Jack Frost Bookmarks

Well, as it turned out I wasn’t all that satisfied with the huck lace snowflake bookmarks. The variegation in the color made it difficult to see the pattern distinctly, and the shade of blue didn’t help either. This was ironic because I had been extremely happy with the yarn when I dyed it. It’s a nice dark blue, which is not easy to get with woad on cellulose. But it’s a bit too dark for effective lace, it seems. Not enough reflectivity, perhaps.

Here are a couple images of a snowflake motif in woad blue 40/2 linen.

woad-dyed snowflake in huck lace

woad snowflake oblique angle Continue reading “Jack Frost Bookmarks” →

Woad Dyed Snowflake Bookmarks in Huck Lace

It is tricky to squeeze in weaving around teaching and my shifts at the Shelburne Arts Co-op, since weaving is a time consuming process, multi-step. I usually have to break a project into incremental tasks. That way I can do a step even if I only have a small window of time, and still feel like I am making progress.

After I wove off the Hop Vine bookcloth, I planned to weave a new batch of bookmarks. For this wintery season, I planned to weave a huck lace snowflake motif, based on a project I developed for my Master Weaver Certificate. I called the original design “No Two Snowflakes Are Exactly Alike,” because the project featured 7 different snowflake motifs. To make it work with the same threading and treadling for each, I changed the tie-up between each snowflake. This was a time-consuming way to do it, and I decided it was impractical for items that I intended to sell. So, I decided to just pick one snowflake motif for this batch. I planned to use 40/2 linen naturally dyed with woad from my garden.

For this snowflake bookmark project, a lot of the steps were already done. The yarn was dyed (though still in skeins). The designing was already done. Often times I have to do some math to figure out if I have enough yarn of a given color to make a given project. For this project, I already knew how much dyed yarn I had and roughly how much I needed, based on my calculations from the heart-motif bookmarks. Continue reading “Woad Dyed Snowflake Bookmarks in Huck Lace” →

Hop Vine Color and Design

This afternoon I wove off the rest of the Hop Vine warp. I am pretty pleased with the cloth, and have even come around to liking the three sections that I was so critical of in my last post.

To add some variation to the pattern, I decided to switch to the “rose fashion” treadling for the remainder of the warp. You can see the difference in the two photos below. The first one shows the star fashion treadling. It is a series of diamonds with strong diagonals. The second is the same pattern and tabby colors woven rose fashion. Four-pointed stars alternate with ovals to create more undulation.

Mosstone and Pistachio Hop Vine Mosstone and Pistachio Hop Vine Rose Fashion

Here’s a close up of the cloth with the rose fashion treadling.

Mosstone and Pistachio close up

I do think it is more dynamic with the alternating motifs. That shift alone added a bit more energy to the cloth. Continue reading “Hop Vine Color and Design” →

More Hop Vine and A Color Theory Question

Matthew pointed out that I have been spelling Hop Vine two ways: Hopvine as one word, and Hop Vine as two words. This is because I have seen it written both ways, and personally I don’t have a strong preference. Perhaps I should be more consistent, but I don’t have good criteria for choosing between the two spellings. Without good criteria, some decisions just can’t be made. INTP anyone?

Meanwhile, here are three more pieces that I’ve woven on this warp. I re-wrote the treadling to maintain a consistent tabby order, so the pattern looks a little different from my earlier woad- and madder-dyed pieces. All the yarns in this group are commercially dyed.

The one below has 10/2 tencel in Moroccan Blue for the pattern weft and 20/2 UKI cotton in Deep Turk for tabby:

blue pattern weft and blue tabby

You can see the actual color of the 20/2 yarn on the bobbin closest to the reed. You might be asking, “What happened to that bright blue?”  The background of the cloth looks very light because the warp is off-white. It mutes the tabby color. As I recall from a class on color theory for weavers with Susan Loring Wells, a color plus white is called a tint. Continue reading “More Hop Vine and A Color Theory Question” →

Hardy Flax

Back at the beginning of September I was surprised to discover that tons of flax seeds which I’d dumped out of a retting tank in the back yard had managed to germinate, despite having been waterlogged and fermented, and still being in their pods. You can read my original post here.

After I came back from the very inspiring flax processing workshop at Rhinebeck in October, I decided retting was done for the season even though I had one more portion of the 2012 crop left to ret. So, on Sunday October 21st I poured out several buckets of water I’d been saving. As I was dumping the water onto the grass, I was amazed to spy dozens of flax plants growing in the lawn beside our apartment, under the shade of a huge spruce. Continue reading “Hardy Flax” →

Hopvine

My new book cloth is a variation of a miniature overshot motif called Hopvine. To create my threading I worked from two other drafts. One was “Modified Hopvine” from a sampler from the Hill Institute. The other was “Modified Hop Vine” from Marguerite Davison’s classic A Handweaver’s Pattern Book. The threading from Hill had too many ends in each pattern repeat to suit the scale of my book covers (5.5 inches by 8 inches) so I wanted to make the motif smaller. The Davison draft had fewer ends in a repeat but looked weirdly jittery in the drawdown in my weaving software.

So, I tinkered until I found a satisfying balance in the pattern, and am still tinkering with the treadling. The design consists of two different diamonds, one a longer and more pointed and the other a little more squat and rounded. I am not sure if these are supposed to evoke different elements of a hop vine, for example the leaves and the inflorescences. Or maybe the name of the pattern has a different origin. There are some nice images of hops plants here.

For those of you who recall my emboldening tabby travails of a year ago, you might be surprised to hear that I ran into the same problem of keeping a consistent tabby this time, also. Sigh. Continue reading “Hopvine” →

Guild Presentation

On Wednesday November 14th I gave a presentation to the Weavers of Western Massachusetts (12/24/2023 Edited to add, they have a website now so I added a link!) about my Coptic bound books with handwoven cloth covers. It was very flattering to be invited to share my work with such an accomplished group of weavers, and I really appreciated the opportunity to talk about my process to an interested audience. It was a lot of fun. Continue reading “Guild Presentation” →

Rhinebeck and the Brothers Zinzendorf

Last weekend, for the first time, I went to Rhinebeck (a.k.a. The New York State Sheep and Wool Festival). I am not a high-speed driver and I always take back roads, so via my route it was a three hour drive to get there. Two of those three hours involved a nerve-wracking creep through the foggy pre-dawn darkness, praying to St. Francis to keep all the small creatures away from my car. The last hour involved intense gratitude for the sunlight, eager glimpses of glorious foliage, and sorrow for the poor wee beasties on whose behalf, apparently, crepuscular New York drivers had neglected to invoke any animal protector. Continue reading “Rhinebeck and the Brothers Zinzendorf” →

First Frost and Woad Thoughts

Where I live in Massachusetts, our first frost is usually the first or second week of October. I feel like it has been creeping later and later in recent years, but tonight (Friday October 12th) our forecasted low is 25 degrees. I always find the first frost to be a bitter-sweet moment in the gardening year. By the time it comes, Matthew and I are usually up to our eyeballs in chilis and tomatillos, there is no room in the fridge, and we are sick of watering and weeding and squishing bugs and trying to defend beets, corn, pumpkins, or what-have-you from unknown assailants…. Continue reading “First Frost and Woad Thoughts” →