Project finished!

Finally done! After getting waylaid and distracted over the past couple of weeks with things which included working and the worst chest cold I've experienced in years, I got the darned bag finished. It was a little smaller than I'd originally planned. I realized this once I had the lining put together - medium weight linen, lined with fusible woven interfacing and a couple of pockets. I was going to redo the lining as I hadn't cut the handwoven fabric yet. Then I lifted it up, and realized that the couple of extra inches I wanted to add would just add weight, and I still had the strap to add on, so I finished it as it was. Turns out, while it is a big narrower than I wanted, it will work just fine. It looks good and the pockets turned out in the right spots.

Now, to hem the leftover pieces into towels, a pouch, maybe a hat and of course keeping a sample swatch for future reference, so I can remind myself how nice a 10/2 cotton in a twill weave is. I still wish I had enough of that thread to make a shirt or something for myself but it was two small cones from a $2 leftover cone sale bin. I'm not even sure what it was, though it is obviously cotton and wove up so nicely into fabric with a lovely hand. Really, too soft and drapey for a handbag, which is why everything is interfaced to death, but it worked.

Basketmaking 101

The therapeutic nature of basket making has been known and used for many years. So, on Saturday, I went for a bit of therapy and spent the day with a dozen wonderful ladies learning about basket making. The class was a basic skills class, revolving around making a useful basket covering skills which would allow us to make more baskets in the future. We had a choice of 3 styles, a market basket, a tote bag and a square basket, which I chose.

If I was going to make a useful basket, I thought something to hold fibre or fibre tools would be a good thing to own. This baby will hold a lot more than I thought! The base is 12 inches square but the weaving opened it up another couple of inches. It is a good 6 -7 inches deep. It is made of flat reed, oval reed with handmade ask handles, although I didn't make the handles.

It is a good outside activity though, since it does require lots of water and wet reed that invariably ends up on your lap. The dog and I spent part of the morning outside in the lovely weather, being chided by the birds for being too close to the feeder, while I finished up lashing the rim. This was an awful lot of fun. It wasn't rocket science, but did require some effort, planning and detailed thought. The sad thing is that in Canada, basket weaving supplies are a little pricey.

Madder and Indigo

I started my seeds too early. With commercial madder seeds, I found them to take up to two weeks to germinate and be slow growing after that. The fresh seeds I harvested last summer must be happier as they started germinating very quickly and look at them now!
I've lots of them as well as a few extra for a friend who was unable to start any this year.
As well, I've got Japanese Indigo sprouting. I had read that it can be difficult to germinate and fussy to keep as seedlings. I was lucky though I guess as a number of the seeds I planted germinate. I haven't tried to grow Indigo ( indigofera tinctoria ) though as we really are much colder than the required growing zone and I am not sure using the limited space in my garden is useful for that experiment. Maybe I'll be like medieval dyers and just buy my indigo. That way, my limited space will be used effectively.

Hubby's car died and he's using mine, so I'm effectively sans car for much of the time. When I get a chance, which doesn't include having to use the city bus, I'm going to pick up some row covers and start some woad seeds directly in the garden and see how that works. I know that it says you can just direct plant into the garden once the soil is workable, but this does seem like a good excuse to start playing with pushing the growing season.

Sprouts!

The first Madder sprout of 2008! Hurray! It is so nice to see that my seeds are viable and are growing. So far I can say that these seed which I harvested myself last fall are germinating faster and more completely than any I'd purchased in the past. Last year I put 3 seeds in every pot, hoping for 1 seeding in each pot. I had a couple of pots with two, but probably 1/3 the pots with nothing at all and the rest only 1. This year I put 2 seeds in each pot and have signs of growth in all but 2 pots, and many have both seeds growing. The 2 pots with no signs yet maybe just a little slow.

This is a container with Dyer's Knotweed. Also known as Japanese Indigo or Polygonum Tinctorium, it is another of the few plants which yield indigotin. The seeds are exceedingly tiny and very difficult to find. I searched high and low earlier this year for them but couldn't find a source which sold them. However, I was given some by a lovely gal at the Guelph Guild of Handweavers and Spinners as she had some extra and I'd given her Madder and Woad seeds. Pretty cool and very nice of her. So most of them are planted to see what will happen. They just got in the soil yesterday so it's a tad early yet.. I was just excited.

Long weekend put to use

I got the loom warped and was able to start weaving. I've got a homemade temple hooked up to see what it would do. It really does make the selvedge edges less dense, although the draw in is the same. I've 15 inches woven already. It is sooo pretty, at least on the loom. For some reason I wove my sample and then didn't take it off the loom to wet finish and check out.. I've no idea why I didn't follow my normal weaving protocol, but I'll hope for the best. My biggest worry is that my SETT might be a tad too close. Weaving off my sample and being able to examine it close up and wet finish it would have told me all that I needed to know. At any rate, I love the texture and look of diamond twills. On the loom, this is one awesome fabric and I wish that perhaps I had more of this yarn to do a larger piece of fabric. This would make a lovely shirt.. for moi!

I've planted this year's crop of Madder, some rosemary, basil and tarragon. The cilantro, weld and woad will be planted in a couple of weeks as they don't seem to need the same start time as the others. Of course nothing is growing yet, but it's planted and I can check several times a day to see if anything sprouts. I've found that madder seeds seem to take at least 14-18 days to germinate. Rosemary is not only slow to germinate but slow to grow. I've never actually been able to get a rosemary seedling large enough to provide any flavour from my own seedlings but it is fun anyway. Lavender is another plant I haven't had a ton of luck germinating from seed myself. I've got one plant in my garden that I started from seed. I need a couple more this year but will just buy them. I'll buy my tomatoes as well. I do have some fancy lettuce seeds and rocket seeds for early planting, but since my garden beds are under at least a foot of snow, I'm not even thinking about it yet.

productive weekend

I got some plying done. Almost all the superwash merino is plied! Woo Hoo.. just a tiny bit left to go. I was a bit distracted by the loom, so it is waiting. The plied wool looks awesome though. It was fun to spin but by the end I was getting a bit of angst about the next project. 225 grams of wool is enough for knitting socks or something, but not enough to weave with. Of course, I may be running out of fibre anyway, at least enough for large projects - and in amounts worth dyeing with. Not quite panic time yet though..

On Sunday, I got started on warping the loom. The thread is 2/10 cotton - about 4000-4200 yards /lb. I'm going for a twill, so using a sett of 30. The width of the project requires 555 threads, plus a few extra are needed to make the pattern repeat complete. I figured it would take me several days to wind off the warp. Although it is only 5 yards long, it is still a huge number of threads.
Well, I got on a roll. The cone fit perfectly on my Lazy Kate. The winding on went perfectly. I was able to put up 100 threads at a time - I could have done more but figured 100 was a good length of time for phone and tea/bathroom breaks. I got the whole warp wound off and the reed threaded. Threading the reed went quickly. I had forgotten to load my mp3 player with Sine Mitchel podcast on weaving which, if I'd remembered, would have been a good thing to listen to while threading. Not bad for only a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon and evening.

Now that I have my pattern and all the math done to figure out how many heddles per shaft, I can get them threaded and I'll be good to go. That however, will take much longer. Still, I rather like dressing the loom so all is good. It is all playing with fibre.. mmmmm

SNOW and Fibre and frames

We had more snow this weekend. Lots and lots of snow. It was record breaking snow fall at that. It is only 11 days until spring and not likely that this lot will melt by then. Pffft I say to late winter snow falls. This is the view from my front yard. I'm standing two steps up, so looking down on the snow, so to speak.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, in a photo sized to overshadow the snow in comparison, I bring you a bobbin of blue superwash merino singles. They are waiting for me to finish the 2nd bobbin, to be plied into sock yarn. It is a little more blue in the photo than in real life, but it is a very pretty wrong blue, so I will leave it. I know, I didn't actually fill the bobbin. I was impatient and wanted to see how the plied yarn will turn out. The singles are thin and the Kromski bobbin is larger than the Ashford bobbin, so it takes longer to fill. As it was I spun for hours to get this much done.

At the end of the summer last year, at an SCA event, I watched a good gentle make a book. He was sewing the page signatures onto thin pieces of alum tawed leather, using a somewhat similar type of sewing frame. He very politely answered all of my questions and showed me details, including drawing little pictures on a scrap of paper. I got to listen several times as others wandered by and asked the same questions I had just asked, or different ones that I had been about to ask. I was quite intrigued. After getting several books for Christmas and a promise from hubby, yesterday, I received this handmade book sewing frame. Way nicer than I had asked for as I only wanted a simple one to play with. Thank you!