Weaving the Forest Shawl

Finally, the weaving begins! Two photos and a few words can be found in this blog entry.

The Forest Shawl Continues

In which I discuss planning the Forest Shawl.

Planning the warp design.

Beginning the Forest Shawl

I’m writing up the process of making a woven shawl on my new blog, so I thought I should post a link here so everyone can find it. This is not a fancy weave: just something simple to practice basic skills and to use up some stash.

Selecting yarns is a tricky process.

 After much searching, I chose a hand-painted sock yarn and three Knit Picks Palette yarns to coordinate. The sock yarn was supposed to become a Clapotis shawl, but once it was out of the skein I didn’t like it. Plus, when I bought it, I forgot that Clapotis calls for worsted weight yarn. (Still haven’t knit a Clapotis.)

The Knit Picks yarn was supposed to be shadow-knit pillows. I love shadow-knits, but I quickly discovered that I hate knitting them. Especially in DK-weight yarn.

Exhaustive detail about planning this can be found in the post “Planning the Forest Shawl”. I will continue to cross-post here.

The End of the Beginning

Took my Kessenich floor loom out for a test drive today. Whee! After fixing several errors, I think the threading is finally right.

I still need to adjust the tie-up to get a bigger shed, but after that I can finally get started on my first towels!

Flickr Find: Desert Scarf

Beautiful rigid heddle weaving. Clapsed weft is the technique that creates the pattern.

Flickr link:http://www.flickr.com/photos/waschbear/6856706931/

Recycled yarn

Made for E's school auction, which features recycled items.  I had this yarn from the Prairie Crossing yarn store's closing sale and thought it would be perfect.

From the label:  Rowan Purelife Revive is made from used garments which have been selected according to the silk, cotton and viscose content. These are then carded to make regenerated fiber, which is then spun into this beautiful, high quality yarn, which gives life to new hand knitting designs.

Fiber content: 36% recycled silk; 36% recycled cotton; 28% recycled viscose (rayon)

It's not the softest scarf, but it's definitely not scratchy or stiff either.  I really liked the drape after washing it and the heathery shades are awesome.  It's not quite as in-your-face as this photo might suggest - it's more blue-gray-heather.  Hope it sells!

Antique finds

A few weeks ago I checked out the Gurnee antique center for the first time. That place is huge!

Among many other finds, they had a few buckets with lots of yarn bobbins.  One place had a ton of wooden spools.  Really cute, if I could figure out a way to use them.  Ideas?

Things that make you go "hmm."

The cloud is telling me to post

I'm a little spooked:

So I've been playing around with apple's new iCloud system and my iPhone and I opened my apple email for the first time in months, maybe years.  I've been having password issues with my me.com email so I just have ignored it for the most part.

Shortly after I did this, I received an email from  my apple email to my gmail account that just says "Files" in the subject line, and it had this picture.

It's a picture I took almost a year ago of a scarf that I wove for a friend.  The yarn is this yummy Noro Silk Garden, and I thought the colors reflected well her fabulously colorful personality.  It's my first attempt at a leno weave pattern, which involved creating a string heddle to help me 'twist' the warp fibers with every other pass of the shuttle.  What that means is that I took some string and tied little loops in it exactly every other inch.  I wove it under every other strand in the warp, and then put the loops on a dowel.  So when I lifted the dowel, it created a different space for me to throw the shuttle through.  Sounds complicated, no?  Thank goodness it takes up a lot of space and weaves really fast, because it was!

Pattern:  Leno weave
Warp:  Noro Silk Garden
Weft:  Habu Silk (see Win, I do use the habu! :))

The weird thing is, I have absolutely no recollection of putting it in my apple email.  I don't even remember ever accessing my apple email and using it for anything, much less uploading cool pictures like this.  And then this email appears to myself from myself.

I guess it's a sign that I need to post about it !

I'm not weaving, I'm managing my stash

Today I was listening to the KnitPicks podcast from late October on rigid heddle weaving.  Now I realize that this is a somewhat self-serving podcast, since it is created by a website that sells yarn, but there were two items worth commenting on:
 - Think of weaving not as a new craft, but as a means of stash management!
 -  You can pick up the edges after it's off the loom and knit an icord edge.

I haven't woven much lately, because there's a project on the loom that I don't know if I'm loving yet - though it is starting to grow on me.  That will be the subject of another post, since I don't have photos right now.

Here is a scarf I did this summer, to surprise a friend for her birthday.  I love the subtle sparkle.  The weft is a Claudia Handpainted silk/wool fingering that I found in the clearance section at Fiddlehead (!!  big score!).  It's tough to appreciate the colors from this photo, but it's a blend of pinks, oranges, and browns.  The warp is a cotton/viscose blend that I scored at an odd yarn sale out of someone's home.  This one practically wove itself.