New weaving adventure

Weaving a kind of industrial landscape.

 using handspun and dyed yarn which you see here all rolled onto tubes.

And this will be different from previous tapestries, because there will be smoke and flames and drama, all being well.

At that point I plan to pull raw top through and have it rearing up. Just flailing about, not woven neatly, see the black and white and red stuff there? That.  Also the copper armature wire you see there, which has featured in several weavings.

It came out of an old washing machine being stripped for parts by a friend's husband. He asked her if that artist friend might want it, he couldn't use it. Done. It's beautiful.

So tomorrow I'll see how this goes. The variegated yellow looks a bit agricultural, and a bit of copper might happen there. Or something. Won't know till it's upon me, or I'm upon it.

Painting with yarn and texture. I really like working big ideas in small format.

I could call it Dark Satanic Mills, but the reference might escape the viewer.

And I did a classic Dumb Move. Accidentally cut a warp thread when I was fixing some slubs. Arghghg. But I find, as I learn, that a lot of seeming disasters are quite fixable if you keep breathing and take a minute.

Here I cut a new warp thread, knotted it to the cut ends and went from there. Works fine. You can't see the repair now that it's buried.

That could apply to a lot of life situations, come to think of it.

Goats Magosh Redux

In today's mail, two innocent little Ziploc bags of roving ends, lovely cheap way to experiment with fiber.

So you think ooh, a couple of nice chunks of roving. So you pop them open.

And there's an explosion of color and texture and scent of clean happy fleece animals.

And you play with it all, and separate bits to see how it spins, since you need all the help you can get if you're me, still working toward consistency.

And you make sure your readers know about Goats Magosh.

Nice people, handwritten message on the cover invoice.

Meant to be a scarf, turned out to be a table runner

I finished all the sections of the supposed summer scarf, joined them up, washed and dried it, tried it on and decided it looked like a table runner.

So now it is.

Onward!

The potholder loom returns

Bit of spinning, bit of dyeing to get the yellow I need, then a couple of sections of the summer scarf I was thinking of before, when  the rhl turned it into a wall hanging. I'm just a helpless prawn of fate, I tell you.

There will be a series of sections, to be crocheted together in some interesting way I haven't thought of yet.

This is very airy. The Tunisian crochet hook is working as a  weaving hook. I also use it as a shed stick on the Hokett loom. All purpose tool.

And, when I found the potholder loom, I remembered the little motif, top left there,  I hadn't taken off it, so I did. This is handspun and dyed, and it will be part of something bigger. I think. Interesting organic shape.

I have three tapestries in the studio waiting to be framed, and I think all this may be displacement activity to avoid the dreaded, I mean great fun of,  framing.

Dyed roving ready to spin

Learned a few things, one being that even the smallest drop of red overcomes even a lot of yellow. I plan to dye more roving yellow, since I accidentally got orange there.

All in all, ready to spin this batch and see what happens.

I have dyed, and here are the pictures

Results of the dyeing caper, from white to bright:

Draining over the sink. The roving doesn't seem to have felted,  always a concern.

I can spin colors together or card them together, depending on what I need to weave. And  I can spin the solid colors. There's probably enough for a small tapestry.

Nice evening's work.

Help, I'm dyeing here!

Food coloring and microwave dyeing of roving. This is done in stages so as to get the dye completely into the fibers without cooking the roving.

I think this is the last of the Coopworth roving. It's friendly and I'm hoping for good tapestry results.

Ideally when it's done, the water is clear and the fiber is dyed. The white vinegar is the mordant, and once the dyeing is done, at the end of the dye, teehee, sorry, the dw detergent helps get the last traces of unabsorbed dye out of the fiber. That way it won't migrate onto the user.

Since I'm wanting this for tapestry, not wearing, it's less of an issue, but still a good idea.

And since this is food safe, it's okay to use the regular microwave.  Gloves were out for show, then cropped out.  I never remember to put them on. My fingers are an interesting series of colors now. I do use the wooden spatula and the tongs. This stuff gets hot.

All this means that spinning will happen soon. And I'm wondering if it would be nice to get a Turkish spindle..again. Wondering, that is, not getting.

New artwork, partly tapestry

So this just came off the loom. Possibly finished. Definitely keeping the loops.

Finally got to the gallery to establish that I'm in the show

The Gallery at Mercer County community College. I picked a few favorites. The reflections on the glass made it difficult to get others.

And Alice the gallery director obligingly took a pic with me and my work, Red Building, and the certificate showing it's now in the public collection.