you knitted what?

My best friend's mom recently passed away.  It's not much, but maybe my friend will feel a little love from me when she takes out a kleenex.  

Pattern:  Zakka tissue cozy

Yarn:  Noro Aurora, a little bit leftover from another project

(I love this yarn and am sad it's discontinued)

(if you ever see me contemplating a toilet paper cozy, you may need to stage an intervention)

Shadow Weave Samples

My small weaving group did a weave-along, and we chose an 8-shaft shadow-weave gamp. In addition to the towel (or table runner), we each wove samples to swap. Here are my samples:

Shadow weave samples to swap

A gamp is a weaving term that means a piece of cloth with a pattern or set of colors in the warp (the length of the cloth) and a pattern or set of colors in the weft (the width of the cloth) such that the final cloth has a series of squares where the different patterns or colors intersect. It's a fun way to see how colors and/or patterns interact.

Shadow weave on the loom (looking sideways)

This gamp was modified from Handwoven Magazine (Jan/Feb 2004). It is shadow weave, which requires alternating dark and light colors (my dark was always black). Each warp stripe has a different threading to make a different pattern, and each weft stripe has the corresponding treadling.

Our samples were full width but had only four rectangular repeats; enough to show the pattern but quick to weave. Each sample took about 35 minutes for me to weave.

I cut off the samples and will tie on the remaining warp to make a table runner. It's neat to see the different patterns; some are pretty, and some are pretty ugly!

Eating a rainbow

Remember that Whole Living magazine that you got for me, Win?  I LOVE it.  In one of the last issues they had a colorful article about "eating the rainbow" - pictures of foods from all over the color spectrum.  So I made a couple, and they were Amazing.  

This one is just pineapple, mango, thinly sliced Meyer Lemon (which you don't eat, as I discovered), and toasted unsweetened coconut.  A perfect dessert - recipe here, in case you don't believe how simple it is.  

This is a "black stir fry" with kale, red cabbage, tofu, and eggplant.  Kale!  And it tastes great!  There was a squeeze of lime which I think made it phenomenal and changed the way I look at stir fry.  Here is the recipe:  Whole Living site    

the end justifies the ends

check out this stunning lap afghan that Pat  just finished!  it's been two years in the making ... but done just in time for her granddaughter's graduation.  

for this project, she learned how to weave in ends as she knit.  can you imagine all the ends she would otherwise have had to weave in at the end?

Stunning

My incredibly talented mother-in-law finished her needlepoint box.   Each side is a masterpiece of organization, execution, and artistry.   I had no idea you could do so much with needlework!

an ode to ikea

My latest project:  redoing my craft room, a la Ikea.  Look at my wall of yarn!  It makes me so happy just looking at it.  Before, I would sit on my couch and get stressed out by all the clutter.  Now there still is clutter, but it is contained.  And now I have all my books within easy reach.

This is the sewing corner.  Check out the fabric bolts, the same ones I discussed in an earlier post.

I uncovered some old sumi-e sketches that I did in a class back in Seattle.  Makes me want to take it again.  That big swath of pretty fabric is just pinned up there, no hemming or finishing.

mark my words

My latest addition to the craft distraction armamentarium:  a set of metal letter stamps.  

I wanted to make plant markers that would last year after year.  Last year I tried getting some silverware at a thrift store and writing on the handles with a sharpie.  However, sharpies wash off in the rain.

Then I learned that hammering stamps onto stainless steel doesn't work at all.  

My next door neighbor has been selling a lot of small antique-y things that she inherited, mostly jewelry and small things.  One thing she hasn't been able to sell well is silverware.  There's a lot of cute stuff, but it's all silver, which nobody uses anymore because who wants to spend the time polishing.

But silver is eminently stampable.

Hammering the spoons flat is a little tricky.  This spoon was a jelly spoon or something like that and was already mostly flat.  The small knives work really well because they don't even need hammering.

To make the letters dark, you color over the letter with a sharpie and then sand it off while it's still wet.  The color remains in the valleys of the stamped letter.  The "basil" is a little smudgier because that spoon is a little softer, and so the letters stamped more deeply, and thus was a little trickier to sand away.

So fun!  And now I can make markers for any and all of the plants and herbs I am planting this year.