Sweets

Scarf No. 3 on this mostly silk Rosepath warp.  I'm really warming up to the seductive warm colors, with a little aqua for the sugar-on-top.  Figuring out color is always my first interest, and I usually try to make it more difficult, because the results are often more interesting, at least to my eye.  But even with a simple color scheme,  nothing is automatic about color and design.  There's always the chance of good color going bad.   Seeing the rags I used to start this scarf makes me feel itchy to do a little more rag weaving.

There was a torrential downpour on Friday the 13th, another flood in Avalanche.  It was a little scary. Soon after the waters subsided,  a sister, nephew, and son and brother in-law, came to visit.    Our table has been full of people talking,  eating good food, and laughing about I don't remember what,  but was very funny at the time.   The good feeling is what lingers.

2010

Best wishes to everyone for a happy, creative, productive fresh year!

Abundance Is A Bandage!

Felt button making today was a little like baking cookies. Sofie helped. These were dyed in a simmering bath of dye and vinegar and salt, decorated with french knot dots out of perle cotton. Stitched to a safety pin back.

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Internet auto-translation can be such a rich experience. Any writer can become two, or even three, times better than she ever imagined through this simple application. In my last post about creativity and inspiration, I tried to say that self-censorship is my biggest problem to overcome, and felt I had expressed that idea as well as I could. That is, until I came across an internet site that substitutes any writer's words with synonyms, starting with letters from the beginning of the alphabet. I've no idea why the site exists, but there it was, and this is what I found.

In my version I wrote: "I wonder, Why do I stop myself? I'm actually not doing anything alarming, or earth shakingly over-the-edge. It's only a scarf, and mine is a scarf with crooked edges, and bright moments."

Observe the transformation magic of robot internet synonymization:

... I wonder, Why do I stop myself? I'm absolutely not accomplishing annihilation alarming, or apple shakingly over-the-edge. It's alone a scarf, and abundance is a bandage with agee edges, and ablaze moments.

See how much better?

In Tina Fey's words, rephrasing the lyric "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose", "A synonym's just another word for the word you want to use...."

Paper Work

The main thing looming large here has been taxes. Procrastination weighs heavily on this task. I am suddenly struck by an inspiration to sew a new felt doll, or fill the bird feeder, or anything at all, but take out the paper work. Happily, this is picture of a stack of my now completed tax work!

Yet, even in the midst of it, I found the opportunity to avoid it a little more, by printing some new white paper bakery bags with my print Gocco. Paper work I like. Now, back to the linen threading, in progress...

Keeping Store

Store keeping takes a lot of my time and energy at this time of the year. As my suppliers admonish me, You can't sell off of an empty cart! So, I am buying toys, and books, and bags to fill my cart. And I am still weaving a little. The birds have been madly feeding: tufted titmice, downy, and red bellied woodpeckers, nuthatches, chicadees and juncos. Cardinals, blue jays, and one fat gray squirrel, have also been dining at the black sunflower seed cafe. There have been furious flurries of snow, and a fruitful search for my winter mittens.

Some of my best weaving hours are late at night, when I come back to my workshop. The owls hoot from hill to hill, the Big Dipper lies low in the Northern sky, and sometimes a startled deer rustles away in the woods when I cross my foot bridge to go back home to bed.

Dyeing, again

My next rug is going to be a combination of shades of bright hungarian paprika red and dark chili powder red. I have an appetite for this color, especially at this time of year. I dye the wool pieces in approximately 1/2 yard chunks, to fit the stainless dye kettle I use. There are some variations between each kettle, which is an effect I try to accomplish by changing the color mix a little for each batch. The differences are subtle, but the mixture of close colors across the surface of the rug is much more vibrant than a rug made with a single color. Exciting the eye is what I'm after. My favorite dyes are Procion fiber reactive dyes, because they are quite safe to work with and dispose of, and are also very light and wash fast. With red, this is especially important. My wool rugs are washable, so I don't want any running reds.

The blanket wool I use is a beautiful quality, and quite thick to begin with. To make a 22" X 36" rug I need a little more than 2.5 lbs of wool. This is useful to know when I'm custom dyeing, because I don't make more than I'll be using.