Day in the studio

I've been working all morning on winding off warp. I'm winding off enough for two more table runners. (on one warp) I'm about halfway done, but that's because I stopped to run, eat lunch, talk to mom and Sarah (my sister) and post this!! I wanted to share pictures of the warp color though. I'm just using one color this time because I only have 8/2 mercerized cotton in one color. (Yup. It's 8/2 cotton AND it's mercerized. It's harder than you think to find)

 

 I'm pretty happy with the color. Although, I did have to steal (Okay... took with permission) some from my mom's cone of yarn. I didn't have as much left as I thought. But that's okay. I'm planning on using white as weft again. (I know. boring.) But I have a plan for one of these which I shall not speak of on here. Who knows who might be reading! haha. ;) I'm SO happy that it's COTTON! That means I can make fringe and NOT twist it! UNTHINKABLE! I'm soo happy. I may make one with fringe and one without...I'm not sure yet. Either way I'm pretty excited to finish winding off the warp and get going! 

Then I really do need to get back to making things for my inventory! Especially if I plan on doing a big craft show in the spring. (And I do) I'm trying to come up with interesting and unique ideas, patterns, textures, yarns, projects, etc. I have a few fun ideas of things to try. We'll see if they actually work! :) Okay. I'm going to finish winding off warp and perhaps start tying this bitch on. HA! (a bit hyper right now...must be a delayed endorphin rush...) All done. 

~JoAnna

Another baby goat. :)

Molly called me this afternoon to let me know that Belle, another goat mama, had a baby!! :) I haven't seen her yet but we decided to name her Nutmeg. I'm pretty excited to meet her. If I go to the farm tomorrow I'll be sure to take pictures. I really need to get a video of the babies running and jumping around. It's hilarious and adorable! Sorry I haven't been posting much. Holidays throw everything off but hopefully soon I'll be back in the swing of things. I need to start some more weaving projects!!
~JoAnna

Finally!

I have FINALLY finished ONE side of the fringe on the table runner. I estimate that it will take me 8-10 hours JUST TO TWIST THE FRINGE!! I am calculating this by how many movies I watched. lol. If you figure a movie is approximately 2 hours long (and I watched TWO while doing this side!!) plus a little more time here and there over the past few days, it comes to somewhere around 8+ hours. Ridiculous. And I even have a fringe twister! (which does speed the process up) Oy. I'm SO not looking forward to doing the other side. But I can't wash it and see how it feels and shrinks, etc until it's done. I am certainly not doing more tonight. Right now I'm going to get ready for bed. I'll be getting up at 6 tomorrow and going to the farm most likely. Yay! :) I'm looking forward to it. Good night!
~JoAnna
PS: On a scarf it takes 30-60 minutes per side of the scarf depending on the sett and how wide it is. *sigh* those were the days.

Fringe...The never-ending story.

Seriously. Never-ending. Okay, okay, I did take a two day break. But I'm STILL twisting fringe. There is no end. If I DO make another one of these (which I hope to) I may try it without fringe or in a cotton so I don't have to twist the fringe. I do have some 8/2 cotton leftover from my culminating project but I'd like to overdye it with something because I'm tired of that particular blue and green together. haha. :) I suppose I could bleach it and then dye it since it IS cotton....hmmmm....

Once I finally finish the fringe I think this table runner will be lovely. Also I think I need to beat harder. I think that may also have something to do with why my pattern looks more rectangular than it should. Bah. I have very little motivation to do anything today. I hate waking up late. Yup. 8:30am is late for me. Blah. If I get up some motivation I may wind off warp to dye for another table runner. Okay. Back to fringe for now.
~JoAnna

My Woods

Just a few pictures from my backyard. :) Enjoy.

~JoAnna

Ummmm..... sooo..... :D

Sooooo......I got a bit excited about the table runner and....I finished it already. :D

Also, you should know, this is WAY a lot of fringe! I spent....3 and a half hours twisting and still am not quite to halfway on ONE side!!! I'm definitely tying on another warp to this one and weaving another one. I'm SO excited!! :) I know, I know. I got a little over-zealous with my weaving. It was just so fun!! I couldn't stop myself!

I made one of my Kahlua cheesecakes for Thanksgiving tomorrow and I'm SO excited. :) I also had to chase baby goats...well actually I chased the mamas....all over creation today. I'm quite tired and most likely going to bed. I am SO looking forward to spending time with my two families and eating wonderfully delicious food. Good night and Happy Thanksgiving!!!
~JoAnna

Grrr...An update.

I got home from the farm last night and my mom informed me that the cat (not my cat...) had eaten the two ends of my warp that had broken while I was winding on and I had weighted off the back of my loom. Grrrrr!! Now I'll have knots showing up in the warp! How frustrating! And the ends are right next to each other so there will be a BIG knot whenever I weave that far. Blah.... :(

Not much news from the farm. We're all cleaning and working hard to get it ready for Thanksgiving, as is custom every year. I ended up painting the door to the mud room and also painting the green house. Actually, I painted the mud room door green and the green house white. HA! ...Okay. Not funny. Oh well. I also ran goat preschool again yesterday. No new pictures. :( Sorry. Forgot the camera. BUT! I think I mentioned that Olivia had hurt her leg the other day (maybe not...). Well it's completely better and she was even jumping a little. :) She's not a very bold goat yet. But she's SO adorable. And I think she remembers me because she doesn't fuss when I try to hold her. Actually, she fell asleep when I was holding her yesterday. :) Awwwww!

OH! Big news! I hadn't mentioned this before because I get nervous to mention stuff just in case it doesn't happen for sure. I sold my second loom! :) One of the girls from the fibers dept. (Ella. Used to be a clay major, just switched to fibers) had texted me a while back and told me she was looking at a Leclerc loom online and was thinking about buying it for $4000 dollars. AHH!! It had crossed my mind that I could sell my second Mac and just buy another one later to upgrade to 8 shafts. But when she told me she was looking for a loom, I started thinking more seriously about it. Anyway, I ended up offering to sell it to her. So she came over and looked at it and decided she wanted it! I sold it to her for a good price AND we delivered it. She's had a rough couple of weeks. She had mono and totaled her car and had to completely re-design her scarf set project and buy all new yarns. Ben and I hadn't been up to the craft center since May so we thought we'd offer to deliver the loom and then just stop in and see who was in the studios. It was fun. :) We got to talk to some of Ben's wood buddies and see what they're working on this semester. There wasn't anyone in the fibers studio that I know really so I didn't go in. (Well...Jess, but I didn't want to talk to her...lol) Anyway, it was good just to be there even if it was only for a little while. I miss it SO much.

I am going to go find some breakfast and then probably go weave for a bit. :) I can't wait to see what this table runner looks like once it's DONE!!! I'm so excited! I want to make another one. haha.
~JoAnna

Oh my GOODNESS

OH MY GOODNESS!! I can't even believe this is what's on my loom or that I'm the one weaving it! It's SO gorgeous!! I'm SO STINKIN' excited!!!! I've only done one repeat of the pattern, but I'm completely ecstatic about how it looks so far! I can't wait til it's DONE!!!! Also it's really soft and wonderful. Yup. I'm happy. I want to make a million.
~JoAnna

Steadily working...and cute pictures.

I've been working steadily all day pretty much trying to get ready to weave this table runner. I finally got tied on, fixed errors (a few ends were switched in the reed...okay more like 16... But out of 600? that's not bad.) and then tied up my treadles. Now I'm trying to figure out the easiest way to get the treadling sequence onto something so that I can tape it to my loom to look at while I'm weaving. I thought about just bringing my computer in there but that's just not gonna work. There's no where comfortable to prop it up while I weave.

I think I might take a break for today and get going on weaving tomorrow or possibly later today. We'll see.

In the meantime here are some cute pictures I found while stumbling recently. :)

~JoAnna

Curry yarn

Here's the finished product of my curry/yarn soup last night. (haha)

It looks quite like curry. I love the results! :) I washed it in the machine to ensure that if it was going wash out, it would. I read somewhere (Maybe on Sandra Rude's blog??) that cellulose fibers dry 4 shades lighter. I'd say that's about accurate. I'm still quite happy though. I wasn't even sure if the color would stick since I didn't mordant the Tencel first but it did! Goodness was the smell STRONG though. The yarn doesn't smell like curry. Just the rest of the house. It was the same thing when I tried tea dyeing. Gracious. My entire tiny apartment smelled like boiled grass. GROSS! And I love tea! But there is such thing as too much of something good. And that was it. :) I'm pretty excited about trying more natural dyes. I have a book somewhere on natural dyeing but I can't seem to find it right now. Blah. This lovely yarn may be what I use as weft for the weave a long. If I can just get the motivation to go tie on, I'll be ready to weave! ...Hmm...motivation....
~JoAnna

Goat Preschool

I got to run Goat Preschool yesterday while at the farm! It's LOTS of fun. :) Here's what it is: In order to get the baby goats acclimated to their environment and also to give the mama goats some time to get out and browse for food (or just eat hay from the bails we have) we take the babies out of their stalls and let them run around while the mamas eat. It's so fun to watch baby goats jump around and run and fall all over themselves. They're adorable. :) Here are some pictures I took:

Merry and Pippin and their mama, Pickles! Merry is the lighter one and Pippin is the dark one.

Betty and Veronica. Betty's head is peeking out from behind their mama Roxanne and Veronica is the solid black one. :)

Olivia sniffing my shoe.

I think this is Betty?

Merry and Pippin. They actually wandered back in the barn and went to sleep. :)

SO cute! And they're HUGE! They are two days old in this picture.

Olivia is the same age as Merry and Pippin and look how small she is in comparison!

Snowflake. :)

Lots of babies runnin' around.

Pickles loves to eat...and when she eats, she likes to stick her entire face in the hay bail.

Snowflake got tuckered out after running around and jumping so much!

She's extremely photogenic! ...For a goat. :)

Wednesday and Totty are a week old and STILL smaller than Pippin and Merry.

Lots and lots of fun! We have several more mamas pregnant and who will probably have babies soon. :) I can't wait!
~JoAnna

Yarn and curry soup

Today I went out to nearly every thrift store I could think of to find a pot to use for dyeing for cheap. I ended up having to go to Dollar General, but I got a nice dutch oven for $10 and it holds a little over a gallon of liquid. So it's the perfect size for the amount of fiber I usually dye.

Most of the recipes out there for natural dyeing (at least the ones I found) are for dyeing an entire pound of fiber. While that's not particularly difficult for pre-made fabric, it's a bit more difficult to dye a pound of yarn. I usually dye around 3 or 4 oz. at a time and that's it!

Once I finally GOT the pot (around 3pm...I went out at 11ish!) I searched online for several recipes. I wasn't really sure how to mordant fiber. I had a basic idea, but didn't have precise measurements. They all seem to say about 10-25% of the weight of the fiber you are dyeing is how much alum (mordant) you use. (Note: I was only looking at alum recipes since that's all I have right now)

Since I had decided I wanted to attempt dyeing with curry powder, I read a few recipes on it first. I discovered that curry (or turmeric) is one of the few natural dyes that sticks to cotton (or cellulose) WITHOUT a mordant. So I was able to save myself a step and just get straight to dyeing.

My lovely red dye pot. I'm so happy it's red.

Yarn soup. Yup. Pretty much.

I must admit I'm pretty excited to see how it looks once the yarn is washed, dried and ready to use!

That's it for now. The yarn is currently in the dryer. From what I've read, cellulose usually dries several shades lighter. It didn't really loose much color in the rinsing process though. I'll post pictures of the results later. :)
~JoAnna

My secret weapon

I totally forgot to mention this ages ago! I have a secret weapon I use when winding off warp. Since there isn't room in my little "studio" to hang my warping board on the wall (or mount it on a shelf like I had when we lived in Tech Village) I have to put it on the floor. That's all well and good but cones of yarn don't like to pull off nicely from the side. They need to be below the warping board or on a cone spindle to pull off from the top and not fall over. Well I didn't want to buy a spindle and I didn't have a paper towel holder either (which I had considered using at one point). So this is what I came up with:

Ta da!! Behold my secret weapon! A Chaco box! They're wonderful! I'm so glad I never threw this away.

See they have these great holes in the side (which becomes the top) so when I'm winding off warp, I stick the cone in the box, pull the end through the hole and the box remains upright and the yarn pulls off easily! Jeanne always used to tell us that weavers were resourceful people. :)

Oh also Chaco boxes are made from really sturdy cardboard so they don't fall apart easily. I also discovered that this method prevents fiber dust from floating around in the air for me to breathe in. When I opened the box to take the cone out the last time (and several times before) I saw a pile of fluff lying around the cone. Tencel sheds horribly. That's my only real complaint about it. Otherwise I love it. :)
~JoAnna

Threading, threading, threading!

I have spent nearly the entire day threading!! But I'm finally done! I think I'm going to save tying on and winding for another day. I'm a bit sick of looking at the warp right now. haha. :) So that will happen Friday, most likely.

The threading sequence. I wrote it down on a piece of paper. It repeats 5 times in my warp.

Here's my loom all ready for threading. I fold down the back and put my little, padded stool right up next to the loom. It's actually really convenient because you can get so close to the heddles. Not much reaching involved.

I had to use an Ott light so I could see the difference between the two colors I was threading. It's hard to see in normal, incandescent lighting.

I do get some natural light in my "studio" in the afternoons. I love that time of day. :)

I'm back at the farm tomorrow; most likely back in the goat maternity ward. *lol* I love it though. It makes me want my own herd of animals. Either sheep or angora goats...or both... :D
~JoAnna