The last July adventure (this year anyway)

Alert Bay, Cormorant Island. A road trip with good companions to northern Vancouver Island. A special place.

Chilkat Weaving of the region.

Inch by inch, pick by pick.

Its slow going but its going.



Braided twill- silk warp, merino weft. It will be a scarf.





From a recent walk. Captured in the wind. Some loose ends beginning to be sorted out, both literally and figuratively these days.  

Knitting progresses but it is too gnarly to photograph- being knitted lace. 

Multi Shaft Weaving, No Shaft Weaving…

The second is a bit of a palate cleanse from the first.

The first: napkins for the dinner table, wonderful to me in that the sett worked, the pattern worked, the materials worked and there are no obvious blunders. A small improvement in skills, though much of multi- shaft weaving remains just out of my understanding. I blindly follow instructions here.

The second: odds and ends first spun into a four ply novelty yarn. The loom a picture frame, string and office supplies. The material likely to be made into small bags, (the extent of my primitive sewing skills, using suitably primitive fabric.) In a way weaving is a pretty expensive hobby, in another, well, use what you have. Fun.

I took the van for a run to Crescent Beach. Watched the birds and sat for a while.

Boundary Bay Birds

I went to a park new to me, armed with the camera in the fog. This is another gem easily accessed from Vancouver, it may be a new regular stop. There are many kilometres of walking trails and it was very peaceful there this morning. Pictured is a juvenile eagle.

Because I was in the area anyhow, I swung by the Riefal Bird Sanctuary. The yearly membership is really inexpensive, and it means even if tired and a long walk is out, one can pop in and see who is hanging around.

While there I picked up a book, a natural history of British Columbia, which may increase the chances of my knowing what I am talking about when I go on about what I have photographed! It looks interesting.

Adapting to conditions? The wily Harlequin Duck, trying to pass himself off as a red winged blackbird at the small bird feeder. Goofball.

And here is the obligatory craft shot – woven twill, with leftover sock yarn weft, and some leftover plain weave hand spun cotton – both made into bags. One is my new knitting bag, the smaller will be used for carrying books perhaps. I didn’t do the cross stitch piece on the front of the small bag, my friend Ruth did that many years ago, its beautiful fine work.

Found Objects

This has travelled bit. Hopefully its owner isn’t too upset at its loss. From the wander at Crescent Beach this past weekend.  There is always something interesting. This was clearly propped up by other wanderers. (This beach is not likely to receive much debris from the Japanese tsunami, there are many landforms between here and there. At least that is what local media are saying around stuff washing up on the beaches of the gulf islands and Vancouver Island. The bike’s travels likely started out much more locally.)

While yet one more knitted hat blocks and dries, a look into the stash bin revealed some woven bits that were waiting to be made into something. I found some stuff from back at the beginning of my rigid heddle play.

A quick zip of the sewing machine and this strip of plain weave cotton fabric becomes six wash cloths. Warp is…something…weft is hand spun organic cotton, done up as a two ply. Very soft, next to skin soft. Hopefully they will continue to shrink as they are washed – other experiments in plain weave and cotton seem to do so.

A bit of saori style weaving with different remnents of handpsun wools and silks. Turning it into a cowl minimizes the various width and gauge changes – sheer luck that the piece was just the right size. I blame Mason -Dixon Knitting for reviving the cowl idea. While this might be a gift, I keep wearing it around the house…

Another found item – a very simple recipe for rosemary and olive oil shortbread. This might be the perfect activity for another cold day here. Not just winter coming, oh yes, that holiday, oh what’s it called? It’s on its way too…

Winter is Coming! (make a blanket, quick)

Sorry, too many episodes of Game of Thrones apparently. A series which has lost its charm for me actually. Too much gore, too many killings, just too much. Anyhow, Grant took this recently on a local hike and I couldn’t resist.

Off the loom, it is about four metres of 40 cm wide yardage. Not quite big enough on its own to be a blanket but I will finish the ubiquitous blue up completely making a couple of panels to sew on to it. It’s an easy point twill, (hard to make out I know) and should be a warm cover. It may benefit from lining it with some fleece maybe, that remains to be seen. I have vigorously washed and blocked it and it stood up very well. There is a slow food movement? This is slow fabric. Fun.

Still with the birds. Our unusual, but not unheard of, cold snap has continued, with accompanying clear bright skies. Today at Crescent Beach the ducks filled the ocean, hundreds and hundreds of them, murmuring to themselves. We had never seen anything like it. I guess the ponds are frozen over. Mallards and wood ducks were what we made out, there may have been other kinds too.

Kind of an inadequate photo, too bad.

Lots of these fellow too, charging up and down the shore. Amazing how few people out today, I guess this is cold for here. (The rest of the continent, socked in with blizzards gives us a razzberry. )

The End is Nigh…

 

Hah! I wasn’t sure this would ever happen, but it seems I have made a significant dent in the “ubiquitous blue.” I have a pang to see it come to an end, though lord knows I am ready to weave, knit, do tapestry, sew – whatever it may be – with any other colour! I warped up the Jane to do a simple point twill, using the blue as warp and some  pretty blue chunky mystery yarn as weft. (Found at a guild sell off, feels like wool, sure hope it is wool.) It is pretty enough, I think it will become a blanket, though I am going to have to make it in pieces given the size of my loom. That’s OK, it seems to be how I roll in this weaving game.

It has been an exceptionally nice week. Alison was in town and we went to the Sunshine Coast for a couple of days for some sister time. (Beautiful niece Chloe was here for a couple of days too, but she had to head back north a bit earlier.)

The family resemblance is striking isn’t it! (snort).

One of the highlights of the trip was a hike into Skookumchuk Narrows, four kilometres in the woods to a view-point where the sea rushes in quickly, especially at high tide. It was fantastic. And to cap the experience was watching a group of six sea lions playing in the surf. And it was clear that maybe they were fishing, but they were also really playing – breaching into the air, rolling and occasionally coming near. It is like watching crows and ravens catch the downdrafts – there is no question in my mind that the experience of joy transcends species.

Thanks fella’s.

 

Woven “Boyfriend Sweater”

This was another experiment. The idea of a shrug has been perambulating about my head for a while. It seems ideal as a cover up for a person of a certain age, who needs a bit of warmth, but with vents for those occasional blasts of personal heat! The materials for this were very inexpensive, some unlabeled cotton and weird boucle yarn that seemed to go together. The fabric is a bit sleazy, and may not hold up, though as long as the cats don’t get too friendly – they like to get my attention sometimes by pick, pick picking at my arm, time for a treat – it should be OK. Sort of like a sewn together shawl rather than a boyfriend sweater really. It is just that it is kind of shapeless and comforting to put on. Just like wearing someone else’s sweater.  Thank you interwebs – any kind of old 70’s “sew your weaving” pattern you can dream up is there in living colour. Or is it the 80’s? Making garments from big squares, whatever decade that was.  (No, I did NOT put shoulder pads in this. And no, I will likely not wear this out of my house.  And like the blue vest, it has been two days and the arms haven’t fallen off yet. Phew. )

Still showing off from our Rockies trip. This is Eva Lake, in Mount Revelstoke National Park. Oh we had a wonderful trip!

Tapestry Respect

Joining a weaving and spinning guild has a lot of side benefits. Not only are there opportunities to meet like-minded people, and to see their impressive work at the show and tell, there are the things that happen by word of mouth. Elaine Duncan has a sterling reputation amongst weavers for the quality of her work and the quality of her workshops, so when it became possible to do sign up for one I jumped at it. I tried some rudimentary attempts at tapestry in the past because it seems a wonderful way to play with colour and design but it was a struggle to figure out how to make it work at home. My experiments were pretty frustrating, and didn’t produce anywhere near what was in my head.

Four days of heavy lifting produced this! A sampler about eight inches long with lots of mistakes but lots of lessons learned. It was tremendous fun.

There is a lot to tapestry.  What is very appealing is the quality that it shares with the rigid heddle loom – a delightfully accessible way to weave. Accessible due to the simplicity of the actual loom. Elaine warned us, should we choose to involve handy partners in the construction of a loom like this, to make sure they didn’t have the urge to solder and improve on the construction. It really is as simple as the fitting together of the copper pipes. After all, weaving has been done on simpler looms than this one for many centuries.

It was a congenial, easy-going class. Elaine has a relaxed teaching style but managed to pack in a lot of information, often stopping by to drop gems as she encouraged us to continue. It was a good idea to listen to what she was saying to other people, as there was often a good piece of information to be overheard.

Weaving is an unfolding world. I have much deeper respect for those who work in this medium, and want to learn a great deal more.

Now that pile of leftover balls of yarn has a future!

Now, if this were simplified a bit…inspiration for a tapestry perhaps? From our September trip. Trying to see the patterns.

Finally!

A weaving and sewing milestone. Real sewists please do not look too closely. This is a wee vest for wearing under my motorcycle jacket. That ubiquitous blue yarn, woven into a honeycomb twill, according to my book. Then, using a Saori book I found in a used bookstore as instruction I took scissors in hand and cut. Zig zagged the seams, and look at that, a curved neckline. Whoo hoo. I considered overdyeing the yarn, but honestly, whatever it is covered in to make it “moth proof” will likely make it hard to overdye, short of some kind of chemical blasting and then it would likely felt.  Turquoise ? Sure, that’s it, and it must have been a colour of the year at SOME point. What I love about this is the drape, and lightness of the fabric, and it’s sturdiness. I have already worn it on the bike and it works really well to keep me warm without bulk.  So – don’t mess with a woman on a motorcycle. This will work.  (And it didn’t spontaneously fall apart when worn, always a fear in the back of my mind. I am past that with most of the handknits; when I made my first few sweaters I would wear them in the house for a while before taking them out into the wild. If the arms suddenly fell off, well that would be a problem wouldn’t it? Ah confidence.)

And now for a blue that IS found in nature! This jay was pretty annoyed with me I suspect, I followed him all over the place trying to get a good shot.  From our holiday in September.