Holiday Projects.

Over the holidays, I did a bunch of spinning.  The small orangey skein is some pumpkin coloured fibre I spun a while back.   There wasn't a lot of it as I was just playing with colours, so the skein is small.  The white is Merino, very fine and very soft.  It was the end of some sliver that was leftover from another project.  Most of this was spun with a long draw.  I really should have carded it first, as the sliver and fibre was old and a bit compacted in places.   The resulting yarn is a bit uneven in places, but still soft, springy and will make awesome mitts or a hat.
I've started into a bag of grey superwash merino.   I'm guessing there was about 100 g or so, but I didn't weigh it first.  This is the second bobbin and I'll be ready to ply it soon.  It's rather nice because the colour is a bit variegated and interesting to both spin and look at.

The guild is looking for ideas for an upcoming class.   We have had suggestions of pin weaving jewellery, cute woven buttons and stick weaving.  Here is my contribution to ideas, which is a coiled basket.   If it were in the late summer or early autumn, I'd have used either ditch lily leaves to make cording or tried to find a bale of Timothy hay, which would also work well.  However, they are wet project materials and ours needs to be dry, so I used para-cord for this one.  I had this small 1/4 in size on hand for this sample.  I tried most of the feed stores and hardware stores locally but I couldn't find larger  hemp or even jute rope around anywhere.   I have a larger poly braided cord to do another sample at some point.  This little basket took about 3 1/2 hours to finish.

I've dressed the loom with a wool warp in a simple herringbone twill.   It will become a blanket.   Because it's a twill and I only have 4 shafts to work with, I'm doing the blanket in halves and will join it in the middle.   The red stripe was a second choice.  My first was a lighter blue, but it turned the other colours were just a tad thicker in grist.  It felt odd as I was winding the warp and it was easier to just switch out the colour that try to figure out if it would work as is, or did I need a different sett.  This is a couch blanket for cooler evenings and for the kitties to sleep on.

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.