Buttons and such

More dyeing . . . Now the yarns for the rug are ready and I have started weaving . . barely. Today I am adjusting the tieups on this new to me loom for a better shed. Then I can start weaving in earnest.

And we now have a robin who has taken up residence in the pergola. She started 3 different nests and I thought she had abandoned them, but she flew out when I was standing next to the pergola last night and scared the heck out of me as I was watching the raccoon in the neighbor's yard. 

And here is the raccoon. It was only about 6:30, so I thought it was early for him or her to be out and about but what do I know?

I have been going through boxes of "stuff". Stuff from my aunt who passed away a few years ago, stuff in my fiber closet, stuff I have just accumulated over the years to pass things on to people I know will enjoy them, or donate them.

I came across a shoebox, filled with little boxes of buttons and found these beauties. It's mother of pearl and abalone. There were 2 large buttons and 4 smaller ones.  They are gorgeous. I think I will have to sew something with handwoven fabric that needs some buttons.

    

More Color!

I did more dyeing over the weekend. The teal is darker than it looks on my monitor. I wanted gradations of color, so had 2 dyepots going with the teal. When I bought the Cranbrook, I got a lot of great yarn with it, and some colors that aren't what I would normally use.

 The yarns above on the left are overdyed yarns. The yarns below are the ones that I dyed over with teal.

I have one more color to dye this weekend and then I'll be ready to weave the rug!

Love my Cranbrook!

I just took the sampler off the loom and I am going to love weaving on this loom. I was able to start dyeing some wool yarn this weekend but have more left to do.

Go for it!

For years, I have thought that I would like to have an orchid. But I never bought one because I thought it wouldn't grow well, since I might not have enough humidity, or the right amount of light. 

This past winter it was so cold and snowy for so long and I saw this orchid sitting in a display at Walmart for $10 and I thought, "why not?". Even if the blooms lasted for only a couple of weeks, the beauty of the flowers would be well worth it. 

I have sometimes forgotten to water it for a couple of weeks. It sits on the windowsill in my home office and it got kind of chilly up there when it was cold outside. 

It just keeps blooming. It has been blooming now for at least 4 months. It seems to be happy where it's at. 

There is a lesson in this for me. That I can sometimes just do something that might not be sensible or seem like a logical thing to do and it can bring a lot of unexpected joy into my life if I will take that leap of faith. 

And maybe since it's going to be sticking around for a while, it's time to get it a real pot. 

Sampling

First I did some sampling with the shaft switcher, which didn't work well because I used nails instead of eye hooks and the doups slid right off - which I thought they might. But I tied the ss warps to either harness 2 or 3, just to see how the spacing of 5epi worked with various yarns and after all, that's what I really wanted to know. This portion is plain weave. Because I warped this up in a 4 end block weave, I am also able to do plain weave, just using 2 other treadles tied up 1&4 and 2&3. I'm going to start a rug using that and I wanted to see how various colors worked with each other. I washed my skeins of white yarn yesterday and ordered the dyes which should be here by next weekend. It's good to be doing weft-faced weaving again. And I got another towel done on the David loom.
By the time I have woven this rug, the shaft switching device should be finished and then I'll have levers!

Shaft Switching Sampler

It's been several years since I took Jason Collingwood's class at Juanita Hofstrom's Vavning Studio. So I had to reread my notes and look over Peter Collingwood's books again to figure out what I was doing. I have the new Cranbrook warped with linen for a sampler and I made some shaft switchers out of some wood strips with nails. All I have left to do is make the doups and I'm ready to weave.

I want to try out some different sized weft yarns to determine the best epi. Then I can make the shaft switching device using levers. 

Freedom to try new things!

I do love to organize things. Sometimes, when cleaning, I get so caught up in the details of organization, the bigger picture gets lost in the shuffle.
When I purchased the Cranbrook, a lot of yarn came with it. A lot. Bags and bags and boxes and boxes. It was all packed kind of hodgepode by the seller, so I ended up piling it all up in the dining room on a couple of clean sheets and have been picking through it.
I've been so impressed by how wonderful some of this yarn is, some of it decades old judging by the old plastic bags they were in that I ordered some of my own plastic bags. I found some in reasonably small quantities at Good Quality Paper Goods in NY and it arrived yesterday. I already had a large package of mailing labels so I got to work. I have 59 pounds of various sized wool rug yarn in natural white and fawn color. Those are skeined, so I have those in big plastic bins.
Here's some of the yarn all packaged up and labeled. This is mostly wool yarns and rayon yarns. About 41 pounds of just those types just on those 2 shelves.  And there is more to do yet.

I've always had a relatively small yarn stash and this has limited my weaving to some extent. I would only buy something for a particular project and wasn't able to experiment the way I would like to. Now I feel like I can try all sorts of things because I have all this yarn to play with! It's wonderful!!!