this and thinking: “six inches, sounds like a nice spring day.” In the Seattle area, six inches is a snow apocalypse.  We don’t have the infrastructure for such weather, and to make things even more treacherous, when we get snow, the ground usually hasn’t frozen yet.  Which melts the bottom layer of snow, which then refreezes: resulting in 4 inches of snow covering 2 inches of solid ice.  Add drivers who’ve never seen snow before, and San-Francisco-esque hills.  And well, let’s just say that everyone with half a brain stays home.

For the purposes of this narrative, I have not got half a brain.  Later Eric told me that he and Kai (home from school because it’s a snow day) had looked at the treacherous snow-and-ice encrusted hill that leads from our house and made a bet as to whether I’d try to get out today.  I asked which of them was foolish enough to bet against me and my drive to get things done.  Eric said the conversation went this way:

Eric (46, married to me for 13 years) “I’ll bet you a dollar that your mother tries to get up that hill and go to the post office today.”

Kai (7, known me all his life): “I’m not taking that bet.”

The good thing about driving in a snow apocalypse, is that you pretty much have the road entirely to yourself.  This is sometimes a very good thing.

This man is my hero.  He came into work on a day when all the schools and libraries were closed, and he cheerfully welcomed me when I came sliding in just before closing with a huge bag of packages to mail out.

So the kits are packaged and off to their new homes, some to be woven up as gifts, others to be gifts for new weavers.  One customer, Sunny, wrote me that she ordered a kit last year, loved it so much that this year she and bought several more kits to give to young weavers along with the gift of teaching them how to weave.  That warmed my heart.

And after all that, I got a bit of a post office reward of my own.  This is magnet wire from the Florida State University magnet lab.  It was generously shared with me by Ramona.  Apparently FSU’s magnet lab was getting rid of surplus wire and offered it free to artists.  I studied physics at FSU, and my major professor was the head of the magnet lab.  At the time, I wasn’t a fiber artist and have since kicked myself for not acquiring surplus magnet wire when it was just laying around.  I’ve tried to buy some off eBay, but it’s pricey.  So to get this, and from the place I used to work, was a real blast from the past.  Thank you so much, Ramona.  You made my day!

I can’t wait to see what I make from it!

P.S. The Viking Coffee Cozy pattern is in the works.  Thank you everyone who responded regarding it.

I’m so excited to share the results of my coffee cozy adventures, but first, a quick peek at some finished fabrics from my rigid-heddle loom.

Here is the polyester permanent-pleat fabric off the loom, before tying and pleating.  I like it so much in the flat form that for a second I thought about not pleating it, but that’d be crazy, considering how much work it was to put in the supplemental weft shots.

This next piece is the Curious Creek yarn woven up into 2-1/2 yards of lovely squishable fabric.  It’s destined to become a garment of some kind.  As to what, exactly, I haven’t decided; I’m still talking to it.  I meant to blog this in progress, but it was just too fun to weave, and before I blinked, there was the end of the warp coming off the back beam.

Eric’s birthday was a quietly festive affair.  There was a sunburst cake, made up of slices of a bunch of different flavored cakes from our local deli.  And there were gifts.  One of which was the practical, yet stylish “Viking Coffee Cozy.”

It is designed to fit over my husband’s french press coffee maker to keep his coffee warm as he works in the wee hours of the morning on his latest novel.

This is my second-ever knit design and I’m tickled with it.  Designing is even more fun than knitting!  My first attempt to create the cozy, I used 2×2 ribbing all the way up, but didn’t like how it interacted with the spout.  So I (to my husband’s astonished gasp of horror) ripped the three-quarters-completed cosy back into a ball of yarn.  It was actually sweet to see Eric looking mournful about the loss of my knitting progress.  “I can rebuild it,” I assured him.  “Better, stronger, faster.”

While I’d been knitting and struggling with the first version, I got the inspiration to use cables to flow around the spout.  Heat rises, so I continued the coffee cozy over the top of the press.  But I also wanted him to be able to put the cozy on when he poured in the  the hot water but not have to take the cozy off to press the coffee.

The body is knit up in heathered bulky grey wool (grey is my husband’s favorite color) and took about a day.  A caribou antler button from a family trip to Alaska completes this manly cozy.  (I recall thinking at the time, “What the heck am I going to do with one caribou button?  I’m glad I listened to my intuition and bought it anyway.)

Stash diving provided all the materials, ingenuity the pattern.

I felt very artsy and thrifty giving this to Eric.  Those of you who know him, will recognize that this coffee press is perfectly suited to his aesthetic.  In fact, the cozy matches a hat I knit for him out of handspun that soon became a staple of his wardrobe. (Really, it’s his go-to wooby hat, but if I said that I’d get in sooo much trouble.)

When he’s working at his desk and wearing his handspun hat, he and his coffee cozy look like two vikings waging a war against the blank page.

I love how the coffee press now looks like it’s wearing a chain mail hood.  Very fierce!

P.S. I’ve already had one person inquiring about where to get the pattern.  Here’s what I’m thinking, I’d like to offer the pattern for sale as a downloadable PDF for $3.99.  If you are interested in purchasing it for that price, send me an email or leave a comment here.  If five or more people express interest, I’ll whip up something pretty in InDesign, get it test-knit, and put it for sale in the shop.

I’m doing a study of rigid-heddle fabric this year and my current project is playing around with the permanent-pleating possibilities of polyester.  This is what’s currently on the loom.

The warp is a singles silk/wool, and the weft is a polyester yarn.  I’m putting in shots of monk’s belt to pull it up like you would for shibori, but I’m planning to steam and pleat the fabric instead of over-dyeing it for color.

This is thin yarn, and it’s taking a bit to weave through the five or so yards I enthusiastically put on the loom, so let’s take a tour of some other fun things while we’re waiting for me to weave this off…

Kristine (of Curious Creek Fibers) and her husband Phil swung by for a visit.  I’d met Kristine at GGFI and we’d hit it off, so when she mentioned that she’d be in the Seattle area for a night, I invited her and her husband to stay at our house.  We had a great time.  Phil is as big a fan of Legos as Kai is, and they built a number of intriguing things while Kristine and I hung out in my studio and discussed weaving, dyeing and other things fiber.  Eric cooked us a fabulous dinner.  Twas great fun.

She gave me two squishable lovely skeins as a hostess gift.  I think they were meant to be socks, but I’m thinking warp!

The cone in the background is a little something that I pulled from my stash that I’m planning to use as weft.  Though anyone who’s taken my beginner class knows that I “audition” wefts before I settle on the right one, so I may well end up using something entirely different.

Here are two more finished items from the glass blowing class.  One great thing about glass: no UFOs.  You have either a finished object at the end of a working session, or a pile of broken glass to recycle.  There’s no in-between.  Glass is a harsh mistress.

This is a bowl where I “broke the rules” and dipped in two different mixes of frit between layers.  I was supposed to stick with just one to avoid “mud” since glass colors interact in strange ways.  For example, topaz and orange make black.  I got lucky in my choices, however, and instead it had the wonderful effect of making the bowl primarily blues on the outside and primarily greens on the inside.  The asymmetry of its shaping was a throwing error, but one I find quite lovely.  I’m thrilled with it.

Below is what happened when Eric and I finished before the other set of students and were given the instruction to “go play with glass.”  I’d seen the instructor sculpting a rose  before class and decided to give it a go.  It’s not as lovely or large as his, but definitely recognizable as a rose and way much better than my first floral attempts.  I never thought of myself as the kind of gal who’d be tickled with a glass flower, but I am.

And that ball of yarn with sticks in.  It’s been turned into a finished object, that I’m calling “Eric’s Viking Coffee Cozy” because everyone knows that strong coffee is absolutely essential for getting ferocious vikings up and going in the morning.

Why does it look a lot like a wrapped present?  Because it’s a surprise for Eric’s birthday, and he reads this blog.  I’ll share it after he’s opened it.  Don’t want to spoil the surprise.

As a last detail.  Doti asked for the Stupid-Simple Wash Cloth pattern.  So here goes:

Stupid-Simple Wash Cloth Pattern

1. Cast on 4 stitches.
2. Knit 1, yarn over, knit to the end.

Repeat row 2 until the wash cloth is as wide as you want it to be, or you’re halfway through your yarn.

3. Knit 1, yarn over, SSK, knit to within four stitches from the end, k2tog, knit two.

Repeat row 3 until you have only six stitches left on the needle.

4. Knit 1, SSK, K2tog, Knit 1.
5. Bind off 4 stitches and weave in ends.

Taa-daa!

This pattern is so simple that it’s all over the knitting world in various forms.  This variant was un-vented by me when I was trying to recall the wash cloth pattern I’d knit years before and got it slightly wrong but it worked anyway and I hadn’t realized it was different than the one in Complete Idiot’s Guide To Knitting & Crocheting (1) until I’d knit eight or so.  As Laura Fry would say, if you can’t be perfect, be consistent.

(1) And yes, it is embarrassing to admit this is one of my go-to knitting references.

Eric and I have been taking a glass-blowing class together on Saturday mornings at Art by Fire.  It’s become our weekly “date night” and I’ve found that learning something together is more satisfying than passively going to a movie.

Add to that the fact that we’re learning something dangerous—the molten glass hovers between 2100-2500 degrees Fahrenheit—and that glassblowers work in teams on the bench and it’s been good for our marriage, if a bit stressful at times.

(I have no idea why there’s a giant Mickey Mouse on the back wall.  Truly.)

Here’s Eric marvering glass to the tip of the gathering rod, which is the glassblowing way of saying: pushing a glob of glass off the end of the rod into a cylinder so it can be worked.

(Note Sponge Bob on the back wall, gleefully demonstrating the importance of safety.)

I hadn’t realized before the class how much teamwork would be involved.  In glassblowing you rely on your partner to blow into the pipe while you form the glass, use wooden paddles to shield your skin from the intense heat of the glass while you’re working it, and to attach a punty on the end so you can flip the piece over and work on the other side.  Each partner in the team is crucial to the success of the piece.  Your work has your partner’s breath blown into it and vice versa.

Working with molten glass is so very different from weaving, and yet there are skills that transfer over.  Design and color principals.  I found myself rolling the rod on the bench with the same full-body rocking motion that I use to slam a beater into place.

I brought the same intensity to marvering glass off the tip of the gathering rod as I do for threading a complicated pattern.

Eric’s comment after the first class was a surprised: “You have a gift for working with your hands.  A real kinetic sense.”

It was a nice moment.  I usually weave while Eric’s at work, so he doesn’t often get to see me in my element.

Textiles are everywhere, and glassblowing is no exception  I wore my Pendleton wool shirt for the class, since wool insulates from the intense heat and will self-extinguish if I catch on fire.  The Pendleton was the only woolen shirt I own, and I at first hesitated to wear it because it is a thing of beauty and was not cheap.  Then I realized that a shirt would be less expensive and easier to replace than my skin, so on it went.

In the class, we were offered the use of kevlar armbands to help insulate our arms while gathering and working the molten glass.  These were sized for big burly guys, and fit rather sloppily on my little wrists, so if I stay with glass blowing I may have to get some kevlar yarn and create my own.

Another interesting thing was working in a medium where I am a complete beginner.  I can approach a loom with a certain amount of confidence that I’ll come away with something usable.  Perhaps not quite the thing I had in mind, but a piece of cloth for sure.

Glass makes no such guarantees.

You can spend hours working on a piece, forming it and blowing life into it until it’s a thing of beauty…and then lose the whole piece in the very next moment.  Let the glass cool too much or the heat become uneven, and it’ll crack.  Attach your punty too loosely and the piece will fall to the ground, too tightly, and you won’t be able to get it off the pipe.  The only thing you come away with in those instances is experience and, hopefully, a bit more skill.

Below are the more successful of the flowers I made (the others are more anatomical than floral) and a tree ornament that would better serve the season as a bludgeon with which to deter present thieves.  (It weighs half a pound.)

It was useful and humbling to be a complete beginner again.  Hoping a piece will turn out, ready to settle for knowledge if it didn’t.

Though every now and then, if you keep working in spite of setbacks, you can create something of beauty.

On Monday I submitted my first-ever knitwear design to an editor/publisher.  I’m waiting to hear back as to whether it was accepted, fingers firmly crossed.  It was a fun project to puzzle out, incorporating many features that I’d never worked with before, so there was a huge learning curve.  Turns out I love huge learning curves—who knew?

Designing knitwear is largely a matter of geometry and tracking rates of change.  I very much enjoyed the exercise.  In fact, it’s given me a whole new appreciation for knitting and a new sense of freedom about what’s possible.  If I can create a 3D model of the human body, and then through sampling and swatching figure out the fabric per square inch to cover that model.  Well, then I can knit whatever the heck I like!  No more being a slave to patterns.  Whoo-hoo!

I’m also thinking that this fabric-to-3D model work might work for designing fabric with woven cloth.  Which might just get me over that “designing clothing” mental block.

(Speaking of designing clothing, have you seen the cool Handwoven / Väv design challenge? I’m giving it a thought.  Heck, I’m starting to scheme ways to get to Sweden.  Smart textiles is one of the conference topics, how cool is that?)

Anyway, back to the pattern that I finished up on Monday.  No spoilers, but here’s a sneak peek.

My looms are all tied up right now with challenging weave projects, so when I wanted something mindless to do while taking Kai to after school events, or waiting at the doctor’s office, I turned to my stash and discovered a pile of miscellaneous balls of worsted weight cotton (Sugar n’ Cream) in a variety of colors.

I briefly puzzled out my variant of the “Stupid-Simple Wash Cloth” pattern.  You know, the one where you increase for a while, and then decrease for a while.  After I knit the first one, I thought “pair that with some homemade or fancy soap, and that’s the start of a fine holiday present.”  It felt wonderfully thrifty to be converting stash into presents.  Add to that the near-instant gratification of knitting a wash cloth in an hour or two.  And…my brain got a bit stuck on wash cloths.

I’ve knit eight so far, with no sign of stopping.  I promised myself I’d stop when the cotton ran out (the whole point was to use up stash, right?) but then I taught Eric to knit a dishtowel.  And then Kai wanted to learn, but he wanted blue yarn.  So I wound up at Michael’s and some cunning balls of yarn leapt into my shopping basket when I wasn’t looking.

Only one or two…or perhaps three.  But at the rate I’m knitting wash cloths, I still have a chance of winning.  Especially since I’m recruiting the whole family now.

As long as I don’t enter a JoAnn fabric or Michael’s I should be fine.  Right?

On a related gift-giving subject, since we are in the final lap of the holiday-gift-crafting season.  Eric, my husband, has a need.  With the weather cooling down, the coffee in his French press gets cold before he can finish it.  He’d taken to wrapping it in a towel to keep it warm and opined that he wished there was something like a tea cozy, only for coffee presses.

Bouyed on by my recent knit-design success, I dug into the stash and found a bulky feltable wool.  (I recently learned from Teresa Ruch that feltable wool is more insulating than superwash wool.  Which makes sense if you know how superwash wool is made and think about it a bit.)

I whipped out my measuring tape (after searching for it for a good long while.  I swear, gremlins come into my studio and hide the dratted things) and measured the press in several places.  I have a cunning plan, involving wool, DPNs, and ribbing.

I got Eric and Kai to watch Franklin Habit’s video on holiday knitting.  Eric, a laconic fellow, said dead-pan afterwards: “That seems…familiar.”  And Kai, less laconic chimed in with feeling, “Yeah, REAL familiar.”

Nevertheless, I will be knitting Eric a French press cozy for his upcoming birthday.  Likely there will be cables.  Hope he didn’t want roller skates.

Compulsory Weaving Content

I got an email asking how the singles wool/alpaca fabric turned out.  I never got the interesting tracking or crinkling I had hoped for.  I washed the samples two ways: full on machine wash with hot water and towels,and the “hand wash” machine cycle.  (The third sample on the right is the unwashed fabric.)

Both felted too much for my liking.  So I cut off another chunk of fabric and washed it by hand (something I try to avoid, hence the machine-cycle testing) and liked that result very much.

There is no pretty picture this post, alas.  I’ve been busy with several exciting things, and a whole host of boring ones.  None of which are photogenic.

The exciting things are (frustratingly for you and me) top-secret at the moment.  I’m not being coy here, I’d love to tell you about them, but there’s this whole situation with publishing where you work like mad in private and then suddenly “taa-daa!” there’s a finished thing and it’s all shiny and new.

But talking about it beforehand kinda rubs off the new/shiny, and you want the full force of the shiny when it’s finally done, so you keep mum while working on it, although it’s really, really interesting and full of daily triumphs and challenges.  Which is why writers tend to seem quite boring and dull until that brief moment when the shiny thing emerges fully formed as if by magic.

Which is my rambling way of saying: the quieter I gets, the harder I’m likely working.

On to the host of boring things.  (Not my best blog-segue there, perhaps.)

I’ve spent the past two days working hard on getting organized.  I can see whole swaths of desktop now, and my inbox actually has whitespace at the bottom (a tip of the keyboard there to Mimi who recently described that concept to me.)  My current goal is to finish each day with that day’s emails fully taken care of and responded to, as well as 2-3 of my backlog emails until I’m fully caught up.

It’s part of my current push to do less, but do it better.

I’m seeking a balance between work I can achieve and the work I sign up for.  And I’m remembering to leave empty space in my schedule for chaos: the day the kid stays home sick from school, the car breaks, the warp goes hideously awry.  (Hopefully not all on the same day.)

Instead of trying to do it all and being crazy stressed.  I want to do a few things terrifically well with grace and aplomb.

This is part of an ongoing theme in my life.  Less can be better.  Whitespace is good, whether it’s a design, an inbox, a calendar, or a busy mind.

Today’s Non-Sequitor: LED Pen Give-Away, Part II

Thank you everyone who left a comment on the last blog post and was entered the LED pen give-away drawing.  It was so much fun reading all your comments!  I liked the ones that cheered for polyester, and the ones that remained skeptical.  I appreciated the encouraging comments about the site and podcast, an extra bonus for me from this bit of give-away whimsy.  I wish that I’d had 94 pens to give away instead of 5!

To pick the winners, I used random.org to select 5 numbers between 1 and 94 (the number of entries).  The winners are…   Sunny, Roadweaver, D. Ferguson,  A. Weaver (an anonymous entrant), and Aunt Janet.  Congratulations!

I’ve emailed the winners privately for their mailing addresses.  If you didn’t get yours yet, please check your spam folder.  (And everyone, adding editor@weavezine.com to your email address book helps make sure my emails and newsletters get to you.)

P.S.  For those who asked where I bought the LED pens, there are several sites online if you Google around.  The place I used was FlashingBlinkyLights.com (mostly, I confess, because I liked their domain name.) No affiliation, just a happy customer, etc.

Dear Polyester,

In the past, I’ve mocked you, ignored your feelings, and said bad things about you behind your back.  I went out of my way to avoid you, and encouraged others to do the same.  When we were together, I felt smothered.  I couldn’t get away from you fast enough.

What can I say?  The past three days have proved me wrong.  You rocked my world like no other fiber.

I feel dirty admitting it, but I can no longer deny your attractions: devoré, disperse dyeing, permanent pleats.

I find myself searching you out, planning things we can do together.  I look forward to our next explorations.

<3

–Syne

P.S. Please don’t tell silk and wool.

Below are pictures from a devoré workshop I took with Holly Brackmann this past week.  If you want to hear an interview with Holly and my audio essay about the workshop, check out episode 53 of WeaveCast.

This is Holly Brackmann.  Isn’t she adorable?  Every day she wore inspirational clothes.  The bright red shirt is devoré, and the scarf is one of her “bubble” scarves that she makes using the thermoplastic properties of polyester.

Devoré is a technique in which you take a fabric (commercial or handwoven) and then chemically burn out some of the fibers, leaving others behind.  It created areas of translucency that can be simply magical.

First you paint on the devore solution, which can be either clear or tinted with disperse dyes.

Then, while wearing the appropriate safety gear, you use heat to activate the solution and burn out the cellulose fibers.

If you create a cloth with both cotton and polyester components, you can color the cotton with Procion MX dyes and the polyester with disperse dyes, without any worry that they bleed into each other or interact.

The workshop was eye-opening in many ways.  It made me look at polyester and nylon in a whole new way, and taught me that surface design isn’t just something that you throw on at the end.  When selecting (or weaving) cloth to design on, you have to take into account both the fiber content and the structure of the cloth, because both affect the results you’ll get.

Here is a subset of the samples I developed in the workshop.  I played around with transfer printing with disperse dyes (the leaves in the enter and right top), shibori with burn out, burn out designs on poly-cotton T-shirts, and structural burn-out in which the burn out changes the weave structure (red sample at lower left.)

Learning new techniques is only half the fun of a workshop, there’s also the joy of hanging out with fiber-folk.

I ended up sitting in the back of the room with Mary, Deena, and Tamie.  We elected ourselves as the rowdy “bad girls” table.  There was gum chewing and lots of wise-cracking involved.

Today’s Non-Sequitor: LED Pen Giveaway

I like to think of myself as an original, a free-thinker, not swayed by the opinions of others.  For example, I only recently started knitting Clapotis now, six years after the fad hit and faded.

However…I was reading the Yarn Harlot’s blog the other day and she was talking about keeping a light-up pen near the bed to record those middle-of-the-night inspirations.  She said, “I bet at least one of you just found out right this second that there is such a thing as a light-up pen and now you need them too.”

I just barely finished reading the rest of the post before I was off and Googling “light-up LED pens”

The online store I found had a minimum order of 20.  I get a lot of ideas in the middle of the night, but not enough that I need twenty pens.

So I’ve been going around giving away light-up LED pens like crazy.

I’ve been having fun with this.  I even came up with a test: I show an unsuspecting person the pen, then click the LED on.  If the person responds with some variant of “Cool!” I give them the pen.

Now it’s your turn. I’m going to give away 5 pens.  All you have to do to be entered in the drawing is leave a comment on this blog post.

This is a bit of whimsy that I’d love to share with the fiber world. So I’m I’m encouraging you to forward it to your fiber-loving family and friends.  Tweets, Facebook posts, Ravelry mentions, etc. are all welcomed.

You have from now until midnight (PST), October 25th, to leave a comment.

Earlier this week, Doug and Laura Fry visited with me for a couple of days on their way home to British Columbia.  They are, without a doubt, two of the most capable people I’ve met.  (I’ve noticed that the Canadians in general tend to be surprisingly handy.  I have a theory that it’s the harsh winters; weeds out the others.)

No sooner had Doug sat down for a bit of brunch, than he’d discovered one of the legs on my dinette table was wobbly.  (It’s an old maple set from the 1950‘s, previously owned by my Grandmother Mitchell, and has seen hard use in the family.)  Before I could finish apologizing for the table, he’d flipped it over, diagnosed the problem, and was in the process of repairing it with wood clamps and glue, strengthening the rest of the table in the process.

The next day, they descended on my AVL loom like a NASCAR pit crew, tweaking the loom for efficiency and helping me re-build my fly-shuttle array to be more ergonomic.  I wish I’d gotten pictures of that.  There was one moment where they were both working on either end of the loom–it was very picturesque–and I was too darned shy to ask if I could take a photo and blog the moment.  (If I’m going to blog regularly; I should get over that.)

Together we took off the old flyshuttle assembly and installed the new system.  What’s up there now are a temporary cords for me to test-drive and tweak until I’ve got the lengths set right for my particular wingspan.  When I’ve figured that out, I’ll cut cords from braided cord to the right length and be set up.

My AVL is an older model, between 20-30 years old; Doug walked around it with me and gave me a laundry list of tweaks to do as homework.  Some are improvements that AVL’s added to their modern looms, some are hacks that Doug and others in the weaving world have developed.  The list covered two pages of notes, and most of them things that either reduce wear or make the loom more easily configurable.

After we got the temporary flyshuttle rig installed, Laura gave me a demo of how to throw with it.  The trick is to launch it with a good snap and then to catch the shuttle at the other end by leaving a bit of slack in the cord that the shuttle hits and breaks against.  If this sounds slow, it isn’t.  Watching Laura work a flyshuttle is an awe-inspiring moment.  She becomes a part of the loom, and the loom goes fast.  I could believe 100 picks a minute–easy.  Heck I could believe more.

I…am not so fast.  But with the new arrangement, I’m getting it.  I’ve been practicing an hour or so a day since they left.  The flyshuttle is beginning to feel right in my hand, and I’ve almost got the catch working.  I put on nine yards of test warp.  I think by the end I’ll have it.

I have a history of letting looms settle into my life before I get comfortable with them.  In the first WeaveCast, I describe the two-year time out I gave my Baby Wolf before I learned to weave.  The AVL Production Dobby Loom is waaay more complicated, and I confess, I’ve been intimidated by its size and all the moving parts.  For example, you have to disassemble the loom part-way to thread the darn thing.  How crazy is that?  But at long last, and with help from a SWAT team of weaving, I think it and I are starting to come to an understanding.

Which is good, because I have this blanket project I need to get done before the end of the year…

Last Sunday I went down to the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival (OFFF) in Canby, Oregon.  This was the first time I’d ever attended the event and it was on a bit of a whim.  Several people had asked if I’d be there, and then my friend Selah told me about the Spinner’s Triathalon (more about that in a minute), and Kai opined that he’d really love to go to a fiber festival and do some yarn shopping (I think he’d been taken over by yarn-loving space aliens at that moment) and Eric suggested we take the bigger car, because it could hold more fleece (apparently the aliens got him, too.)

With nudging and support like that, how could I not go?  So Selah, Kai, and I hopped into a car and headed down to Canby for the day.

It was a rainy day, but the outdoor vendors were prepared for the wet.

I got to meet Hazel of Hazel Rose Looms in person, and see the cute Christmas stocking that she wove for a WeaveZine article.

After browsing around outside, we headed to the spinning competitions.  The first spinning contest was “strategic spinning” in which each contestant was given a set amount of fiber to spin in a set amount of time.  To win you had to spin every bit of fiber, finishing at exactly the ending time, and produce the longest yarn.

I haven’t been to many sporting events, never once attended a Florida State University football game (much to my father’s dismay), but apparently I did get some vestigial cheerleading gene, because I couldn’t resist standing beside Selah during the strategic spinning and making up supportive little chants like: “Selah, Selah, she’s our gal; if she can’t do it we’ll hire Hal!” and “Spin, spin, spin, spin!”  Selah for her part grinned, turned beet red, and muttered under her breath: “I’ll get you for this Syne, you know that, don’t you?”

Personally, I think she got off easy.  There was a lot of fiber in the room; you know how easy it would have been to whip up fleece pom-poms?

The strategic spinning event went on for a long time, so Kai and I went a-browsing.  He bought a bottle of rocks, and I talked to a couple of vendors about wholesaling copies of Andean Pebble Weave.  And I’m delighted to say the book will soon be available from Village Spinning and Weaving as well as Weaving Works!  (As I write this, the printer is a-humming in the background.)

We ran into some lacemakers a-weaving up bobbin lace.  I am continuing a flirtation with bobbin lace.  I’ve woven a couple of small strips, but don’t yet feel comfortable with the technique.  But I’ve a developed bit of a collection of bobbins, so it’s only a matter of time before the bobbin-lace bug bites hard.  I can feel it circling.

Here are Amy and Lucas, who were also competing in the spinning events.  I love that Kai wasn’t the only boy there.  Lucas, age 11, was a wonderful role model.  Composed, confident, and having fun.

During one of the down times Kai, who’d never spun on a drop-spindle before, asked if he could have a go.  With some trepidation I handed over my precious-precious turkish spindle and let him try.  Apparently watching me spin hundreds of yards on the thing had taught him some moves, because he quietly and without any fuss started making thread.  I took pictures: Kai’s first spindling!

After strategic spinning, was the spinner’s triathlon.  In this event, you spin three times: two minutes plain, two minutes with rubber gloves on, and two minutes blindfolded.  I hadn’t brought a wheel (I’m into minimalism at the moment) but joined in with “team spindle” to participate.  My take-away lessons:

1. Wheels are faster than spindles in competition.  Having to stop drafting to wind on is what kills you.  Especially if you’re using a Turkish spindle with the over-two, under-one wind-on.

2. Spinning with gloves: not my fave.

3. Spinning blindfolded is surprisingly easy and cool.  I want to practice more of this so I can got to the point where I can spindle without having to watch my hands.

And the final event, the 50-foot dash.  In this event one spinner treadles and the other drafts (without winding on) until they reach the finish mark.  Selah generously loaned her wheel to me and Kai.  Kai treadled and I drafted.  If you broke your thread (easy to do) you had to run like crazy before it got sucked onto the bobbin and wound on, then start drafting again.  It was wild, wacky fun.  Kai and I had a blast and Selah got a bit of revenge for my impromptu cheerleading.  Below is the video she took of the event.  It starts slow, but the competition heats up near the end.

Kai and I won fabulous prizes.  Yes, more spinning fiber!

I purchased a few wee tools from Carolina Homespun.  A new backstrap weaving thingy from Lacis, and a uber-cool stitch counter.

I love that’s it’s low tech, looks like a steam punk gear, is anodized a bright color, has a built-in cutter, and a bit of rhinestone bling in the center.

Some yarn followed me home from the Blue Moon booth.  These are two yummy boucles: one rayon, the other 100% silk.  There’s some silly nonsense about knitting gauge on the labels, but I’m looking at them and thinking: weaving yarns!  (A tip to new weavers: boucle yarns hide a lot of beat inconsistencies and selvedge foibles.)  I haven’t yet decided whether to use this on a rigid-heddle loom or my Baby Wolf.  I’m still mulling over the possibilities…

I met the Knitmore Girls on the way out of the parking lot. They were, as ever, charming.

And any trip to Oregon is best wrapped up with a dinner at Burgerville!

Bye OFFF!  See you again next year!