Goodbye October

I'm sad to see October go as it is my favorite month of the year! So much has happened this month!! And I'm excited to see what next month brings. More craft festivals, hopefully and more weaving!! I've been knitting more than weaving lately. I've decided that since I have more than one craft to do I have to focus on them separately. So I'll knit for a while and then weave for a while. I have been knitting so that I'll be able to weave though. I'm planning on using the left over hat yarn to weave...something. I can't wait!! I only have two hats left to knit! Which means I've already knitted up 8!

I started the second to last one just tonight. Hopefully I'll be done with those sometime this week. I still have to decide what I'm doing with the warp on the demo loom. Am I going to weave it up and put a new one on by this weekend? Or just leave it on and weave it up at Art Prowl? Don't know yet. I'm sleepy right now and probably shouldn't be making any decisions even if it's a fairly small one. :)

I think I'm off to bed for now. Hopefully my posts will be more interesting this week. Happy Last Day of October! And happy Halloween.
~JoAnna

Weaving again

After a few days (a week?) off, I'm back on my loom. I'm working on another scarf using the sock yarn I dyed yesterday. I have to admit, I'm getting a little sick of weaving scarves. But I realized that I'm still learning a lot. I've learned how to be more consistent, my selvages are more even, my tension is more even, I'm quicker at twisting fringe, I feel like my all around craftsmanship is really improving by just cranking things out and learning through trial and error what works and what doesn't. I also haven't had any problems with setting yarn at the wrong epi or not knowing how a yarn will behave in a while.

I once asked on Weavolution how to get good, even selvages and one of the responses I got was to just keep weaving. Everyone has bad selvages at the beginning but with practice, they get better. That seemed so far away and hard to do at the time. But I really feel like I've improved a lot by simply making more product.

Anyway here are the pictures:

I love the colors! :) It's looking really good so far. It'll probably end up being shorter than some of the others because I think I'll end up running out of dyed yarn. But that's okay. :) I need to vary up my lengths.

I was reading Reader's Digest today (my parents subscribe to it and have old copies lying around the house) and I read two interesting quotes. One was, "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." and the other, "Amateurs wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and go to work." Both of these were by actors, but I was thinking that they apply to craft as well. Some days I feel like I don't necessarily have any inspiration for a project I'm working on. It's just work. I think sometimes inspiration comes from just continuing to work and work and work. And I love the idea of allowing yourself to make mistakes! I wouldn't have learned half the things I have if I hadn't made as many mistakes as I have. You can read back through my blog (towards the beginning of it) and I used to get SO frustrated. (still do. Don't worry.) but I always tried to remind myself of what I learned from a mistake. Oh goodness! I've made so many STUPID mistakes!! haha. Trying to get 3/2 pearl cotton to go through a 15 dent reed? I'm pretty sure I tried to double it at first...hahahaha.

Pretty soon I'm going to re-dress my loom for a different project. I'd like to slowly work my way back up to tighter setts. I've been working at 12epi for so long I've forgotten what it's like to have more than 90 ends! haha. I'd love to use some of my tencel and/or silk. I'd like to weave yardage and blankets and DIFFERENT scarves. I've been wanting to try weaving plain weave scarves with 20/2 cotton sett at 30epi. I could maybe even sett it looser than that. But that's about what those gauze-y scarves that they sell...everywhere are sett at...from what I can tell.

There are also some projects in my Handwoven magazines that I'd like to try. Actually, two friends are getting married in December and I have decided to make them something so that will probably be next. I say that because one of the projects in one of the magazines is what I have in mind for them. :)
Okay. I should probably go back to work now...
~JoAnna
PS: The days are getting shorter...that's about the only thing that I dislike about fall/winter seasons. I don't like having so little daylight. It makes me feel like I don't have enough time to get everything accomplished. I love it during the summer when the sun doesn't fully set until like 9pm. :)

Netflix

Soooo...I just found out that you can watch Netflix on your iPhone or iTouch. Apparently it's a part of Netflix Unlimited and the app is free. I'm beyond excited because this means I can have more movie watching options!! ...I watch movies on my iTouch when I'm weaving or working on other stuff. EEEEEK!! :)I love having wireless.
~JoAnna

Birthday gifts working together!

I got to wind a skein of yarn today using my lovely umbrella swift! I used the lovely, white sock yarn that my brother gave me and dyed it using kool aid. Here are my results:

Beautiful skein of yarn all ready for dyeing!

It looks like a snake! I tried to stripe it in a palindrome pattern in the hope that it will create stripes in the warp. I read about this technique on Weavezine.

After winding into a ball! (Which is really easy to do when winding from a swift!)

I'm SO happy with it!!

I can't wait to see what it looks like as a warp!

I'm pretty excited. I am so happy and thankful that I have all these wonderful tools now. When I first got my loom last year I had one reed, one shuttle and 6 bobbins. No way to dye yarn, no ball winder to take messy skeins and make them usable, no swift to wind skeins to prepare for dyeing, and no bobbin winder!! I had to wind all of my bobbins for weaving by hand! It was awful. It takes about 30 minutes to wind a bobbin by hand. Anyway, I'm very happy to be on my way to having a fully working studio. :)

~JoAnna

Update

Here's what I've been up to:

Making berets!! I have enough yarn to make 4 more!

Ben and I have also been busy with farm stuff. We raise grass fed steers for beef and just went to pick 1/3 of the meat up yesterday. We were able to make deliveries to 3 of our customers and will hopefully be able to pick up and sell the rest very soon. :) It's pretty exciting. Not only have I been able to kind of start my business with fibers but we're also working on our farm business too. It's really cool!

Hopefully this weekend or maybe next week I'll be able to start another project on my loom. I haven't been home much in the past few days so I haven't had time to plan what I'm doing next. I DO know that I'm planning on using the leftover yarn from all the berets to weave something though. Not exactly sure what I'll weave yet because I'm not exactly sure how much yarn I'll have leftover. :) As soon as I'm done with the hats, I'll start planning weaving projects. I also have to get that warp off my mom's demo loom and put another one on so she'll have something to demo at the Art Prowl! (Which is November 5&6. It's a Friday and Saturday deal) Anyway, I guess I have a lot to do in the next week or so.
~JoAnna

October 28

I finally was home long enough during daylight hours to take pictures of my birthday presents!

That speaks for itself...The book Twill Thrills

SOCK YARN!!

And it's white...so guess what I get to do?!

Umbrella swift!

It's a Glimakra.

It's so pretty! And much sturdier than the last one I used.

I'm pretty excited! I get to use my swift to wind a skein of sock yarn to dye! But first I have to clean the house.... :(
~JoAnna

PS

My brother bought me sock yarn for my birthday! (What a sweetie! :) It came in today and I'm SOO excited! Kool Aid dyeing is in my future!

I have to clean the house tomorrow but beyond that, my plan is to dye. (Yeah, yeah, make the die/death/dead jokes. Heard 'em all, made 'em all.) I'm pretty excited about it. :)

Okay. I'm going back to enjoying Dr. Who now.
~JoAnna

So tired!

Sorry I haven't blogged for a couple of days. I'm so tired!!! I've been at the farm. We are making good progress on cleaning out the shop that we'll be converting to an apartment. I'll try to write more tomorrow. Right now I'm eating dinner and going to bed. Good night!
~JoAnna

Presents

Oh! I forgot to mention presents! My parents bought me a lovely, wooden yarn swift for my birthday. :) I can't wait to wind beautiful skeins of yarn to dye. It's pretty exciting. They also bought me the book Twill Thrills. I've been wanting it for a while. It has mostly 8+ shaft patterns in it, but I am hoping the concepts will be helpful. Mom and dad also gave me a little extra money to buy either yarn or books with. Now I'm completely torn because I don't know which I want to buy!!

My brother bought me sock yarn from R&M Yarns which has yet to come, but I'm okay with that because it's makes me get to look forward to getting the mail everyday. :)

My sister bought me 3 cones of 4/8 worsted wool millends from Webs. I may use them for knitting, but maybe weaving. I'm not sure. I'll have to see when they get here. I LOVE waiting for packages and mail. It's so exciting. As convenient as email is, there's just nothing quite like snail mail. :) It's so special and cool.

My sister in law said that she's still going to buy me something small, but that I shouldn't get excited because it's small. :) She's so sweet. She never thinks her gifts are enough when really they are so incredibly thoughtful and sweet. For Christmas last year she bought me 4 skeins of Simply Soft yarn which I was extremely excited to receive. I used most of them to knit hats (Which have now sold) and the remains from the hats became a warm, cozy waffle weave scarf which I love and I can't wait for it to get cold so I can wear it!!

Anyway, I don't have pictures of the presents yet, but perhaps I will soon.
~JoAnna

My birthday weekend!!

It was a lovely weekend. :) Friday night (the day before my birthday) was the celebration with my family. We went to Red Lobster and had all you can eat shrimp. If you know me well, you know that I generally dislike seafood...of pretty much all kinds. Shrimp is the one exception to my dislike of seafood. I had been craving good shrimp for a while so that's what we decided. It was lots of fun. I basically gave up after one plate but Ben and my bro made me get more so we could take it home. I did not eat any of the second portion. I actually didn't even finish the first portion. Anyway, it was lots of fun. :)

We ate a lot of shrimp!

My brother poked a hole in my take home box. For some reason I yelled, "NOOOOO!" after he poked it...I'm not really sure why it upset me. And we all laughed at me for the next 5 minutes about it.

Ben built a shrimp tent. Which my sister was then captured in. haha.

I looooove him. :)

Then on Saturday (My actual birthday) my mama and sister-in-law took me on a mystery adventure. They called me and said, "Be ready to go somewhere and dress up a little bit." That's it. They had been talking about this for like 3 weeks or something. It a big surprise and my 13 year old sister in law is the one who came up with the idea!! (I tell ya, this kid is SMART! haha) anyway, we left Spencer around 11:30ish that morning and drove to Sparta. They took me to an adorable little tea room right down town! We had a delicious lunch. I had a chicken salad sandwich (my favorite "chick food") and a wonderful cup of potato soup and carrot cake for dessert. The only sad part was that the focus of the tea room was not tea. When I asked for a list of their teas the woman said, "Oh we just have a basket that you fish through and pull out a bag you like." :( At the tea room that used to be in Cookeville it was ALL about tea. And it was always loose leaf tea. But I was able to move past that and simply enjoy the company I was with. :)

There was an adorable antique store attached to the tea room so when we had finished lunch we browsed to our hearts content. These are all a bit out of order, but I'm sick of trying to fight the photo up loader.

Cute little antique store.

Loved this sign on the wall in the tea room.

The entrance to the tea room.

Lovely tea room. :)

By far my favorite find in the antique store. They're antique wood working hand planes. I asked Ben about them and he said that they have one at school like these that they actually still use.

Mushrooms! They were cute and comical.

I found more mushrooms.

I love blue glass.

I want something like this someday. Especially for my tea.

Lovely antique easel.

Adorable green fondue pot!!

Mustard tin.

I really liked this lamp!

My sister-in-law looking at antiques.

The lovely Miss Marenda's Tea Room.

Anyway, it was a LOVELY day. I don't know any other way of describing it. :) We all said (mom in law, sis in law, grandma in law and great grandma in law...and me) that we should have tea room outings at least once a month. It was so fun!!

I suppose I'm "back to the real world" today. I went to bed with a headache and woke up with a headache. I have a bunch of errands to run and more laundry to do. (I did three big loads of laundry yesterday but I didn't get sheets or towels washed. Ugh) Blah. The "joys" of being 24 and an adult. Can I just be a kid again? :) I sound whiny, but I'm really quite happy today. It rained last night and so everything smells and feels wonderful. I suppose I should actually get off the couch and start my day.
~JoAnna

Dyeing with cimmamon

I had the strange opportunity to dye some wool yarn with cinnamon this past week:

This strange opportunity came about while my mother and I were unintentionally attempting to poison ourselves with toxic fumes. :)

Mom bought some Rit Dye Remover to try on some solid black, silk scarves she got from a friend. She wanted to do a discharge sort of technique on them but bleach did absolutely nothing and she didn't want to wait for Thiox (which I assume we could have found at Pro Chem) so she tried the dye remover instead. The package says to simmer on the stove for 10-30 minutes with good ventilation. Since she was attempting an itajime clamped technique as well, she didn't want to use the stove. We used the microwave instead. Well...it turns out that the whole good ventilation thing isn't JUST for the toxic fumes that may hit your lungs. It's probably also partially due to the fact that it smells terrible. (Allison or Emma: Do you remember how bad Thiox smelled in Surface 1?!) So now the microwave smelled terrible. And also, the bag that we had the scarf/clamp deal in spilled in the microwave so we had to clean that up. We used Windex because that was the closest cleaning substance.

It only added to the horrible smell...SO we decided to run cinnamon water through the microwave to make it smell better. It went for about 2 minutes and I said (as I often do about MANY things), "I bet you could dye with that." I grabbed some white wool I had and stuck it in the pot. When I Kool Aid dye, I usually end up microwaving the yarn or whatever for about 6 minutes. (2 minutes on, 2 minutes off. so a total of 12 minutes for the entire dye process) I figured I should probably do the same for this cinnamon bath too. Cinnamon water gets very interesting after 6 minutes in the microwave. It's no longer cinnamon water. It becomes cinnamon syrup, basically. It's kinda gross and weird. While I was rinsing the yarn out, it kept slipping out of my hands because the cinnamon mixture was so slippery! Weird...Anyway, I like the results. It's a lovely color. Very fall-like, I think. :) Now I just have to figure out what to use it with...
~JoAnna

Happy Birthday to ME!! I am now 24 years old as of 5:10pm. 

~JoAnna

Pigment dye results

Here are the results from my pigment dye experiment:

Before

After

So the yellow flower print fabric is probably my favorite. I dunked it in the dye bath squeezed it a few times so the dye would totally soak through and then squeezed out the excess dye and put it in the dryer on the drying rack. The way the fabric dried left "wrinkles". It looks SO cool! The "after" piece has been ironed and the lovely wrinkle shapes remain. I'm quite happy with it.

The red yarn....Oh dear. There's just nothing that can beat this stuff!! It was COMPLETELY black when I put it in the dryer. Now? It's red...AGAIN! And it's stiff...(side effect of using pigment dyes) It may soften up when woven, and at least SOME color managed to stick to it, but it's still not great. I didn't scour it AT ALL though. I just soaked for a few minutes in some water while I prepared the dye bath and then threw it in. So perhaps that would make a difference. It has an interesting variegated effect now so that's something. I guess I will just have to keep trying. I was reading Syne Mitchell's blog on Weavezine the other day and she was talking about disperse dyes on polyester. Perhaps I'll try to get my hands on some disperse dyes. I just want this red yarn to be usable!! I've bleached it (in PURE bleach) and nothing happened. I've thrown it in every type of dye bath I have access to, (kool aid, MX dyes, pigment dyes, etc.) And nothing works. I am completely determined to be able to over dye that red! It just might take some time. I have not attempted Rit dye yet, but it says on the package that it's not recommended for 100% polyester so it probably will not work despite the fact that Rit is a union dye. :( Well anyway, at least I got SOME color, right? Even though it's as stiff as straw...Okay, limp grass.

In the meantime, I'm going back to work on my alpaca scarf.
~JoAnna
PS: I'm looking at looms again....

Synthetics *shiver*

I am currently attempting to dye 100% polyester yarn. I've tried almost everything on this stuff to dye it and nothing has worked. My mom has some Dharma Pigment dyes that I decided to try. This is some seriously cool stuff. It's pigment but the consistency is that of a liquid allowing you to use them as dyes as well as printing pigments if you so desire. :)

I have used them once before on some rayon yarn. The colors faded quite a bit to more of a stonewashed color but I was kinda expecting that since the info on the website says it will most likely fade when rinsing. The colors tend to stick better on 100% silk. My mom uses this stuff to dye silk scarves which always turn out beautifully. Anyway I'll let you know what my results are. :)
~JoAnna

Staying busy

I haven't lined up any shows for myself for a few weeks. The next one that I know of is Artisans(or maybe just artists) of the Cumberlands. It's in McMinnville again on November 18. We heard about it when we were at the Autumn Street Fair a few weeks ago.

However, my mom has a few shows coming up over the next couple of weeks and she asked if I wanted to put some of my stuff in those. So this weekend (tomorrow....also my birthday!!) is Elf Magic at the Cookeville Art Center. It's a smaller show, but I'm still looking forward to it. I will most likely be at the farmer's market with my father-in-law in the morning and then hop over to the Art Center as soon as he packs up. Should be a short day because frosts have killed of most of their produce. It will probably be mostly soap sales and delivering milk to our herd share customers. But I'll go with my hats and try to sell something. :)

Then the weekend of November 5th, I believe, is Art Prowl! I love this show! ...Come to think of it, I'm not sure why I'm not a member...oh well...There will be various places all around the West Side of Cookeville where artists will have their stuff on display. Marilee Hall has her studio right downtown, stuff at 39 West Broad, Art a la Carte, etc. It's always a lot of fun. You walk around to different buildings and there are refreshments and in some places there are demos going on too. Each location is marked with an Art Prowl sign. There were potters, wood workers, painters, weavers (my mama!), other fiber artists, etc. :) So I'll have my stuff with my mom's in that show.

I think I might actually get like one or two weeks off! Crazy. In which I will probably be working my butt off to produce more stuff. I'm trying to be broad about the types of yarn I use. I'm mostly sticking to about the same dimensions for now because tying on is SO easy. Although, I AM gonna have to cut off some of the previous warps because I don't have any room left on the cardboard that I use to wind between the warp when I wind on! Which means....I have a lot of warps on there. :) I honestly don't even remember what the first thing was that I wove on this long string of warps. It'll be fun to go back to the beginning and see all the different scarves represented by their approximate 10 inches of waste.

Too bad I couldn't weave that into something. It'd be weird and cool looking. :) Perhaps. Or I could use it as weft for another project. The knots in it make it difficult to weave as a warp because they get stuck in the heddles. Grr...I need inserted eye heddles. I'm NOT loving the flat steel heddles my loom came with. Well I think I've probably rambled on for long enough. And I'm more awake now that I've been up for a while. (I got to sleep in today. YAY!) But "work" is calling. Hats to knit, scarves to weave. Gotta keep the public warm! hahaha.
~JoAnna

Alpaca on the loom

A preview of the scarf I started today:

I'm pretty stinkin' excited. I was originally thinking I'd do a color and weave effect with this yarn, but I really liked the idea of a simple plaid so I went with that instead. :) It's SO SOFT!!!!! I can't wait to see what it's like once I wash it. I'll keep you posted.
~JoAnna
PS: I still like weaving better than knitting...