Next?!

I can't believe how much this workshop changed my attitude to warping for the loom. It just seems so doable now. 

As to the current warping, I tried a few different variations of the houndstooth pattern I wanted to use and decided to do four patterns of one (green/purple/green/purple) houndstooth pattern and then four of another, slightly longer pattern. 

 

 

I'm now about 2/3 of the way into the warp and will hopefully be able to finish it this weekend (during rest times for my poor hand that is about to fall off from helping a crochet project that has me crocheting with rope - long story for another day). 

I just can't wait to do the next warp!!

Ready to roll

We had an absolutely lovely day at Hopewell Weaving yesterday. I love Jennie's common sense approach to weaving and how she can do easily move between teaching absolute beginners (there were some of those) and experienced weavers (there were a couple of those), including those inbetween (the rest of us). 

This was one of those classes where you don't come away with one big revelation but loads of little gems about the warping process. 

A few of my new gems:

• You can wind small sections of warp. You don't have to wind and manage the whole of the warp at one time. I know this is going to sound silly to experienced weavers but I didn't know this. I've wound large warps where the strands were popping off the warping pegs because it was too much. Just wind smaller sections. BAM! Problem solved. Need to warp with different colors or yarns?  BAM!  Problem solved. 

 My purple and green linen warp fully wound on. 

• How do you hold the warp and keep it organized?  Use the loopers from the little potholder looms, of course. And super important to wrap one all the around the cross. 

•  Loopers and slip knots work just fine. 
• Before tying the final knot on the front beam, lift the shafts to make sure there are no crossed threads. 
• No one really knows why plain weave is also called tabby and the terms are interchangeable. There are theories but no one really knows. 

There's more but the main lesson is that when you get 9 people in one room who are open to learning new things for a day, it makes for a darned enjoyable day!

So much to learn so little time

So excited!  On Sunday I get to go with one of my favorite people to a weaving class taught by another of my favorite people and spend the whole day better learning how to warp my loom. 

Jennie Hawkey of Hopewell Weaving teaches a wide variety of classes through the year at her studio near Peoria. Fabulous teacher and all around good egg, that's her. 

I have warped a loom before in my life but if I were ever to be filmed doing it, the video would go majorly viral and cause injury to many people (from laughing). I want to do good in the world, not injury, so I will be at Jennie's house on Sunday to learn and doing a little laughing myself (and at myself, in sure).

If you're in this area of the country and want a reasonably priced weaving class, keep an eye on Jennie's website (http://hopewellweaving.com/) or follow her on Facebook. You can sign up for her mailing list and keep up on what classes she had going on. 

All in how you look at it

If I were in a "life is like…" sort of moods, I would say this hot mess is a reality for all of us. None of us gets through life with everything all put together and beautiful all the time. Life is beautiful as we embrace the messiness it takes to eventually get where we're going. 

 

But I'm not in that mood today. This hot mess is waiting for one more tiny section and then I'll be able to get it off the pillow and cleaned up. But it's been a fun one. I think I'm going to use it as a doily under my candy dish at work. 

A Heart Challenge

I've moved onto the second pattern from the Brigitte Bellon book.  I won't tell you how I know this but when you work this pattern, don't do it at one in the morning on a long weekend.  It'll catch you out sure as sure.  Not hard but tricky.

Coming Home

For quite a few months, I've been posting project photos on social media instead of here on the blog but I've decided it's time to come home.  To be perfectly honest, I was doing that because it was easier and seemed more immediate and I was being lazy) but, in the process, I've lost the recorded thread of the creative life.

So I've come home and look forward to being able to say more about what's going on along my creative path.

I have a long post about my progress and study through the Ulrike Voelker workbook on Torchon Bobbin Lace, having gone almost all the way through the first volume, but I've taken a little side road looking at Russian Tape lace.  This type of lace, typical of the lace made throughout Russian and the Eastern European countries, features tapes that undulate and move through often very complex designs as well as leaf tallies, braids, picots and discs that are used as fillers in between the loops of lace.

Here is a very simple, very beginner piece that I've just completed, taken from Brigitte Bellon's book, Gekloppelte Fruhlingsmotive.  It has many of the basic characteristics of the style.  As you can see, it's a very sweet little motif but it's definitely a beginner's effort.

Actually, it's a better effort than my first attempt, which shall remain quietly in the background.  I have a few more pieces from this book to try and then I will go back to attempting some patterns from one of the vintage books on Russian Tape lace I downloaded from the University of Arizona website.   Although some of the books are in Russian, the photos/woodcuts are distinct enough for me to learn from. 

I've also been discovering a couple of Russian lacemakers who have posted teaching videos on YouTube, such as this and this.  Even though I'm sure I'm missing out some of the details because I don't speak Russian, the videos are clear enough to be hugely helpful.  Thanks, ladies, for your generosity in sharing your art!  It's simplicity made into high art.

The Puzzle

So what do you do when you have a skein of multicolor chunky single-ply yarn that's pretty but doesn't have enough yardage to really do anything with?  

What if you have another ball that's a lace-weight solid color yarn that you don't yet have a project for?

What if you try to combine them? What size needle would you use?  What would you make with them?

It's kind of a fun project to figure out. 

For me, I decided to do a cowl. The chunky would be nice and warm and the lace-weight would allow me to add some nice details. 

I started off with a sort of in-between needle size but quickly realized that it was going to be way too small for the chunky. Since I was going to be doing a lacy insert into plain stockinette, I realized I could use different size needles for each of the yarns with very little effort and bridge the gap that way. 

So I did stockinette for the chunky using size 8-9 needles and then I transitioned to size 4 needles for the lace. 

For the lace I did a really simple, super lacy old lace pattern called "faggoting" which is simply doing 1 round of yarnover/knit 2 together and 1 round of knit. These 2 rounds are repeated as often as needed to make it the length you want. 

I did a few short sections in the bottom before knitting a long center section, basically to use up the whole skein. 

I was going to do a long lace section before doing the edging but I got bored so it was shorter. This was one occasion I was glad of my sometimes short attention span because it came out much better. 

I used a little 8-stitch VanDyke edging from the 1846 Cornelia Mee book to edge it (which took forever!) so it ended up like this. 

It turned from being a snood to a lacy neck warmer and I love it. 

So go explore your stash and try your hand at combining 2 different yarns that you might not have thought to put together. See what you come up with!