Checks

 

I'm putting a sign in the door of the store this afternoon.  We're going to town to see the homegrown Harvest Festival Parade, with all handmade floats and big puppets. It will be small, and sweet, ephemeral. Get there if you can!

Chimney Smoke

 

 

There's a whiff of it in the air, and it's not a forest fire!  The sugar maples are about to turn that crazy orange they do.  Our first load of picture-book firewood arrived today.  Call it scarf weaving weather,  and I've started adding a little alpaca-silk blend yarn to the mix, for coziness. I'm still in the lost-in-the-woods mode, in soft smoky colors and Rosepath,  and I like it like that.

good weaving days

I walked up to the quarry this Sunday afternoon, in a perfect breeze, a perfect light.  I wanted to take a picture of the ferns that grow across from the quarry, and there they were, in softly filtered sunlight. Some butterflies were dead along side the road.  I've woven two new plain scarves, in linen and combinations of silk, alpaca, and cotton, but mostly unbleached linen. One is ferny,  greens and browns. The other is dark teal blue, browns and charcoal gray,  lakey.

uphill

The wild clematis is a little garland of puffs along the hill road. The woods on the side hill of the valley is not so leafy now, but the Witch Hazel is in bloom with its small yellow starry flowers.
I wish my weaving could merge into the rough fissured bark of the century (at least) white pine. I don't try to copy what I see. It's usually after I've woven something, that I see what I have been looking at.

First Snow

First snow, first cardinals at the birdfeeder, first sweeping snow off the porch when I open the store, first time to try out my new boots.

I'm still felting my fir trees, and also weaving on my mixed weft cotton and linen Rosepath scarfs. A while ago,  I can remember thinking I didn't care for Rosepath as a weave.  Now it seems just right. This is a mixed weft time of year, when there seem to be so many different claims to my attention, this weaving is oddly calming.  I think it's the unbleached linen plainweave that I love the most, that's always in the background.

Eye Opener

I wanted to wake up early enough to take a picture of the earliest sunrise we see here in the valley. It happens on the first day of spring, when the sun rises almost directly in the east, at the bottom of the V formed by the two hills. Technically, the sun had already risen a bit, by the time I had opened my eyes and found my camera. But, it's a very-close-to-sunrise picture. And, technically, officially, it is spring again.

The heddle eyes are what I'll be looking through for most of the rest of the day, threading linen for window weaves on my old Norwegian barn loom. Plain weave, spaced warp, unbleached and half-bleached. My favorite flavors!

Native Big Blue

The rain last night bent over the clumps of native prairie grass, Big Bluestem. Some of us like to use the colored, segmented dried stems as wefts. It's flowering now, and the stems will continue to color into September, when we harvest it. We cut it with scissors, wrap it in bed sheets, and put it out in the sun to dry for a week. I like to use it in a plainweave linen warp on the big barn loom with traditional Scandinavian ticking stripes. With Finnish and Japanese paper yarns it has a crosscultural feeling that I like: Japanese and Finnish.

morning scarf

July. On the last bit of linen warp I was able to get this one last piece. Soft and sweet, like this morning.

Lingonberry

The unbleached 16/2 linen inlay took almost 6 hours to do. It was hard to see, so I had to remove more than one error. My edges took a beating from reaching around the weave to hold the paper pattern up, but it was worth the trouble. The rest of the runner/window weave will take less time to finish than the inlay did. The traditional combination of half-bleached and unbleached linen in a weave is very attractive. Do it again? Yes, yes, yes!

All My Eggs in One Basket Again

I'm constructing a new piece of spaced linen warp and rya knots. The warp is bleached 16/1 Swedish linen, and unbleached 20/2 (if I remember right, since the label has dropped off).
I'm making the knots of paper yarns from Habu, and Finnish paper yarn I brought home from Finland. I fine cut some organdy rag, and just added some knots out of white mohair. This is fun, but slow, slow.

Finish and Begin Again

The first window weave is off the loom, hemmed and ready to deliver. Now I'm moving to my next project, a spaced linen warp with rya knots made of Finnish paper yarn, Japanese paper yarn, linen, and silk ribbon. It's another in my series of All My Eggs in One Basket. I'm excited, but it is time consuming to weave it, and there is a mid June deadline. I'm happy that the loom is already warped with enough linen to do this project. The linen on the
9 silver paper pirns is to weave the tab loops to hang the finished weave.

Sweet

All the problems are fixed, the tension is right, and the linen likes the present humidity. What a pleasure to be weaving at last!

Grass Weave

Here are all the ingredients for my next grass, linen and japanese paper yarn weave. My unbleached 20/1 linen warp is finally wound on and correctly threaded, though a demon must have been in the loom this time. The 5 yard warp was days in the making. Errors kept showing, and I had to rethread it again, and again. I finally quit fighting the frustration and submitted to the process, until there were no doubled threads or two threads to a dent. Though it was just plain weave it certainly got the upper hand this time.

The yarn is paper yarn with a silk strand, from Habu, and the grass is the native midwest prairie grass called Big Bluestem. It is a sturdy stemmed, jointed grass that has a blue cast coloration when it matures in August, and is about 4 - 6 feet tall. These prairie grasses covered the Great Plains when western settlement happened in the 19th century. Gradually they were plowed down as crops were planted, but now there are many who wish to restore these native grasses and flowers to our lands. We cut bluestem grass stems with a scissors in late August,
when the grass is ripe, and let them dry in the sun before bundling and storing them to weave. I think they resemble bamboo, and remind me of Japanese design when I weave with them in Swedish linen warp.

Plan

The big barn loom is empty now and needs to be warped for a plain weave linen curtain.
It will be made of linen, with some Japanese paper yarns, and some wefts of the prairie grass native Big Bluestem. It needs a traditional ticking stripe.

Some weavers work out plans for warps on graph paper, or use a computer program. What works best for me, so I can see what I want and how to get it, is to wind the linen threads around a piece of cardboard, taped on the back. I usually leave enough room on this tag to write a few details about the weave, what it's made of, who it's intended for, the date, and how long I plan to make it.

January Scarf

Now it is midwinter and a flock of cardinals still dominates the feeder. Two gray squirrels came as a tag team down the hill last week. They visited the feeder, but spent more time chasing each other and leaping from branch to branch. Snow is coming again tomorrow, and then bitter cold days ahead, wonderful days to weave with the sun shining in.

This series of 5 or 6 scarves woven on the old Norwegian barn loom, is handwoven of rayon and silk chenille, cotton and linen yarn. The design is asymmetrical in muted colors.