At long last

Yes, I'm still here.

I was just on hiatus due to a rather rough semester I've had. Between keeping up with my coursework, my work, staying on top of the going-ons of our school's art club, AND just plain old day-to-day life, some things just gotta give.

But now the semester's over, and I can catch up with all the things I've deserted for a bit!

Anyway, here's a general breakdown of all the things I've been doing all this time that might be of interest to someone, but I haven't had the time to write about:

-I've woven buttloads of stuff for my advanced weaving class.

-I've been sewing more often, mostly for my advanced textile design class. It culminated in a rather nice hand-dyed, hand-sewn raw silk skirt.

-I've been trying to knit an Estonian lace shawl out of yarn I spun during what little spare time I have. So far I'm halfway through.

-I attended the American Craft Council craft show during spring break. I was too poor to buy anything, but I walked away with a lot of business cards!

-Spectrum, our student art club, managed to get a lot of things done during this semester. We had our second biannual art sale, and this time around we had our own booth during the Bear on the Square festival. Hopefully this will be something we'll do every spring.

-I did some natural dyeing with a friend over spring break as well. Dyed some handspun yarn a lovely shade of raspberry with cochineal.

-I got my senior show idea accepted...now I have my portfolio production class to look forward to next semester (yikes!).

-I bought a loom.

.....

So my plan is to eventually put up a lot of pictures and write a lot more about these things. Who knows whether any of that will actually get done, but at least I've given you the gist of what's going on.

Until then,
-Cat Read more!

Latest handspun and some stash gloating

Well, since I only have another day left before I'm back in school and back into the non-stop studying and art-churning routine, I figured I'd spend some time here sharing some photos of the fiber I've been working with.



This is 2 ounces worth of a lovely warm brown alpaca that I spun up on my drop spindle-- so far I think it's the largest amount I've ever spun up using a spindle...

I got it from Harmony Wools Alpaca, which happened to have a booth over at the John C. Campbell Folk School Fall Festival I went to back in...oh, October-ish?...

It's been a busy year.

AND...here's the final product, after I plied it using my drop spindle. Using my wheel to ply it after spending all that time spinning it on my spindle just felt like cheating. Oddly enough, I think this is my most balanced ply yet.



I found it to be a wonderful spin...I usually prefer batts to roving, and when I *do* spin with roving it tends to involve a copious amount of pre-drafting...not so with this.

Lucky for me, I bought more!



From left to right: 2 ounces of an even softer squooshier alpaca roving that I will definitely need a lighter spindle for, 2 ounces of a grey alpaca/blue silk blend roving (both were gotten from Harmony Wools Alpaca), and about 2 ounces of some gorgeous mossy green mohair locks from Good Fibrations, who were also at the John C. Campbell Folk School.

I regret not buying more mohair...this I purhchased for an art yarn I've got in my head, but a couple of ounces would have been great for a nice floofy curly yarn spun from the lock...

I'm going to make an effort this semester to set apart some time off during the weekends to work on some non-school related art and crafts stuff. Its going to be difficult-- I'm taking both Brit Lit 2 and Visual Literacy, which apparently are both writing-intensive classes...not that art or british literature are subjects that I find at all difficult to write about, but deadlines are such creativity killers. Blech.

Gah...gotta think positive! At least I'm taking textile design and weaving again. Can't wait to get back on the loom...

Ciao!

- The Bloated Ewe Read more!

Etsy Steampunk Gift Guide

Hello to all,
I finished my finals this past Tuesday. FINALLY. They really weren't awful, though. Most of my finals were kind of like mini-parties with some critiquing on the side. Still, I've been slaving away on final projects and am happy to finally be able to focus on my non-class-related art stuff. And now I have weaving and dyeing to add to my growing collection of things I want to do outside of the classroom...

Sadly, I've caught that nasty crud-bug that always seems to hit the campus, and it's annoying me to no end-- I currently have a few "commisions" I was working on for a few of my professors for Christmas, and they're all at a stand-still now that I'm all sneezy and groggy and just plain nasty.

ALSO, I've been meaning to put up some pictures of all the neat things I've worked on for this past semester, but until I get better that just ain't happening.

Ah well.

At least there's etsy to turn to when I want to share something crafty!

They just put up a "steampunk and noir gift guide" filled with loads of stuff I'd just love to get my hands on. Needless to say, it's filled with cogs, frills, black lace and brass findings...basically, the kind of stuff that makes me salivate and feel rather greedy during the Christmas season.

Now to just BACK AWAY and look at things that my family would like instead of me.

.... Read more!

Spinning at the Fall Festival

Weeeelll....

Last time I blogged I left off where I had *just* gone to do a bit of demonstrating with my sister at a local fall festival. For about four hours I spun, carded, and crocheted a shawl for myself-- something that I would have probably done at home on any average weekend, fall festival or not. It was our very first time doing a demonstration on our own, without the spinner's guild, but I feel we came well-prepared. Amazingly enough our booth was placed next to the basket weaving booth, set up by the woman who did the hand-spinning demonstration last year, who also happened to be a member of the spinner's guild as well.

And if that wasn't quite a coincidence itself, she also recognized our drum carder. Turns out she was the very first owner, and she had given it to Sharon, who then gave it to my family.

Wow.


Other than spinning, carding, and crocheting, I had tons of fun chatting with demonstrators at the other booths and doing a bit of shopping. My sister and I both purchased really great face jugs from these kids who made them at the local high school. I was AMAZED that they hadn't sold out, because they were really great pieces and the price they were selling them at was a steal. Seriously, I would have bought everything if I had the money. But I only bought one; it has these two screaming faces on the very top, and the mouths are actually the eyes for the main face on the jug. Very Halloween. I definitely need to share pics of it some time....

Enough talking; here's a bunch of pictures!

Here's Mary at her Ashford traditional spinning wheel.

Here's moi. My louet isn't quite traditional.



Here is our little setup.

Here were Gae's basket weavings. Definitely putting kudzu to good use!


This was Paula, the butter-churning lady. She sewed her whole outfit.


Making apple cider with a cider press...

Here were some hand-made dulcimers.

By no means the gist of it, but my camera was low on memory...

Anyway, hopefully I'll get back to blogging again soon, because I've been doing some spindling with some alpaca I bought over at the John C. Campbell Folk School's fall festival and I've been meaning to blab about how that's all coming out. So until then...

-The Bloated Ewe

Read more!

Natural Dyeing Escapade: The End Result

Well, since the last post not only have I had an overwhelmingly large amount of school work to do, but it also happens to be "Fall Festival" season, which usually keeps my weekends busy--the only time I have to write.

Fall festivals also mean more fiber crap to buy, which also means more stuff to write and rave about...but for now I'm simply going to focus on what I left off on-- that yarn I naturally dyed a couple of weeks back!

On the left is a skein of yarn I spun from Aggie's wool, in it's natural creamy white. To the right are two similar skeins, naturally dyed with alkanet root chips and with alum as a mordant.

While dyeing it I kept worrying that I under-guesstimated the amount of alum and cream of tartar that I mordanted the wool in, so I mixed up some more and poured it into the dye vat. I also let the yarn sit in the dye vat for a couple of days-- not so much to be sure that the dye took, but just because I wasn't able to finish dyeing during the weekend and got busy with school and work.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the colours; it's like a light lavender-grey.

I took one of my alkanet-dyed skeins along with a lot more fiber-related things on a demonstration I did with my sister over at Smithgall Woods for their "Fall Celebration". Yep, another topic that I'd LOVE to write about right now, but I feel that it deserve a post all of its own, along with all the pictures I took.

So for now all you get is a picture of my alkanet skein along with some more handspun yarns I had on display.

More to come soon.

-The Bloated Ewe Read more!

Hands up, who wants to dye!

So.

One of my many studio classes this fall has been textile design. Every Monday and Wednesday I don two layers of protective plastic aprons, rubber gloves, and a respirator, and I play around with toxic chemicals. Like chemistry, but with pretty colours instead of beakers filled with stuff that smells like farts. Or home ec, but more edgy. Anyway, the end result is a bunch of fat quarters (cloth, not lard) that are painted in a wide array of patterns in all the colours I can muster up in three hours.

Why am I writing about this?

Well, all that playing around with dyes and soda ash and fiber has gotten my feet wet (and rainbow-coloured) in a realm of fiber art that I've wanted to attempt for a long time but never quite got the courage for. I bought the natural dyestuffs, I snatched up mordants, I called a big ol' canning pot just for myself, I purchased a couple of "easy to follow" (yeah right) books from the internet...but still no dyeing.

But now, just as I'm writing this, there's that big ol' pot simmering in the kitchen filled with a couple white skeins of yarn I spun up from Aggie's wool, some white cotswold/mystery blend roving I purchased from a spinners destash, and some alum/cream of tartar that I was very careful about fully dissolving before dumping all the wooly crap in it. And notice that it's simmering. It's not boiling. It's simmering.

All I had on hand to measure out the mordants was a tablespoon, but apparently a tablespoon is like half an ounce. So I just guesstimated from there.

I feel kind of nervous about the fact that I guesstimated instead of getting ACCURATE measurements, but I keep telling myself that in the good old days they didn't have measuring spoons and all they did was eyeball the mordant measurements.

This may or may not be true, but it makes me feel a little better. So don't correct me if I'm wrong.

...

I'm off to go check the fiber. Read more!

Serendipity

At the last spinner's guild meeting, I was talking to a fellow member who has been involved in the craft (and fiber-arts in general) for quite some time.

Somehow the topic went to how I've been searching for a drum carder, but just couldn't seem to get one for a "deal". I explained how I was probably just going to have to suck it up and buy myself a drum carder for the usual going prices, when she said, "How does free sound for a good price?".

For a few seconds I just kind of blinked, thinking that I must have heard wrong. She explained how she had a second hand drum carder that she had been thinking about giving away-- she had gotten to the point where she just could never get the teeth to align the way she wanted to, and at that it was just growing to be more of a nuisance to her than anything else.

Next weekend I went with my family up to where she works to pick up the drum carder; it's like an Appalachian educational center where she works as a weaver. I got to see some of the results of a natural dyeing class that was being held at that time (I even purchased some mordants from her), and my family and I also had the pleasure of getting a little tour of the studio where she worked.

That night I cleaned up the drum carder, pulled out some of Aggie's (our sheep) wool that we had sheared this past spring, watched some youtube videos on how to work a drum carder, and we all set to work feeding the drum carder and cranking the fiber through.

This was the end result.

I am now obsessed with drum carding, and I can't wait to start dyeing and adding extra things like exotic fibers and glitter and Lord knows what else I feel like adding. The amount of creative control I have over my fiber has just increased tenfold; it's amazing.

It's also amazing how just talking to someone can lead to so much. One of the things I've learned from working in the arts (I'm using "art" quite loosely here, denoting anything creative) is the necessity of others. Most know that art isn't created in a void, but when you find yourself working with other people, helping others and being helped by others, you realize the importance of working in a sort of community, rather than in complete isolation. For me, art was about forming a connection with the world around me; a tool to break that isolation that pervades humanity. And little moments like this serve as a reminder of the need to connect.

Off to go card some more!

-Caty

Read more!