I Can Crochet!!

Posted on September 11, 2005 by

Proof:

This is all a bit experimental so it doesn’t sit perfectly flat, but I think I can fix that with a bit of thoughtful blocking 🙂

The Paynesville Spin In went well. There must have been about 50 people there including two men, David from our guild and another guy from Phillip Island who spins for his wife. I think David took up spinning to keep up the yarn for his wife too, he tells us she was the fastest knitter he ever saw, he has bought in some of her work and it is beautiful.

The Spin In was held in St Peters by the Sea Anglican church, a beautiful location. I wish I’d taken my camera. A funny thing, I was spinning away and two ladies approached me and asked why the thread doesn’t break, I said that I was putting twist into the fibre and that makes it strong enough. Then one of them said, ‘how do you get the twist in?’ I was polite, but holy crap! I’m sitting there with a spinning wheel at a spinning guild event.

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Why it is wonderful to belong to a guild!

Posted on September 7, 2005 by

The Latrobe Valley Spinners and Handweavers Guild has 12 members. I spend my Wednesday lunch hours with them and it is heaps of fun 🙂 I’m the youngest by a long way, which is cool.

Today I lamenting that I would have to wind the next skein of my lace wool so I can finish off the Kiri shawl. The last skein took me all night to wind into a ball. Anyway, soon I was armed with the guilds swift and ball winder.

I rushed home from work today and in about 45mins … Ta daaaa….

I also wound the lace wool and I couldn’t resist winding the recent purple/silky yarn… I have to stop because I heard that you shouldn’t keep your yarn wound up for too long. Spoil sports.

This Saturday half of us from the guild are going on a road trip to the Paynesville Spin-in. Yay!! I should make up a mixed CD to entertain us… what sort of music would be suitable for a bunch of 80 year old ladies? LOL

Did I tell you that I put my collagraphs in an open printmaking exhibition which opens on Friday night? I think I did… Anyway, I dropped them off yesterday and now I’m really looking forward to the opening… I love openings 🙂

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A Bit of Dyeing, a Bit of Knitting…. A Lot of Work

Posted on September 4, 2005 by

What to do with 250g (8.8oz) merino/silk blend top. Dye it orange of course!

This was a very expensive purchase, it was a toss up between spinning it white or dyeing prior to spinning. I chose to dye first. Mmmm now I have a whole heap of orange 🙂 I’m now wondering how I should spin this up, thick or thin… Is this enough to knit a jumper (sweater) with? (I’ve never knitted one, so I don’t know). It would probably spin up really nice as laceweight, but I’d probably get 3 shawls out of it… how many orange shawls do I need?

On other news, I started a major spinning project today with the silky wool I got at the Bendigo wool show. The wool is treated to make it feel and look silky. It behaves a bit like silk too. I’m spinning it VERY thin, like thread. I don’t have a lace flier so I’m really concentrating on getting adequate twist in my single, I want to 2ply this, but if the twist is inadequate I might have to 3 ply.

I’ve done heaps of work this weekend too. My stresses of a few days ago are dissipating (YAY!!!) A few more hours tonight should set me up well for the coming week. Riscy is using my occupation with work as an excuse to play some stupid computer game ALL day, EVERYDAY. I hate it, such a f#cking useless waste of time. I waste time too, reading romance novels etc but holy crap, the TIME this sucks out of his life. I need to let go of my inner control freak 🙂

Update on Kiri… I realised today that I’ll need to do 12 repeats of the middle chart.. not 10 as I had thought. So I still have a way to go. I spent an hour knitting in the beautiful sunshine this afternoon. Spring is here!!

My sympathy to those in hurricane affected areas of the US. The reports we are getting here are appalling. I can’t believe people are still trapped in buildings. I can’t watch TV (again), things affect me too much. I just hope changes are made to procedures for dealing with these situations in future.

*** Rant Deleted ***

Posted in Printing | 3 Comments

Little Gem

Posted on September 4, 2005 by

The silk strand is actually a silk merino blend I spun up a few months ago. The colours were brilliant but muddied up when spun. Also the silk flew all over the place when handled and I’m not keen to spin up the rest of it.

A thought just dawned on me that this might felt up beautifully. Perhaps I’ll just felt up a scarf for myself.

Yep, that’s what I’ll do…

Posted in Linocut | 2 Comments

A Thanks and …. a bit of sewing!!!

Posted on September 1, 2005 by

Thanks for the comments on my last blog post. It suprised me how much better they made me feel. I’m sticking with the philosophy that the only way to get through time cruch work pressures is to WORK WORK WORK. So I’ve been working at home of an evening and plan to work on the weekend… Not something I want to make a habit of. I’m more productive at home, which has been a total suprise, I am one of the worlds greatest procrastinators.

Still I found time to:

It has been a VERY long time since I quilted, this is something I LOVE to do, but for some reason I have been ‘not quilting’ for ages now. Well, last night after the laptop was shut, I started working on the Orange Bag. The bag has a very bold horizontal stripe, but the whole surface will be encrusted with stitching/quilting. This is my favourite thing to do.

The best thing about this is that the bag will be all about the stripe from afar, but on closer inspection a surface rich in texture and delicate in line will become apparent. This is what I like about quilting/embroidery, it has interest for the viewer on so many levels. This is what I hope to achieve anyway 🙂

I’m going to enter my collagraphs in a printmaking show at ARCYinnar next week. They will not be for sale.

I have reached a decision. I won’t be making stuff to sell in the forseeable future. I have found that as soon as I declare my intention to make stuff to sell, my productivity slows right down. Quilted bags and Spinning being cases in point. You know, it is weight off my shoulders to declare this.

Posted in Knitting | 2 Comments

Touch and Go Post

Posted on August 30, 2005 by

I’m still alive. I have too much pressure at work which is stiffling my creativity, and generally numbing my brain. Tonight I found having a good scream in my car very theraputic… I just saw 6months work and possibily $7million worth of projects going down the drain…. I’m a bit melodramatic, but the shit really hit the fan tonight. I’m short staffed, inexperienced, stressed … you get the story.

This too shall pass.

Back Soon

PS Kiri is onto the 9th repeat of the 2nd chart, but I don’t even feel like knitting in this state.

6 Comments

I’ve Been Spinning

Posted on August 23, 2005 by

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Ink Drawing

Posted on August 22, 2005 by

I occasionally get the urge to buy art supplies. Last week I bought a pen nib and holder and some sepia ink. I wanted to practice drawing… something I’m not natural at, but I know I can improve with practice.

I also drew heaps of studies of the bottle of ink. I improved heaps even in just a few tries. The key here is to not expect perfection, just plunge in and try, learn from the bits that don’t work and continue. I wish I could take my own advice LOL

I framed up some of the little collagraphs (I spelt it wrong in the last post) and they are now hanging on a wall in our sitting room, pretty swish looking 🙂 I wish I had a frame which would accomodate the squashed cake tin print, but alas, I don’t. The question is, where do I store these prints now? I think it will neccesitate buying a large portfolio folder thingy, so I can slip them in beside the shelves in my sewing room.

Talking about sewing. I NEED to clean my sewing room out again, it is attracting clutter like you wouldn’t believe and I haven’t worked in there for months.

We are just about to send our second Ipod back to Apple. It has the same problems as the first one they replaced. Very annoying!! Especially since the work I’ve been doing lately (at work) requires a fair level of concentration and piping music into my ears cuts out all those ‘open plan’ office distractions.

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Printing

Posted on August 14, 2005 by

The big printing weekend is finished and here are some of my results, click on the photo if you want to see a bigger view:

These were photograped as the ink isn’t dry enough to put the prints in the scanner. I’ll especially try and scan the collographs as they are quite delecate and the details would show up better.

Kudos to Jenny Peterson for running such a great class, and thanks to my fellow participants who were a pleasure to work with (they wont read this as I forgot to tell them about my blog!!).

Posted in Art | 2 Comments

What a Day

Posted on August 13, 2005 by

I am exhausted after spending the day in a printmaking workshop with Jenny Peterson at ARC Yinnar.

I go back for more tommorow 🙂 I constructed some collographs today, I am full of doubt about how they will print, I used lots of fibrous stuff which will take too much ink and cause dark blobs, all will be revealed tommorow.

We also explored using found metal to print with. I had found some lovely rusted corrugated iron on the side of the road on the way o the workshop

I had to squash the metal flat then pound the crap out of it to make it suitable for printing. I was very impressed with the results which I will show here tommorow.

Knitting on Kiri continues, it would boring if I continued to post pics of its shriveled self.

Posted in Spinning | 1 Comment