A bit of whipstitching, and a pro tip

I started on the hexie cutouts, and I'm getting a bit more skilled at handling them as I go. Seen here, off the hoop, and resting on the background batik fabric.

These will be overstitched in a contrasting thread, I think, when I come to do the appliqueing to the background. Meanwhile I need to press and straighten them up.

And the pro tip for embroiderers: notice the inner ring of the hoop is wrapped? Bias tape (thank you, Judy), or any old strip of bias fabric, works.

It protects your work from being abraded by the hoop. Here I'm working with cottons, so it's enough to wrap just the inner ring.

 But when I've worked with silk, I've wrapped both parts of the hoop,s as not to deform the weave. Like this

Ideally you need to remove the hoop after every working period, so as not to put the imprint of the hoop on your work and the stretching pressure, too. I don't always live up to this ideal.  Fabric is very responsive, and needs care in handling.

I have to be a bit cautious about how long I stitch for, because of eyestrain, what with that and more screen time these days. Otherwise I'd stitch until I was frozen in place.

And you did know that a good way to save strain on your neck is to stitch leaning back on pillows, holding the work up comfortably, light shining over your shoulder? It looks really slothful, but in fact it's a Good Thing. Especially when you're a bit up in years.

A shower of hexies under way

This is where we are, after multiple ideas, discards, new ideas all day yesterday when I thought about it.

The concept is a fall of hexies irregularly across a couple of diagonals. I'll stitch back the edges to secure them, then reverse applique to the batik fabric. All the points you see sticking out will vanish under the edges.

First group hooped. Overstitching next. I hope the hoop maintains the outlines, because there's going to be quite a bit of handling. The drawing's done in heat- vanishing pen, hard to see in the picture but very clear to the stitcher.

Then once this constellation of hexies is ready, I'll decide whether to applique stars to the top layer first or after doing the reverse work.

Decision for another day. Now I can get stitching.

Well, right church wrong pew

I posted in the wrong blog. If you want to see the current state of play in the Big Star Thing, you need to go to https://fieldfen.blogspot.com

Oops!

Background fabric done, now work begins

Here's the rest of the story.

And now, I need to set to work deciding, moving, eliminating, choosing, settling, until I'm happy with all the moving parts.

This is where the true aerobic nature of art shows up. Bending, stretching, crawling, lifting, moving, all happen. Usually you're not aware of it until you stop for a break and feel as if you're wearing lead shoes.

It's possible I've got two pieces going, a lot of shapes in search of a place and may need to overdye another piece of the cotton. Since the process didn't exhaust the pigment from the natural dyes, I could reuse it. It's back in the freezer just in case.

Dyeing continued

Yesterday was the mordanting with a bowl on top to keep the fabric under water.

Then today I did the first stage of the dyeing, using the whole sheet, just poured  the powder among the folds. After simmering for probably a couple of hours, it came out a lovely pale green, on the blue side of the spectrum

Then I tore the fabric  into four parts, three for future use in various plans, one for the current work.

Then I folded the current piece, top to bottom, concertina style, and banded it tight at intervals

ending with an overhand knot.

Tomorrow when the second stage dyes, the natural ones from the freezer, have thawed, I'll do the next stage.

These dyes are a mixture of dark gold, reddish and brown. It's all going to be the background for the stitched appliques.

I have to guiltily admit one advantage of the isolation situation: no interruptions by friendly neighbors of my train of thought. This piece is benefiting from it.

Quiet in here lately

I haven't been active in art for a few days, because of ocular migraines. They're triggered by too much close stitching along with  screen time.

 So I took a couple of days off  the most intense stuff,  to rest my eyes, and tomorrow here's where I'll be. Dyeing.

The background fabric for the Big Star Thing,  a new white cotton sheet, laundered and ready to mordant and dye tomorrow.

See the Kool-aid packets? Sara, Ravelry friend, sent me them when I couldn't find them anywhere.  I'm going to dump the lot in, after I fold and gather the fabric. The idea is to have a gently variegated color background against which the stars and hexie formations will blend and contrast.

 Koolaid's a good nontoxic dye. You'll note the mordants, washing soda and alum, are similarly benign. They don't outgas fumes.

The big white pot is the mordant bath then the dye bath. Long ago I used it for canning before, along with other kitchen items,  it migrated into the studio never to return to the cooking arena.

So now that my vision has calmed down, and the jagged shapes and gaps and flashing lights have gone away, I can get on.

Experiment complete

The weaving is done. 4.75" x 2".

 I was able to do the fringeless finish at one end, but had to cut the loops at the other end to release the heddle. Knotted them, then wove the ends in. The heddle kept the margins even, a bonus.

Nice change of pace. Now back to diamonds and hexies.

Hokett loom, rigid heddle, paper thread

So here's the heddle in action. I'm using one side of the Hokett loom.

 Heddle down, see the threads at the top of the slits?

Heddle up, threads slid down ,shed changed

Work started. The shed, the passage between the warp threads, is big enough to pass the bobbin through, very handy. No manipulation needed. This is easier than the needle weaving I did before.

Since I plan to do the drawn weft finishing method I got so excited about a while back, I needed to use  loops, rather than the separate warp threads you usually thread through the rigid heddle, hereinafter called the rh. That's why I chose the Hokett. Notches plus space to raise and lower the rh.

However, this meant threading the entire warp thread through each slit and hole, while trying to warp and maintain tension, all at once, quite exciting. Needed three hands.

After I managed it, I taped down the backs of the loops, because raising and lowering the rh would lift the loops right off.

 This would result in no tension on the loom, but high tension in the weaver.

This idea of combining the fringeless finish and the rh is not exactly a trifecta. More of a bifecta. Don't try this at home, folks.

After this experiment, when the rh is free again I'll cut the slits in it just fractionally wider, to reduce friction. On the warp threads. And the weaver, too, come to think of it.

All in all, not a bad outcome. If I ever do backstrap weaving, this is a great little tool for making belts. Pretty nice width. 5 epi (ends per inch).

 You'll notice I warped every other slot on the loom, to reconcile the 8 epi of the loom with the bigger spaces in the rh. This wouldn't be an issue in backstrap weaving, where the rh would dictate size, there not being any loom to contend with.

Nice bit of learning this morning. Always a student, ready for feedback from the real weavers who read here. Judy, Joanne, and there are others, show yourselves, I am not afraid, oh wait, that's Bertie Wooster hearing the knocking in the wardrobe when he's reading a ghost story.. never mind.

Miniature rigid heddle

I've been thinking about this since Sarah Swett's recent blogpost about carving a tiny rigid heddle from a beautiful piece of wood she just happened to have lying around.

It's a weaving item which enables the weaver to raise and lower warp threads to slide the shuttle through. You can make string heddles, tied individually to warp threads, then lifted and lowered in bundles to change the shed. Same idea, different mechanism. It's a lovely engineering concept.

I needed a physical change of pace last evening from stitching, and had been mulling about this. And remembered the plastic sheets I have for cutting out epp templates. It's pliable enough to cut without shattering, and I thought I could pierce and slit it.

Which I did. As you see. Alternate slits and holes. You raise the heddle, the threads in the slits slide, the ones in the holes don't. Lower it, same, but you've changed the shed, the pathway for the shuttle.

 I used a metal eraser shield as a base outline shape.

 These things date back to old fashioned typing, and needing to erase mistakes without blurring the letters around the typo. I must have had this since freelance writing days, which was when Handsome Son was a baby. And I've also used it for paper embossing, must tell you about that another time.  Anyway, back to my heddle.

It's not a beautiful piece of wood, nor could my hands tolerate carving wood, but it will function.

 I'm going to try it today when I do a bit of weaving, using the paper thread I made recently. Here it's just showing how the warp is threaded. In action it will be held in place on the loom by the warp threads.

When you make something different from the daily artwork like this, it releases a lot of  thoughts about the main piece in progress. I've now decided on the backing for the Big Thing With Stars, and how to go with it. Caution: Artist at Work, Dyeing is Forecast.

Not to mention stamping and reverse applique, which I don't think I've ever done, but which will work a treat with this design.

I need to be weaving today, to save my stitching hands. Awful work, but someone's got to do it.. my son tells me I need to work on my joke alert game. He points out that people need cues now and then as to what's said seriously and what's not. To which I say, oh, you're joking...loud eye rolling ensues.

Design taking shape

These are the current small dark stars. Next up will be bright stars from these organza pieces, sari fabric. And there will be bright and dark hexies and clamshells.

This piece is shaping up now, probably large. It doesn't do to think it all out ahead of time, nor to discuss it much. That tends to foreclose on possibilities.

But there's a swirl of ideas in mind. My mental design wall is buzzing like Pixar. Stay tuned.

Change of pace! From big diamonds to small diamonds.

One of the things everyone has to watch out for with fiberarts is not overusing your hands with the same repeated movements.

 I was very pleased with the diz results, much better spinning. But because of the scrunching movement of the left hand as the roving advances, I started having a bit of left shoulder pain. Also the flicking movement of spinning is hard on my right hand. So I have to take a short break before I get trouble going on both sides.

So I picked up the epp, the big diamonds, and found I had unaccountably cut the fabric a bit small, or the templates a bit big. Either way I had unusable fabric bits.

Since I had planned on an array of diamond sizes anyway, I cut the undersized diamonds down further to make smaller diamonds, for which I had a bagful of templates from another project.

There might be a mad array of shapes, clamshells, hexies, diamonds, patch work circles made from tiny bits before this project tells me what it is.

And after this morning's drama, see https://fieldfen.blogspot.com, and waiting to hear Handsome Son has got home safely from work,trees down all over, flooding, a bit of quiet stitching is a Good Thing.

Diz iz da final word on ma diz

Before I stop boring you with my diz career, I had to do one last post. I have now added a small button to my Dizkit.

Using this resulted in significantly better thread, from a pretty intractable chunk of roving, a bit felted.

 So I had to show it. It's getting more consistent, a hard thing for me to accomplish.

Okay before I start getting threats, this is my positively final dizquisition on this tool. Unless I get another great idea.

Sudden great diz afterthought

The diz I used yesterday sort of worked but didn't look exactly like Sara's work. I realized it's probably because the hole is a slot, not round. So I roamed about in in search of something round.

And found the butt end of a small safety pin does the trick. I'll try an even smaller one, since I now find that the diz aperture size influences the fineness of the eventual yarn. This had escaped me in the excitement of discovering the concept.

Once again Occam's razor comes through.  Good old Occam.

The Diz and Liz

One of the best ways for me to have a good day is to learn something new. Today it was the purpose of the diz. I've heard of this spinning tool many times, usually mentioned by spinners who assume everyone knows what it is and what it does.

Then today's Spinning Sara email arrived, with a link to her YouTube channel, explaining it all.  Complete with ideas on how to improvise one, if you don't have one, which I didn't.

Turns out it's pretty simple, a circular piece of anything, with a hole in the center. You need a threader to start the roving through it. I used the inside of a covered button and a tiny crochet hook (thanks, Judy, again). Like this

The idea is that when you have a hank of roving which is very resistant to drafting, you pass it through the diz which renders it a whole lot more amenable to drafting and spinning.

  I have a couple of these hanks, so I tried it out. I'd been thinking I wasn't good at drafting. Seems that even the best spinners run into this now and then.

So I learned to turn practically unspinnable roving into much friendlier fiber. Quite a good bit of learning.

And it satisfied a need to spin.

More stars

I was supposed to be making a dressy fashion-forward mask today. Fabrics all washed, dried, ironed, ready for action. Then I found I'd mislaid the measurements which I'd written down carefully. Somewhere.

So, until the piece of paper showed up, I cut diamonds. And templates for diamonds. And basted the fabric onto the templates.

This kind of quiet hand stitching, listening to a good audiobook is such a relief from the mad rush of bad news.  Then I'll be whipstitching the diamonds together into stars, for future use in some art thing. It doesn't do to lock yourself into an idea too soon, so this vagueness is fine at this point.  Anyway, that's my story.

Some blessed soul has started uploading very well-read Georgette Heyer audiobooks on YouTube, so one of my favorites, the funny  The Reluctant Widow, is accompanying my stitching.

Then while I was in YouTube, I found the video with the measurements. 14.5"x8" in case I forget again. And cut out a piece of fabric, a lovely batik cotton that looks like a sky with clouds.

 I don't have a scarf suitable for wrapping round my face, knitted and open weave no use, and I seem to be the only person on earth who does not own a bandana.

So a mask will happen, and maybe if I wear it out walking, it will help with whatever's making me sneeze and snort and generally make a lot of noise when I get home. It's the hayfever season.

The principle is simple, and you see the sum total of my notes. If I get this made, I'll do a selfie, and that'll teach you to ask questions, Missy!

Change of pace, diamonds and stars

I needed a change of pace from spinning and weaving for the moment.

So I went and retrieved the paper piecing diamonds, which I organized away during that January Great Winnowing.  The winnowing saved me a lot of time and annoyance, really glad I did it when I did, before life changed dramatically.

I found quite a few pieces already wrapped for joining, and templates cut to continue wrapping

So I decided to make stars, random color choices, just go. By my standards these are huge -- 10.25" tip to tip! Massive!

I'm making raw material. Might be mobiles, bags, pillows, vest fabric, background for framed weaving, throw, no need to know yet. And peaceful basting and whipstitching is about as calming as you can get.

I made a great discovery, to listen while I stitch. Jennifer Ehle, yes, Lizzy from Pride and Prejudice, is reading it live on her Instagram account and putting the recording up on YouTube.

 Totally unrehearsed, sometimes commenting on the characters, sometimes needing a couple of runs at an unfamiliar word, her dog barking, family barging in forgetting she's working, it's very much being read to rather than read at.

This is more my speed than running about trying to recreate the lives we used to have on Zoom. We're suddenly in a new era. I think it's better to learn how to live now than try to seize yesterday. Just my thoughts. Agreement not required! Life's an unfolding artwork to manage as best we can.