Tag Archives: weaving

A Successful Weaving Class

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I spent the last two days in Placerville, about an hour from my place, teaching a beginning weaving class. The Hangtown Fiber Guild meets at a great facility. They use a classroom at a local church with plenty of space–tables, running water, etc.  There were 7 students and a few helpers and everyone finished their scarves in the allotted time. It is always fun to see the variety of scarves and this class was no exception. Here are some photos of the scarves on the looms.

Jacob wool in broken twill

Jacob wool in broken twill

handspun warp & weft (includes beads!)

handspun warp & weft (includes beads!)

Jacob wool warp with a wool weft

Jacob wool warp (rainbow dyed) with a wool weft

Jacob wool in broken twill

Jacob wool in broken twill

Space-dyed yarn in warp and weft

Space-dyed yarn in warp and weft

Cotton warp with rainbow dyed Jacob wool weft

Cotton warp with rainbow dyed Jacob wool weft

Cotton warp and weft

Cotton warp and weft

hangtown-10

These are the finished scarves before washing or finishing fringes. Great job!

Handspun & handwoven Christmas present

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I flew to Texas Christmas night to see my daughter, Katie. I spent the previous 2 days working on her Christmas present, after finally finishing all the weaving orders that I needed to get out before Christmas. Katie used to join our spinning nights and was a participant in Sheep-to-Shawl competitions. This is back  when she was in junior high and she’s a junior in college now. When she cleaned out her closet the last time she was home Katie gave me a box of her handspun yarn that she was never going to use. This included singles, 2-ply, slubby “beginner” yarn, thin yarn, thick yarn, and everything from Angora bunny to Navajo churro, all in a variety of colors.  I decided to weave her a blanket using her yarn. I wish I had a good photo of the pile of yarn before I started. I used about 20 different yarns, winding them in random order.

Randomly threaded warp using Katie's handspun yarn.

Randomly threaded warp using Katie's handspun yarn.

I wove the blanket using one of my mill-spun singles Jacob yarn in a dark gray.
Weaving the blanket

Weaving the blanket

Close-up of finished blanket

Close-up of finished blanket

Finished blanket

Finished blanket

I don’t have a photo of Katie with her blanket. I need to get her to send one. The blanket turned out better than I could have hoped for. It is soft and has a wonderful hand.  This has inspired me to weave more like this!

What happened?

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I don’t know what happened. I just wrote the post about the pasture. I finished up with a paragraph about the blankets I wove. That paragraph got attached to the previous one and the photo didn’t show up. Here is the photo.

Five blankets on one warp
Five blankets on one warp

Also, it seems that the normal formatting of all the previous posts is gone. I don’t know why. I sure get frustrated wtih this stuff. Any ideas?

Power ram?

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I took this photo of Houdini and told my husband that I thought he looked like an evil cartoon character.

Dan replied that he looked like one of the Power Rangers, which he just happened to see on Saturday morning. (I guess it came on after This Old House.) Now that it has rained and the sheep are walking around in tall wet grass a lot of the color from the marking harness has come off of Houdini, but in the first few days of breeding season I was ready to call him Alien Ram because he had a green tinge all over his wool.

When I’m not dealing with sheep, hay, classes, etc, I’m supposed to be weaving. I finally got a huge job finished. These are 4 queen size blankets and one double blanket that I just shipped on Friday. They are woven from wool grown by the customer’s family and she wanted blankets for her family members. They don’t look too impressive in the photo, but it was a lot of time.

Now the fun stuff (while my computer is still letting me download photos–don’t know what happened overnight). I like making these V-shawls and here are some friends helping to model them.

And this is my son making his escape after I made him take these photos.

Below is a striking shawl made by one of my students in the last v-shawl class I taught. This is her 2nd weaving!