Weaverly

Beamed

The new dobby warp is beamed. It will have wide blue & yellow stripes, and narrow red selvedges.

As I worked on the warp, I kept a close watch on the weather. This morning was rainy/overcast, and I saw this on the cement patio outside my studio door:

The newly fallen pink and white camellias are combined with the ones that fell a few days ago and are now brown. What an amazing color palette! And by a very strange coincidence, these are the socks I am knitting while I take in the evening's ration of British TV crime dramas. It may not be obvious on your monitor, but these are exactly the same pinks and browns. 

B___ed!

Yes, they have struck again. My correspondent in Washington, D.C., just sent me this picture taken outside the Renwick (American Craft Museum). 

Still has her training wheels on.

Video Love

Another two pages. Recto. And a detail.

While I was wasting time searching on Vimeo, I found these two remarkable movies about a fiber project that just blew my mind. It's knitting related, but it suggests a direction an intrepid weaver might take. You'll know exactly what I'm thinking after you see it. 

 

December Madness

I love all the visiting and family stuff that December brings, but not much weaving gets done around here at such times. I do manage to catch up on my knitting while sitting around and chatting. Here's the current project seen at 12x. 

Down the street, our neighbor Tony has outdone himself with Christmas lights this year. Did you know that we have igloos in South Carolina?

Actually, there's something very fiberish about these penguins.

Our state flag (below) features the palmetto tree, and Tony's display is regionally correct. 

Frogged

Points of View

My new weaving project is so nebulous, so in-the-first-stages, that just talking about it may send it off the rails. Some ideas need discussion, feedback, the rough and tumble. Not this one. Not yet. When it's ready, it will tell me.

Meanwhile, I offer this (totally unrelated) photo:

…and also this carrying-around project, that I save for those special moments when I'm on hold with Customer Service:

 

Soccer Haiku

Yesterday's finals inspired this haiku:

World Cup match today

Inflicts auditory pain.

Vuvuzela.

But it did give me the opportunity to knit most of a sock.

Now to continue packing. The stack is getting higher.

If You Have Seven Minutes…

If you have seven minutes, you will enjoy this video, even if you're not a knitter. It's extremely  yarney! It reminds me of warping operations in weaving. I'm in awe of the problem-solving displayed. Thanks to Kathleen Valentine for finding this.

Knitted Calendar and Some Thoughts

Animation fans might enjoy this - a knitted perpetual calendar. You simply unravel each day from the bottom. Perhaps not so good in cat-friendly households. 

The unraveling of a work leads me to think of other ways to modify or recycle existing fiber works. Cutting up, overdyeing, collaging, stitching, recombining, gluing, garnetting, respinning. Double corduroy rugs, looper potholders. Altered books. Books made of junk mail. Paper made from junk mail. 

How about those knitted blanks you unravel and reknit (or weave) afterwards? Or the shibori patterning produced by weaving bundles of yarn as weft, resist dying the woven piece, unraveling the weaving, and reweaving the now resist-patterned yarn in new configurations. I don't remember the name for this - do you?

I don't have any fiber to show you today, but this will come close; it's my newly planted river birch, seen by early morning light.

Why Blog

I've been wanting to write a post about why I blog. And suddenly it became unnecessary, because today I read Bonnie's post about that very topic, and I couldn't have said it better. 

And in the sleeve department, serendipity also reigns. In the midst of my struggles with the set-in sleeve, the day's mail brought a copy of Shirley Paden's Knitwear Design Workshop. On page 84 I found the answer to all my questions. I took notes.

(I figure if I post them here, I'll always be able to find them later, which is not the case with items lost on my desk.)