Endings and Beginnings

 

The towels with the painted warp off the loom.  They were hemmed and hung to take a photo.  I like them a lot.  The black one shows off the colours really well, however it looks out of place with the rest of the towels.  The other ones are a bit less dramatic but they look really nice.  Even the green one which I wasn't sure about.  

Folded up they look nice too.  I think the purple is my favourite, but the teal is close.  They are all boxed up and ready to be put on sale this weekend.

I thought that I didn't have very much to put in the sale.  Because of the hip replacement, I haven't spent any real time on the floor loom.  What I hadn't realized was how much I've actually woven on the rigid heddle loom.  In this case, my big bin that I thought was too large, was actually full to the top!  That doesn't mean anything will sell though because buyers are fickle, money is tight for most people and lots of folks just come out for an interesting day out.  If things do sell though, it does help with buying yarn for next year.

Len's Mill Store sent out digital coupons and the yellow tag items were 80% off.  This is a pile of yarn which would have been $80 before tax.  With tax, I paid $17 and change.    Most of these are for the rigid heddle loom.  One is a ball of Hygge, a very thin fluffy yarn which has come to the notice of sock machine knitters as you can use it to line socks to make slippers.   The horrible yellow is sock yarn.  It's ugly and bright and was $1.88 after discount.  There is enough other yarn there for 3 shawls or maybe 4 or 5 scarves.   When I'm able to get yarn on deep discount, or at least on sale, it means I can sell my non- wool or silk scarves at attractive prices.  I like that because it means that handwoven items are available to those people who may not be able to afford them otherwise.  It's nice to let people have a choice.

I warped up the Inkle loom.  I used 4/8 cotton that I'd purchased years ago when I had this idea to make guitar straps for my family.  I'd already made 2 for myself - a banjo strap and a ukelele strap.  However there were still 3 kids plus 1 spouse who played, so I thought it was a good idea.   It took so long to make mine, that I ran out of time.  Plus, I'd thought that I'd be able to dye all the white to customize them and that really didn't happen either.

   I need to make a new Birka bag and my old strap is wearing where it attaches to the handles, so I put this project on for that purpose.   But, the tele was on and I was dressing the loom while I was watching some very compelling crime drama on Britbox.   I should never do things like this.  The stripes are different sizes and I missed a peg on 2 different threads so had to cut the strap off early because I could no longer pull the strap forward to weave.   It's about 12 inches too short! 

So sometime this week I need to find table space to paint my Xmas cards.  I still need to make a couple of pairs of csm socks.  I also want to put a new scarf on the rigid heddle loom to have something alternate to play with.  This all sounds doable except for the fact that hubby has a week off and who knows what will happen then.

Matching socks!

I think I did it!  When putting these two socks, exactly side by side, it looks like the stripes match up exactly.   I think I even got it matched to the number of final rows in the toe decrease.  I couldn't find a way to photograph  them with the stripes perfect though.  Maybe if I had sock blockers.   However I don't really want to spend the money to purchase sock blockers, so I may just soak these and then pin them to shape on a rubber mat, like one would do with other pieces of knitting.  Not quite as simple and effective as a sock blocker, but I don't have to buy anything either.

The sock yarn was nice to knit with.  It wasn't splitty and didn't tangle.   Once I figured out where the repeat was, it was easy to find my starting point and I had a minimal amount of waste, which was also nice.  I managed to toss the ball band out by accident though, so I have no idea what the sock yarn that I used was called!  Despite the matching and constant checking to make sure my tension was the same, it was a fairly fun knit.

The solid socks which are a grey/brown colour haven't been quite
as much fun.    A lot of it has been my fault because I knit the first sock and then knit the blue striped pair before I did the second sock.   I also didn't think to write down the details as I was going, which did make it more difficult.   It's not a difficult pattern, but I started off the second sock with making the cables the wrong size and had to rip back half the top part, back to the ribbing.   Then I dropped a stitch in a cable and had to rip back to where I could pick it up because it was too difficult to try to hook it back over several cables.  Then I started turning the heel before I did the heel flap!  Argh, that was such a careless error because I had counted out the heel, meant to knit the heel flap, told myself to do it and then got distracted by something DH was watching on the telly.  Thankfully I found my mistake before I'd turned the whole heel.  To top it off, this yarn is splitty.   It doesn't seem to have much stretch or forgiveness to it, so it's not quite so much fun to knit with.   I wish now I'd gone for a more complicated pattern.  At least that would make the end result more worthwhile for all this fussing over a single sock that I've been doing.

My hip has been cranky lately and weaving on my Fanny floor loom has been difficult.  However there is a little Artisat loom in the guild room.   It's smaller than the Fanny loom, and has a smaller width to the treadle setup, which means less lateral movement for my cranky hip.   I was able to weave pain free on that little baby.   

This was a leftover warp from a tea towel class.   I just did a straight twill treadling and wove off this towel in about 2 hours, with little to no effort or pain.   I'd love to purchase a loom like this so that I could get back to weaving.   Not happening though because we need to replace our furnace!   That's been priced out so far to $7200 because we don't have a fuel tank, so are switching from oil to propane.  That's without a/c too!   It's not available right now due to back orders and increased demand.   We haven't had central heating for a decade or more, so it will be a change.   We'll still use the woodstoves, but it means we don't have to get up in the middle of the night to load the stoves and can be away from home for more than 3 hours if we so choose.  That will be an interesting change.

 

Time consuming projects

These are the new tea towels on the loom.  They are a huck variation pattern.  Not only are they fairly quick to weave off, but they look much more complicated than they are.   The bonus is that the weft colour has a significant influence on how the towels look when done.  Each towel will look quite different depending on the weft colour chosen.

I'm betting lots of people have done these towels.  The pattern was in an issue of Handwoven Magazine a number of years ago, and here is a similar, if not the same project free to download.   I'm sure everyone and their sister has made these towels.  I even was inspired colour wise by a guild project a couple of years ago.  The grey and navy works with so many colours and the light and dark stripes add a lot of interest.     One towel down, and only 4 more to go.

 

A while ago I made this hat.  It's knitted and then felted.   I made some proddy flowers for a demo I'm doing and they were perfect to display on the hat.  It makes the hat really fun.  Right now the flowers are just  pinned on the hat with straight pins.  The hat is thick enough that the tips bury in completely.   Once I feel comfortable going out to get crafts supplies, I will get some pin backs and finish the flowers off properly.  Alternatively, I could just stitch the flowers down permanently.   

I wore the hat on my walk the other day and it was super warm, despite not covering my ears.  Like really, winter appropriately warm.    Yay for that!

 

We did our first sap boil this weekend.  We had about 120 litres of sap, which boiled down to almost 3 1/2 litres of maple syrup.  It should have been a full 3 1/2, but I misread the thermometer and I finished it at a degree higher than it should have been.   Sadly, only 3 of the 500 ml jars sealed, so tomorrow or Tuesday, I will empty them into a pot, re-heat them and then reseal them in clean jars.   

It's really good this year and my temperatures mistake means it's super thick.   I admit that I licked the spatula when I was done scraping the last of the filtered syrup into the pot for reheating, before canning.   YUM!

It feels like I should have gotten more done this week, but all of these projects took way more time than anticipated.  Well, the syrup boiling always takes a long time, but the flowers were part of a demo which will be done with a power point. It always takes me more time than expected to put one together.  Dressing the loom is always a bit of a slow project.   Too many distractions :)