Ornaments!!!

I think I'm somewhat of an "ADHD" weaver... Not that there's anything wrong with that!  I mean, I think I have major attention deficit sometimes (mixed with a bit of hyper-activity)!  I can be so distracted from the original project.  Like these ornament, for example, started out as ornaments and then I quickly saw how cute they were and made them into dishtowels!  I made all kinds of combinations, and before I knew it, I had very quickly run out of warp!









So then I re-warped for my ornaments... and wove them... and when they came off the loom, what did I do with them?  Go, take a wild guess!!











I add batting and a backing, then when I start sewing stitches between the ornaments to cut them apart, and I see what a cute quilt it is!




It is pretty cute, and I knew I had some extra trees anyway... so I figure, what the heck?!  And I turned it into a cute little cheerful holiday quilt!





Then I wonder what it would look like with a few strips of fabric between the trees...

 And that's where the second small holiday quilt came from!  

Seriously... this would be a cute idea for log cabins!

 

The finishing of this one was slightly delayed because I ran out of fabric for binding and had to ask my mom for a small piece.  I went with muslin, and I think it looks really good!

But, I knew I only had a few extra to play with and thought that I'd better get down to the business of making my Christmas card ornaments!!

I cut...

 

...and cut...

...and petted the cat a little bit... 

(By the way, like his new winter buzz?  I buzzed his hair because it was dirty and matted all the time.  He doesn't go outside anyway...)

...and surged... 

 

 ...and surged...
...for miles and miles...

... and then tied little strings on...

And now all I have to do is figure out the card part!  

I love them, and I think my friends and relatives will, too!

Oh Christmas Trees!

Here they are... finally I'm dedicating time to my Christmas cards!!  I have revamped this pattern just a bit from the towels I "practiced" with!  First, I spread the trees out a little bit more and second, I used green for the warp threads.  I think I still like green and white best, but I have also tried green weft and brown weft. 

I think these will be very both cute and useful for this year.  I am going to sew the edges and then cut them apart, and then sew them with some thin batting, and voila!  I'll have some ornaments. 

 Yay for fun Christmas cards!!

PS.  Scout says, "HI!

Trees are done!

I have made it in time for the craft show, thanks to the swiftness of the shuttles.   I was on fire when I was weaving with those things!!  They made the work go SO FAST that it's almost scary!  I'm thinking of putting on larger warps than 6 yards now because the warping time vs. weaving time just wasn't balanced enough.



Thanks trusty shuttles!!  My LYS was kind enough to let me borrow a few smaller sizes to try.  My favorite is the 11" boat shuttle because you can grip it well with your thumbs at each end of  the pass.  It was also a bit shorter so it fit under my shed easily.  The bottom is solid so you can't accidentally flip it upside down.  And it glides so nicely!








And now, for the tree towels....








We have two towels completely covered in trees, and when it's hung on a towel rack, all the trees are right-side up because I wove 4 trees standing up and 4 trees upside down on each one.















On these four towels, only the bottoms have trees and the middle is all plain weave.  I especially like the brown towel with the green tree stripe!














This is the same towel as above, but stretched out for viewing.  I really like that green stripe with the trees!!  I should have made more of those!














And I'm officially ready for the craft fair!  I have 23 hand woven towels to sell, some pot holders (remember the Dominoes?), a few knitted things, and some apple pie jam and applesauce.

It feels good to be done with this!  

Now... onto the next projects.

I really need to tackle those Christmas cards!!!

Making progress

There are a few major things on my mind right now, and I'm just so thankful to have my weaving to keep me sane.

And these trees look GREAT!  

I love the safety of my weaving world!!!!

Tree Mistakes

These tree weaves were supposed to be fast and easy!  But no... they had to have some complications....

First of all, I made a mistake in the tie-up and skipped an entire section of 5 threads.  I thought it was strange when I was done putting the threads in the heddles and had a few left over, but didn't think much of it.  I thought that it could just be a warping error.  But no... it took awhile to fix, but it wasn't hard, just tedious.  When I found the error, I knew I couldn't just squeeze in 5 threads, so I used the method of threading from back to front to fix it and it was kind of nice!  The other 5 threads that I needed I added at the end and wound onto a thick piece of wood and put it in a bag with rocks so it would be weighted.  At first, the kitties showed a lot of interest in the baggie of rocks and yarn, but they are now leaving it alone.  It's no different than the floating salvages, but... to a cat, anything that swings and is attached to string demands attention.

The second problem happened once I started weaving.  The first skeleton tie-up I figured out ended up being wrong.  I think I must have put it into the computer wrong.  It almost feels like these towels are doomed!  So here is the correct skeleton tie-up for the Christmas trees:

 

On the bright side, I have discovered the boat shuttle on this weave.  It's so nice to use and it makes such quick work of the weaving!  Wow!!  Up to this point, I have been using stick shuttles because I felt like I had more control, but now that I have discovered boat shuttles, I'm completely insanely addicted to "throwing the shuttle" from one side to the other and watching it glide across.  I just wasn't ready for this before because it felt like it was flying out of control.  But it's awesome now!!!  (And it only ends up on the floor every now and then...)

So now everything is weaving up nicely.  Now that I worked out all the kinks, I can just sit and enjoy the weaving part!  Some warps sometimes aren't as fun or get started smoothly, and this was a perfect example!  I've had too much luck lately, so I guess I was doomed to have this slow and problematic warp eventually!!

But I still have to hurry up and get these woven in time for the craft show next weekend!

Huck trees

The tree towels are on their way to being woven!  The warp is all measured and loaded into the reed, the heddles are all threaded, and we are ready to rock and roll!

I decided to go with a stone colored warp, and make the weft on each one different.  I plan on making about 6 towels, one of  which I will cut up for Christmas cards (if I have the heart to do so... I'm kind of liking these towels already... oops... that wasn't supposed to happen!)  I think I'm going to do a towel only in the stone color, one with a warp of brown, green, yellow, and I'm not sure on the last two yet.  Maybe a nice spruce blue and another brown or green.

Here are the stats:
56 threads total in each repeat
Set at 25 epi on 15 dent reed, so threaded 1-2-2
6 yard warp
approx. 20" across, so the design is repeated 9 times
504 threads


Here's the design again (from the Sept/Oct 1995 Handwoven magazine) and the skeleton tie-up I plan to use:

I want to get these tree towels ready in time for a Christmas craft show that one of my friends is doing in their home.  I hope I can sell a few of my handwoven towels!  I'm also going to put in some zen towels and a few other random ones I have on hand.

Christmas card ideas

I'm already thinking about Christmas cards.  Don't be too shocked, I think I already had mine done this time last year!  So technically, I am already late!  I have been floating some new ideas around for this year, but can't really settle on one thing just yet.  Let's start with last year's card:

I wove little patterns from Bertha Gray Hayes.  They looked like snowflakes!  They turned out cute, and I just sewed the edges and cut them apart.  Then I glued them onto the cards.  Two problems with this though, first, the card stock is kind of expensive.  And second, people didn't know what to do with it.  I told them they didn't have to do anything with it but enjoy it.  But people wanted to do something with the woven part.  They were so confused, and I didn't mean to confuse them!  I thought of it like scrap booking, you know, gluing decorations all over paper.  But I'm not a "scrap booker" and maybe that is where the problem lies.

So then later in the spring I came up with the idea of bookmark cards.  On my warp, I made spaces between the bookmarks and I didn't like how the edges didn't seem packed in.  They almost wanted to just lazily spread apart too much.  It always felt like I was loosing the ends. 

So I sewed all around them on my sewing machine, and then I thought to myself, "Why didn't I just make a solid piece of fabric and then sew rectangles and then cut it all apart?"  I think that would be better.

Then after I made the bookmarks, I stapled them onto the card so they could easily be removed.  This works out great, except the cardstock is kind of expensive AND you can see the staples from inside the card.  But at least you get something useful in the end!  

Another problem with this idea is it feels like I've "been there, done that" sort of a thing, because I just made these in April and because I made so many, I sent letters to all my friends already and even gave some away by the dozen as gifts....  so it's not all that totally new anymore even though it started as an experiment for my 2011 Christmas cards!

Then while driving home from school one day last month I thought of this cute idea:

This is actually a little card I sent a friend this week and all I did was take a sample and sew the loose edges with very tight stitches on my sewing machine.  Then I sewed with huge stitches all the way around it.  It's just a quad-fold card printed from the computer on regular computer paper.  The envelopes are really cheap at the office supply place.  So the cards themselves cost next to nothing!  AND the stitches that hold the weaving in place are sandwiched between the folds of the paper!








This solves the expensive card stock problem, but now the only problem that still remains is people will want to do something with the weaving afterwards.  So I'm still thinking of maybe ornaments with really thin batting between it.  I could do a little weaving and then some thin batting, and then some Christmas fabric on the back with a little loop of thread to hang it up on the tree. 

Here are my weaving project plans from the Sept/Oct 1995 Handwoven magazine.  It is the Huck lace ornament designed by Susan Leschke from Palmyra, Virginia, page 70 & 92:

Questions for my blog readers:

What are some of your weaving plans for the holidays? 

And when do you typically get started with them?