Textiles and Tea, Tuesday knitting

Textiles and Tea this week featured  Marcia Weiss, an accomplished weaver in linen, making ikat and double weaving. 

You know how a book can be very good but pale against a much better one you read right before? I think this weaver came off less notably, because I'd seen a lot of the current Barbican exhibit. Their passionate energy and drive left this work looking much less lively. 

But she's great and here are the slides she showed -- more tell than show this week -- so she gets her due

Earlier I'd gone to the knitting group and a favorite friend was the other participant, along with the librarian. She was continuing the red sweater she's been on a while, I was socking, and doing a bit on the pin loom. I found I weave better when I'm not chatting.  

The librarian immediately looked  up pinlooms, new to her,to learn more, would like one like mine, but was daunted to see vintage ones are not in great supply, and modern plastic ones are more expensive than you'd think.

We talked about making your own using a picture frame, tapping in brads in the pin pattern. The other participant, D, is all for making your own tools!  That way you could make any size of square.

Chat ranged over Portugal in September, Malta now, starting scallions, helping reluctant parents declutter, summers off, jury duty, shared email addresses, curry leaves, bay leaves, growing tomatoes, rain, tiny knitted sock earrings, ear piercing, birth order, and other topics.  You can have a large conversation in a small group.

Cold and rainy again sigh. But happy day, anyway! I'll keep cheerful with hot chocolate. 

Tuesday knitting group, Textiles and Tea

 Tuesday I dropped off my ballot in the dropbox 

Then on to the knitting group nearby in the library, only two today, but here's the table set up with books to borrow.

Talk ranged over making hats, embroidery, Maryland Sheep and Wool last weekend, freezing weather, gardening, Misfits market, local farm CSA and more.

Home to Textiles and Tea with a spinning wheel restorer, John Sturtevant. Not being at all into spinning wheels, I was surprised at how interesting I found it, largely because of his love for what he does and his love of learning. And what a range of wheel designs.

this is his wife Kathy, testing restored wheels before they go back to their owners. She originally got him interested in wheels repair and restoration.

Here's a trolley wheel, really unusual, which he demonstrated on video.

His website is on the id slide, for more info.

Then I got back to my embroidery, which is my happy place just now 

A range of stitches, some improvised, and I'm starting to see what I'm doing here.,and what needs to happen next. Wednesday is always quiet, so it may be a stitching day.

Happy day everyone, do your own happy stuff if you can. Sometimes in hard times it can be only a fleeting experience, but worth looking for. I know this is true right now for some blogistas. I see you. Been there too.

Mayday! Celebrate the workers! White rabbits!

 

Tuesday knitting group brought a new member, and the announcement that we're expanding our range to include any needle arts. So everyone there said, lovely, I'll bring my embroidery! Turns out we all embroider.

No pictures, but talk ranged over Maryland Sheep and Wool next weekend, rare breed sheep, (human) newborns, Shave em to Save em (rare sheep breeds),  spinning, and other vital topics.

Home again and handsome son arrived to visit, bringing a car load of stuff for me to free cycle, several boxes as well as these, 

all of which were requested right away. Haven't checked  what's in the the boxes yet. 

He declared the ANZAC biscuits terrific, and did I only make them once a year? 

He also approved the chocolate covered almond bits. I may make ANZAC biscuits again soon.

And earlier I was thinking about the next page of my fabric book, maybe that Indian free form quilting, so I took a look at my collection of silk stitched stars and found I had a whole lot of completed cotton stars, too, that I'd completely forgotten

This is only some of them. I must have been on a starmaking tear.

So my next page may not be quilting, but applique, we'll see. 

I organized the drawers of floss, lovely visual experience, and it will be better than rummaging every time I need to change colors. 

One drawer is what Marion calls her tangle, a mass of threads to pull out as needed, and now it's not concealing the other skeins.

Happy day, everyone, whether it looks more like tangle than skein. All good.

All the pieces  I found are stitched and finished, ready to use. I must have made them when I made those English paper pieced pillows. The silk stars were hanging in the kitchen window as a mobile, until I moved on.  As you do.

New friends, Textiles and Tea

This morning was about stitching my pages, just folded back wrong sides together, and stitched around with embroidery floss.  The slot and tab thing happens later.

Here are three pages, one side then the other 

Then the afternoon was Tuesday Knitting Group, and since school was out today, we had the pleasure of a little girl starting crochet, while her mother looked on. 

Another knitter taught her the start of Granny squares, and I found a sample of them in my bag, to show her, this notebook with gs covers, seen from both sides 

It's my purse notebook, made when I had a surfeit of embroidery floss.

And while the granny squarers worked, 

the mom and I had a great convo about Indian textiles. She knew quite a bit about the kawandi I'm interested in, also kantha stitching and Gujarati stitching, the kind with the tiny mirrors embedded, so we were very pleased with each other. She took a picture of her daughter with me before they left, very cool 

Other chat ranged over young people starting crafts, artists and musicians finding everything new all the time, how knitting is not work, it's entertainment, wire jewelry,  and more. Cheerful, no apocalyptic chat. 

Then home to Textiles and Tea with Demetrio Lazo,  a wonderful weaver and dyer from a long family tradition in Oaxaca, who teaches as well as makes massive rugs in traditional and newly creative designs. He has children one of whom is already committed to a career in weaving in the family business.

He teaches weaving and dyeing workshops, as well as producing sought-after work of his own

look at the size of this rug loom. He says its really a dance to manage the harnesses. A rug takes about three months.

This makes a person want to sign up and rush to Oaxaca to do this dyeing workshop. Natural and synthetic dyes, including cochineal and indigo, which grows in Mexico.

and the last entry here is a reference book he uses and approves. It's the one you see above, open on the loom to the design he's working on.

I have to cop to falling asleep and missing a bit, cup of tea in my hand, narrowly averting a spill, but it had been a busy day one way and another.

Then supper, which looked pretty good considering it consisted of odd things lying around. Sweet potato tortillas under a  bed of steamed spinach, poached egg on top, roast potatoes.

I find a great way to get potatoes tender inside and all crisp outside is to microwave them whole till tender, then dice and roast them in the toaster oven. Seasalt, black pepper, olive oil great.

Happy day, everyone, mine was wonderful.