Here's another treat from last week's dye work. This is 50/50 Merino/Silk dyed a cool Sage Green. I love this color. It's such a pretty shade of green and it looks even more alluring in this blend of wool and silk. You get that extra luster from the Tussah and it's so incredibly soft!
Last weekend I caught up on my work, so now I'm working on catching up my blog. I mentioned earlier today about doing some custom work last week. Well that order entailed a lot of dyeing. Whenever I'm at the dye pot, I always try to cook up a couple extra ounces for the shop at Wind Rose.
So, thanks to a couple custom requests, I've got some nice new fibers on the way. Here's a fine example, Fine Mohair that is. It's been dyed a lovely Night Blue. Night Blue is a color created by Landscape Dyes that everyone seems to love. I've had so many requests for it lately!
I got a little thrown off of my blog cycle last week. Between the excitement of our neighborhood fire and a couple custom orders, my time seemed to be more in demand. On top of that, there was Mother's Day to think about. Even when I have trouble getting over here to blog, rest assured that this fiber girl is always at work and cooking up something.
Today I just listed a new skein of Avocado Hemp. I'm excited because I found a hemp jewelry maker who is going to sample my handspun hemp and give me some feedback. I know hemp crafts people have resources where they can buy hemp in bulk, but it seems like it would be appealing to them to be able to request a certain thickness or ply. You can do many of the same things with hemp that you can do with wool, It can be plied with other colors or fibers or made to be self striping. I think if I were a hemp artist, I would find that appealing. We'll see what happens.
I named this new lock yarn "Hot Sun" after the sun that will be shining at 100ยบ+ all this week. This was my weekend to play catch up and I managed to complete almost all of my pending projects. What a great feeling!
You may remember that I started this project on April 28 when I dyed my Coopsworth locks. I still plan on taking some video of core spinning with locks for you, but I wanted to play around a bit first.
I think this skein turned out pretty fun. I found the perfect shade of Merino wool in my stash to compliment the locks and and spun it onto a spool to exaggerate the twist so it would grab my locks. Then I separated out my locks and laid them in a row, ready to be picked up and fed onto the core Merino. This assembly line method worked well although when you spin lock by lock, it does take time. It's also hard to tell how many yards you have on the spool because of the tufts of wool splaying out all over. I really thought I had more than I actually did when I decided to call this skein done. I'm going to have to make a couple more to give my customers more yardage. I also couldn't resist allowing the core yarn to show through now and then. I am just a sucker for that spiral effect it creates which seems so fitting on a novelty yarn.
I think what I realized while doing this project is the range lock spinning offers. You can make anything from a wild and crazy novelty yarn to a beautiful and controlled boucle. I'm sure you'll see some more locks from this spinner in the near future!
This is a picture of my kids from at least six years ago. Art has always been a part of my parenting not just because I love it, but because the kids do too!
On this day I let them paint an entire tablecloth. I felt like I was watching performance art. By the end, their clothes and feet and even their hair were covered in paint. They had a great time.
After the cloth dried, I chose my favorite section of it and framed it in a large 2' x 3' frame. It became the major focal point at the top of our stairs in our home. I never tired of walking by and admiring that painting!
So here was my distraction for the week. Talk about unexpected surprises! I went out to get the mail yesterday and saw ash floating through the air. I looked up to see palm trees engulfed in flames not a block away from my home. Once I was confident that the fire fighters were on the scene, I took a little video. There were some anxious minutes, but before long, I and the rest of my neighbors were comforted by the quick and skillful response of the local fire fighters. More than anything, I was relieved that the animal farm next to the grove of palms was spared. No homes were damaged and no people were injured, but some 70 palm trees burned and we are all still smelling the smoke today. It's the closest I've ever been to a big fire and the closest I ever want to be.
I am having a low energy, mush brain day, but in an attempt to bring myself back, I am going to at least try for a useful blog post. I recently started offering a selection of Ashland Bay Ecru Yarns at Wind Rose Fiber Studio. Here is a picture of the Thick and Thin taken with a standard size pencil and a #11 or 8mm knitting needle. The picture is taken along side a thick portion of the yarn. A customer asked me for this shot to help her gauge how bulky this thick and thin yarn is and what size needles she would want to use. I decided to pass it on. To see more pictures of this soft, Thick and Thin Ecru Yarn made from 100% Highland Peruvian Merino, just click on the link.
Sometimes I wish I could leave well enough alone. I'm good with wool. My hands just seem to know what to do. It feels natural. Even so, I've embarked on this new territory of bead weaving. I love beads and I've done some tapestry weaving, so it seemed like a good fit.
Actually, I am enjoying what I'm doing and it's not going that badly. It's just hard to be a beginner. I have these ideas that are great in theory, but then I struggle with the execution. Making matters more challenging is my stubborn habit of figuring things out for myself. There are tons of books and magazines on the subject, but I don't want to learn someone else's process. I want to figure out my own.
So here's my latest work. I'm not very happy with it, but I like to "keep it real" here on my blog. I thought the lighter thread would be a good choice, but now I wish I had gone darker. There are a couple other issues with it too. I was making this as a mother's day gift, but there is no way I'm gifting this to anybody. Back to the drawing board.
I usually do my blogging in the morning, but I just stumbled onto this and it really caught me by surprise! Has anyone else heard of this? Yarnbombing. Really. I'm not kidding!
So I guess this is a new way to take fiber arts to the streets. For some, it seems, the world is their gallery. So how did I find out about it? I was tweeting and one of my friends was complaining about SQUIDOO. So I popped over to squidoo to see what it was all about. While I was looking, I typed fiber arts (of course) into a search box. One of the top articles was about Yarnbombing.
Here's one of the articles from that search:
FLUFFY FUN
"When it comes to crazy counter-culture, there's one bit of fluffy one that's taking countries by storm these days, and its called "yarnbombing".
Billed as a form of "guerilla granny grafitti", it can be found in the streets of London, Mexico City, and Vancouver, B.C. to name a few far flung places where wicked wool-gathers hang out.
So exactly what is yarnbombing?
Well, according to one the world's most creative and prolific yarn bombers, Magda Sayeg, (a 35-year-old lass from Texas and founder of Knitta Please), "It's about making people smile and bringing art out of the galleries so everyone can appreciate it". And she should know, she's been all around the globe embelleshing the built environment as she goes. Her thrilling threads can be found hanging from the Great Wall of China, blowing in the breeze at several Paris landmarks, and even on the Welcome sign to the Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge."
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Image Credit: Perri Lewis, The Guardian, UK -- Magda Sayeg in action
This just made me more curious so I looked around a bit and found this CNN video and also one from YouTube. So what do you think? I'm still processing to tell you the truth. I can't help but find it appealing, but i guess it is grafitti. Is grafitti OK if it's cute? What about in a couple months after it's gotten rained on and mud splashed? Does the same artist come back and clean up? Will this spread the love of fiber arts or give it a bad name? Hmm....Image credit: www.squidoo.com/yarnbombing
This is not a very fiber oriented post, but today I visited Fountain Hills, AZ and their beautiful park. Fountain Hills is a community NE of Phoenix and surrounded by mountains. "The fountain is located in the middle of a man-made 28-acre lake in the heart of Fountain Hills. One of the world's highest fountains, the 560-foot tall plume of water, shoots to the sky and is visible for many miles."
Seeing this has been on my list of things to do since I moved to AZ almost two years ago. It lived up to all of my expectations!
I was looking through my collection of photos for a flower picture. What I discovered is that I don't have many flower pictures! LOL! Yes, I've crocheted and felted my fair floral share, but I was hoping to find something a little different.
After some digging, I found my old piggy painting. Once upon a time, my youngest son's room was covered in farm animals pictures. He had a whole collection of farm books he loved like Big Red Barn. You remember that one? So I took some of his favorite animal friends and painted them on his walls. I had a great time and he loved his room!
This is a picture of my kids from at least six years ago. Art has always been a part of my parenting not just because I love it, but because the kids do too!
