Seedlings!

You guys! I've got plants! They're so cute! I'm trying to grow cotton and flax this year, because that seemed like a reasonable compromise to keeping a sheep in the backyard.

The cotton is so charismatic!

Most of the cotton plants are slick-seeded pima, with a few green cotton seedlings. I got the seeds from Cotton Clouds. The flax is just good old Bob's Red Mill flaxseed from Fred Meyer since the fancy plant store only had the ornamental type. I figure, if I am really, really lucky with my crops, I will be able to make a very fancy washcloth and probably not much else. The flax should grow really well here, it's the processing that will be the trick. The cotton. . . well, we'll see. It needs hot weather to bloom and then the boll has to dry on the plant before you pick it. Not sure if that's going to happen here in the PNW.

The flax

Also have some ridiculous chickens. Sometimes I like to just sit outside and watch the chickens. I call it the chicken meditation. They say, when you mediate, you're supposed to empty your mind, and, well, there is not much emptier than the mind of a chicken. Unless it is many chickens, all together.

Marshmallow, either Poppy or Darjeeling, and Rock Band in the foreground.

Toast says HI.
I think this is the day I found out that chickens are very interested in orange nail polish.

Since the cotton and flax will take a while, I spent last weekend spinning and weaving some stash. After fighting with cotton and hemp, it's nice to sit down at the wheel with some bouncy superwash merino and just spin. Also worked on this yardage, the draft is #360 from The Weaver's Book of 8-Shaft Patterns. I like my new end-feed shuttle very much, but you will notice I have cleverly cropped the picture to hide my crappy selvedges anyway. I'm having some tension problems with this warp and even though end-feed shuttles are supposed to make it look like angels have kissed the edges of your cloth, they can't fix everything. This will probably be some fabric for tote bags.

Also a reed-sleying error. Right. In. The. Middle.

Why do I do this to myself?

Handwoven Nov/Dec 2010. Isn't that pretty? Now that I have an 8-shaft loom, I thought I'd tackle something more ambitious than dishtowels. It's made of 12 colors of embroidery floss woven in doubleweave blocks with black to make a rainbow windowed scarf. You separate the floss into the 6 strands and sley at 60 epi. It's insane.

Paige has been very helpful throughout this process.

But pretty. Anyway, I went out and bought three hundred billion little skeins of embroidery floss (The lady at Joanns scanned them individually. The receipt was more than 4 feet long.) and wound them onto bobbins. The article recommended you warp front to back, so front to back it was. I sleyed the reed pretty quickly, threaded slowly, and looked at the bobbins hanging in a tangled mess off the front beam and thought about what a bitch this would be to beam. And yea, verily, a bitch it is.

I hit a snag last night. Or rather, many tiny snags. Everything was twisted in front of the heddles before I had gotten even 2 inches through, and there was no way I could beam that. So I'm pulling it all out of the heddles so I can beam through the reed, then re-thread and re-sley at the end. The efficient and time-honored warping method of front to back to front again to oh god why. We'll see how this goes.

The Finisher!

The Finisher! Like a superhero, only with household textiles.

New bathroom rug: finished!

30” x 60”. 3 yard warp, 2-3 feet of loom waste. 4 jersey bedsheets, cut into 1” strips and used doubled. It feels really nice, very thick and squishy from the jersey. It ended up being wider on the ends because that sheet was cut on the cross grain and it spreads more than the straight grain of the other color strips, but, you know, learning.

Waffley towels: finished!

8/2 cotton, 4 shaft waffle weave, made from a Halcyon Yarn kit. It’s awfully pleasing to weave such 3-dimensional texture, but honestly they were annoying to weave (I had some tension problems on the selvedges) and really annoying to hem. They’re in the kitchen now, though, and pretty nice to use.

Rainbow dishtowels: I finished the weaving in less than a week, but they’ve been sitting in the “hem me!” pile for months now.

This rainbow warp was on my new Louet David when I bought it, and these towels are going to my friend who drove the loom home in her truck.

Oh dear god why more dishtowels: Still on the loom. There’s a 5+ yard warp on the thing, too. Maybe when I’m done I’ll actually warp for a 8-shaft pattern.

These are the Keep it Simple dishtowels from the Handwoven collection in 8/2 cotton. I chopped out a pattern repeat to get it down to ~20” in the reed because nobody needs 2-foot-wide dishtowels. If I can get them hemmed in time (2 months should be enough, but, well. . .) then they’ll be good to throw at people for Christmas gifts.

Rainbow zigzag quilt: finished! Like, back in July. But I’m bragging anyway, I like it a lot.

It started with a Northcott jelly roll (guys, I love your prints, but we should have a talk about “2.5 inches wide” and what it means. Also on the agenda: “straight of the grain and why it matters.”) I added in other batiks to make this interrupted gradient and hand quilted it. It’s a bit shy of twin size. Despite spending 6 solid months hand-quilting this thing, it’s still the first quilt I’ve finished in, oh, 15 years or so?

Also, more recently, a giant polarfleece cuttlefish. It is the best thing ever.