Painted Women Oops! I Mean Painted Warps

Alice,
I finally took a few photos of the painted warp scarf, the painted warp too-short-to-be-a-scarf, and the unpainted warp scarf for you. In fact, I wore the Mint Chocolate Chip scarf this morning to a meeting. (I promised myself just before Retreat that I cannot leave the house without sporting something that I have made/designed/created. Yes, I was inspired by Anita Luvera Mayer.) For this one I used UKI Boston Brown 20/2 as weft.


I think the Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake piece is destined to become a bag of some sort. The weft here is a polyester (where on earth did I get that???) I considered a table runner, but honestly, it doesn't go with anything we set at the table. Maybe I should be more open-minded.


The last scarf is one that I was particularly taken with when all was said and done. I still had warp that I didn't have time to paint (mostly because I was thinking too much and not playing enough), so there was enough un-painted warp to do one more scarf. I settled on a natural-colored silk noil weft.
When finished, the sheen from the rayon in the 20/2 cotton/rayon warp made it just lovely. I am ready to try more warps with that cotton/rayon thread. I do love white on white designs. You will see more soon...the cashwool/silk warp and weft is in process now. It is a little slower going than the plain wefts.

Canned another 7 quarts of tomatoes today. It is so good to see the pantry filling up again.

Enjoy this Indian Summer!
Nancy

OH! P.S. I saw the hummingbird again this evening. Yesterday I thought maybe she realized that it was Equinox and headed south....

Sampling

Alice,
Since the weekend has passed I have made significant progress on the 'It's spring Alice!' warp, and begun sampling. I have put 9 yards of warp on the loom with plans to be able to use at least 1 yard for sampling. Yesterday I tried several of the wefts that I had planned, cut it off, wet-finished my piece and looked, evaluated, and looked some more. I asked DH for his critique. I phoned Mary U and asked for hers. We looked at the sample piece in different lights, close-up and at a distance, hanging and flat. I think in the end we all agreed on the same one for the proposed jacket (I badly need something that says 'Spring' and yet is still warm enough when Spring is slow to come).

However, Mary and I also thought that the bit with a black cotton warp was also interesting and potentially stunning as a fabric. I had only used the black to even up the warp bundles that were tied on, and to help me see if there were any threading mistakes. Ah, happenstance! The black weft has the potential to become a shawl with a different sett, and we thought that it would kick it up a notch to have a beautiful, heavier weft accent throughout.

So! as soon as I have put the linen warp on Little Alice (the Macomber) I will try more samples. I'm going to use a very nice black wool that was in the stash (from your stash, Alice, and I will try a dark green wool, too.) Before I do that, though, there are a couple of areas that need to have the warp threads mixed up a bit more, and now is the time to fix that. This fabric measures 24 inches wide after shrinkage, and there would be only one way to lay pattern pieces out, so I don't need any stray stripe-y looking areas lurking there. Here is the full sample piece...with a photo of the Chanel jacket that was the inspiration.

Poll Results

Dear Alice,
It appears that everyone is tired of the monochromatic days at the end of winter and happy, colorful sox are badly needed...by all of us! There was only one vote for regular, plain socks. (Have you ever wondered about me using "sox" and socks" interchangeably? I once saw "sox" written and thought "Bah! That's silly! Everyone knows that socks is spelled s-o-c-k-s and some retailer has bungled the spelling!" I was wrong. 'Tis actually in the dictionary, s-o-x, that is.)

So! Happy, Colorful socks it is!

Mary U voted with roving. She brought the most beautiful mixed blue wool roving on Saturday to spin up a yarn for the sox. It has been fun to spin because it is such a beautiful, beautiful blend! Liz (from whom Mary got it) called it 'Moody Blues'; it would be great with denim!



Typing is slow. I am minus one finger for this today, and it will be better soon.





On the weaving front, I have 75 more threads to measure out, but cannot go forward until I get more yarn from Forma. The seafoam rayon ran out...which I rather expected since I used it so many times in the thread order. The first 300 threads:


We had a tremendous melt today, but never fear, there was more snow falling as I drove home tonight from a meeting. ...and another winter storm warning for tomorrow night!

I have only about 8400 more stitches on the top secret knitting project to finish and I will be done early!