At the start of my make-up week for the TdF, I've got one bobbin each of the sparkle and the orange, and got in some good outside spinning time with the yellow/pink that I combined.
What I ended up doing was fluffing up the yellow and pink roving and layering them together, then pulling them through a diz- so they're not really blended, just kind of next to each other. It's a little tricky trying to keep them together as I spin, though I'm not super worried about sections of only one color as long as they aren't too long. The results when I ply them all together should be...interesting? I hope.
I've been spinning 2oz on each bobbin, alternating colors to keep it interesting. Once I'm done with this one I'll be half-way though my fiber. Will probably take me more than a week, but I am determined to finish before I get distracted with another project!
Tour de Fleece update! We're just starting week 3, but I personally missed a week and a half due to vacation plans so I'm only about 2oz down of my project so far. I'll tack on the extra 10 days at the end to even it out.
After a very minimal amount of sampling I decided to spin a 3-ply yarn, with one ply being the sparkle fiber, one ply being solid orange, and one being a rough blend of the pink and yellow. I'm a little frustrated with the sparkle fiber though because there are a lot of white/ undyed pieces I have been pulling out as I go, so we'll have to see what the final yardage ends up as.
And as usually I'm loving seeing everyone's projects this year! Now back to spinning!
Finished another thing! Left is Frau Wöllfchen „Dancing Alone“ alpaca/silk, right is Regenbogenwolle „Bittersweet“ merino/alpaca/camel/silk blend. Think these together could make a really cute cropped striped cardigan??
Last fall, I dyed some yarn + fiber with marigolds that I grew and dried (plus some cochineal that I bought online. I also had some indigo-dyed yarn from a workshop I took which is how I got the purple). Made a huuuuuge mess but overall the results were pretty nice! So this year I thought I'd try growing some other dye plants in my garden.
I got this new planter/cart thing in the spring and planted dyers chamomile and coreopsis, which are now starting to flower (this picture taken after I came back from a week-long vacation so everything's looking a little ragged). I also planted some weld in the ground, but apparently weld is better harvested in the 2nd year so for now it's just hanging out. And of course more marigolds as I plant them in my vegetable garden anyway because they help keep pests away. Allegedly.
As long as things keep blooming, I'll keep collecting flowers and drying them on cookie sheets to stash away for another eventual dyeing experiment. I'm also going to try to save seeds; tbh I've never been on top of things enough to start seeds at the right time, but hey it's the thought that counts.
i love knitting socks and it does bother me when people tell me they are too beautiful to wear bc like. that is the point. im spending time making this thing to keep your feet warm and protected. yes my knitting is art but its also practical. yes it may wear out or rip but its a sock! they are meant to do that. all fabric wears out eventually and id rather someone wear holes in the objects i make and then throw them out when they are not useful as socks anymore then have them sit behind glass on display
the tags i woke up to on this are delightful. I appreciate everyone’s horror <3
to try and answer some of the questions people have asked:
1) i am as bewildered about how i’ve managed this as you all are. i’ve comfortably done a light fingering/heavy lace 3ply before, but this is uhhh. new.
2) the fibre is a 25% penduncle silk/75% superfine merino commercial mix, and it’s extremely soft and extremely fine and extremely easy to draft, which i think helps with the fine-ness. i’m spinning on a small whorl, treadling pretty fast, and with basically no tension on the bobbin because otherwise it snaps the thread.
(relatedly, as someone who habitually spins pretty fine: when i bump into people who struggle with it, the issue is very often that they have their tension up way too high.)
3) this is what the singles look like (with the 3ply on the far left for comparison):
to my eye, they look like they should be plying up thicker, but! i guess not!
bonus picture of the yarn so far, which really does not capture the colour (green-grey-cream) of the subtle lustre of it well at all:
completed weaving of the penelope skyphos from chiusi:
the header is tablet-woven linen, with the linen weft for the band used as the warp for the rest of the piece on a warp-weighted loom, which you can see in the photos below (there is also a previous post with more process photos here). the reverse is a negative mirror image of the front, since I wove this as double-weave pickup rather than tapestry:
additional details below the cut:
the bottom and side borders of the finished piece are tablet-woven with a mixture of linen and mercerized cotton. the sides are a classic meander motif, while the bottom border includes the "X" square from the skyphos itself. the bottom border was woven directly onto the piece using the remainder of the warp beneath penelope's feet (tablet draft for anyone interested—I designed it to be twist-neutral and everything). the side borders are sewn on because I didn't set up the side borders when I started the project, but ellen harlizius-klück previously executed a stunning version here that has the side borders woven in, as well as a really helpful video on this technique.
I was originally planning to leave part of the black warp threads unwoven to serve as penelope's warp, the way I did a few years ago with the amasis painter vase:
but I couldn't figure out how to execute it well in this version, especially since I was doing double-weave and not tapestry. perhaps next time! overall, this was a complicated and fun project as a first warp-weighted loom piece. I learned a lot of important lessons—chief among them being to actually calculate warp lengths instead of eyeballing them and to increase the loom weights on the warps for better tension. unfortunately, I also learned I want to build a large warp-weighted loom (the one I have now was made by jennifer marcus at fiber paintings studio and it is lovely, but I would like to weave larger pieces.)
the original pot also features telemachus standing over a grieving penelope (I had room only for his spear), perhaps a reference to the scene in book 1 when he reprimands his mother and orders her back upstairs:
Odysseus was not the only one
who did not come back home again from Troy.
Many were lost. Go in and do your work.
Stick to the loom and distaff. Tell your slaves
to do their chores as well. It is for men
to talk, especially me. I am the master.
οὐ γὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς οἶος ἀπώλεσε νόστιμον ἦμαρ
ἐν Τροίῃ, πολλοὶ δὲ καὶ ἄλλοι φῶτες ὄλοντο.
ἀλλ᾽ εἰς οἶκον ἰοῦσα τὰ σ᾽ αὐτῆς ἔργα κόμιζε,
ἱστόν τ᾽ ἠλακάτην τε, καὶ ἀμφιπόλοισι κέλευε
ἔργον ἐποίχεσθαι: μῦθος δ᾽ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει
πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ᾽ ἐμοί: τοῦ γὰρ κράτος ἔστ᾽ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ.
Od. 1.354–359. Emily Wilson translation.
my plan is to eventually create a larger version of this piece that includes telemachus and the meta aspect of unwoven warp threads. it would also be interesting to figure out if I can weave a different image on the back of the cloth, since the reverse of the pot itself depicts eurycleia recognizing odysseus as she washes his feet.
First time doing a thing with rolags that's bigger than 1-2 of them! At 67g this is still small but way bigger than all but one project I have spun so far, and that one was a commercial braid, so this very much feels special
Distributed them into two gradients for the two plies. From experience I know i can cram about 25g of fiber on one spindle so i'll play it safe and split this entire load into four (two rolags/three rolags for both plies)
Prior to Day 1, I got a Turkish drop spindle and have been learning how to use it. I spun a partial braid (45g) and got it off on -1 days. The colorway is named Bougainvillea, but I do not have the dyer's name or company.
Then, having learned how to really use the spindle, I started TdF.
My dye sampler project, where I did 10g samples of 5 depths of shade of all 48 Jacquard acid dyes, then split them into two 5g samples. The plan has been to spin one of the 5g samples, so I can see not only what the dyed fiber looks like, but what a spun project from that fiber will look like.
I started with 644 - vivid violet.
I spun and plied two of the 5g samples, 0.125% and 0.25%, and halfway through spinning the third, 0.5%.
My goal is to get through as much as I can of the 48 colors, all done on the spindle.
Admittedly I do not have a super solid plan for TdF this year. I have this lovely sparkly orangey-yellowy-pink 4oz merino braid from Rhinebeck last year I really want to spin up into...something. I went ahead and bought some coordinating fiber to ply with it, but I haven't decided yet how that's going to work.
I could do a 2-ply, one with the sparkle and one with the orange. I'm trying to see if I can incorporate the yellow and pink (I only have 2oz of each) to stretch it into a 3-ply, or if I should just use them to spin a coordinating yarn. I don't really want to split up the sparkle braid. Going to play around with it tonight and maybe not start spinning until tomorrow.
Anyway, I'm going to spin along with the TdF for this week, but next week will have to pause because I'll be on vacation without my wheel. I'll try to keep updating as best I can, and as always I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else is working on!
Happy Tour de Fleece!
Sometimes you wake up feeling absolutely terrible with an awful migraine and simply the only POSSIBLE thing you can do to console yourself is spend 3.5 hours making yourself a fish bag to hold your water bottle in order to cheer yourself up. I saw a post on here awhile back of somebody's fish bag and was like "Oh I want!" Well now I have!
I used leftovers from various pants I've made. As you can see, the purple I used for the head is the same as the purple of the pants I'm wearing in the photo. This green linen I got from Metro Textiles turned out to be absolutely awful quality so I've been looking for something to do with it and this is fine for now. It's a fun silly little thing that I don't plan on using regularly, unlike the pants I made out of it that disintegrated at the seams within 6 months of sewing them. Still pissed about that.
Look at this buttonhole I stitched where the drawstring exits the fish!! Isn't it beautiful?! I wanted to stitch the seam allowance down a little bit here and ended up doing buttonhole stitch around the edges of the opening just to make it nice.
Okay now I am going to go back to hiding from the light, though. Because while my mood is way better thanks to fish bag I do still feel like, really unwell and awful on a physical level.
PS before folks ask, here is the tutorial the OP of the other post mentioned, though like OP of that post I sort of just got the general gist of the idea and did my own thing. Has a written tutorial and a video tutorial, though part of the written tutorial is "watch the video to learn how to draw the fish pattern" which is annoying for those of us who hate video tutorials or find them inaccessible (hi me I find video tutorials inaccessible because of my disabilities give me the photo tutorial for fucks sake ahem anyway)
Its also probably one of the reasons why any fiber art is a gateway drug into every other fiber art. I could do [other fiber art], I basically do half of those steps already for [current fiber art]. If I’m already doing 18 steps to make this sweater, is it really that many more steps if I spin my own wool? If I had sheep, I could skip the step of sourcing my material.
This is how they actually look on their own. It’s really nice in handspun (although to be honest, I hate grafting a soft woolen-spun single; I always break the yarn at least once. It’s much easier to do in a plied yarn).
said it before and i will say it again: if youre selling patterns do NOT hide the yarn details behind a paywall, no one wants to spend money to discover they dont have the stash to make something
A pride flag was one of the quilting projects I really wanted to get done, and it works great as a scraps buster.
This is roughly 40 by 65 centimetres (about 16 by 26 inches) and quilted in the ditch with thin cotton batting. I wish I'd used rainbow thread for the quilting, but I didn't have any on hand, and the goal was to not buy any new materials.
Under the cut: diagram and process.
HST = half square triangle; S = square.
The pieces are listed on the diagram above, but here they are again:
Light blue: 10 HST
Light pink: 6 HST
White: 2 HST
Brown: 12 HST
Black: 12 HST
Red: 1 HST, 7 S
Orange: 1 HST, 6 S
Yellow: 1 HST, 5 S
Green: 1 HST, 5 S
Blue: 1 HST, 6 S
Purple: 1 HST, 7 S
The HST are 9 cm (≈3.5 in) and the squares are 8 cm (≈3.14 in). I used a 5 mm (≈0.2 in) seam allowance. I recommend using a bigger seam allowance if you’re making a larger quilt, or one that will be used as a blanket or as part of a wearable piece.
I worked by washing, pressing, and cutting all my fabric into the necessary pieces. I then assembled all my HST into squares, then pressed the seams open, and squared the squares down to 8 cm (≈3.14 in). I assembled those squares into 1x1 pieces, pressed, squared. Those were assembled into 2x2 pieces, pressed, squared. Then into 2x6 bands, pressed, squared. Then into 4x6 bands, pressed, squared. I then assembled the three resulting bands (two 4x6, one 2x6) and pressed and squared one last time to finish the quilt top.
Some progress pictures to clarify what I mean by 2x6 or 4x6 bands:
After all HST were assembled into squares. I recommend taking pictures of your fabric set up before sewing, so you remember which order you wanted to put your squares in.
4x6 piece and nine 2x2 squares, partway through assembly.
Assembling bands together. Press your seams!
The finished quilt top.
I used the bi flag as a backing, but feel free to do a one-sided flag and use the backing of your choice. I know there’s cute pride-themed quilting cotton out there, or just a plain colour would work as well.
I don’t have a diagram for the bi flag: I used 8 cm (≈3.14 in) squares, 16 blue, 8 purple, and 16 pink. Those were assembled similarly, as I find working in full bands results in irregular points.
A similar process could be used to make any pride flag of your choice! I might make a trans pride one eventually. This is a really good stash-busting project, and a cuter alternative to a polyester flag. Please send me pics or tag me if you sew one!
Happy pride, and don’t forget to press your seams.
