Its electric

Dyeing records act as inspirations

The problem with planning ahead of time is I get all excited about what will be happening next and bored with what's happening now. I have a rug on my loom but all I'm thinking about is napkins. Well, I say napkins. I'm actually thinking some 9x9 waffle weave face cloths. But then I could do napkins...

Drawdown for Waffle Weave.

This is one draft I'm considering. It's waffle weave, that eternally wonderful fabric relegated almost entirely to towels. The cells in this draft wouldn't be square, but the asymmetry would allow more depth then normal in a 4 shaft waffle. To heck with that though! If I want the trouble of setting up 8 treadles, I'll do an 8 harness pattern! For the record, I have no idea what "C 1hr, H 5min" means. I mean, I assume it's related to the dying records on the opposite page, but it's still greek to me.

Hemstitching: You have been Upgraded.

Any way, the reason for all the excitement about making washclothes/towels/napkins/placemats and everything else exciting in the universe is that Santa brought me a Brother 104D Serger. Hemstitching (above) is now a thing of the past! I can now weave 9 yards of fabric, run it through the serger a few times, and suddenly have 27 perfectly finished washclothes/towels/napkins - You know what? They're just rectangles of cloth, you figure out what to do with them.

In my excitement to tell everyone in the world about how utterly exciting this gift is, a lot of people have expected some sort of agonizing over whether these yet-to-be-rectangles would still be handmade, like I needed some justification for mechanizing part of the process.

Bullshit. Machines planted the flax/cotton, harvested, washed, spun, washed again and wound the yarn before I even get it. Plenty of mechanization has already happened.

Moreover, I weave because I love weaving. I hate hemstitching. This serger means more time doing what I love, and less doing what I hate. Perfect!

Oh, and I have an electric ball-winder now too.  I'm basically a cyborg already

Scrap Monsters

Mary-Beth, Alphozo, Alice, Raymond, Quincy, Tolly, and Ozwald.

I don't believe in wasting fiber. So when I finished my senior project I had two nine foot crocodiles, and a lot of left over fabric in odd shapes. It seemed perfectly obvious therefore to make a series of scrap monsters.

The difficult part is putting together the body shapes. Mary-Beth was easy, she's a rectangle with rectangular appendages. Smaller, odder-scraps demand more complicated shapes. Sewing machines like rectangles like Mary-Beth. They don't like oddities like Ozwald, or sewing through five or more layers at once as is necessary for appendages. So a lot of the sewing I do by hand, or I reinforce by hand afterwards.

Adding Eyes.

Additional features are hand felted on. Eyes begin as huge balls of fluff that get matted down slowly. Generally eyes that look straight ahead are confrontational or creepy, so most of my monsters look off to the side. Oswald has three eyes, so he just looks everywhere.

Uh, Shelby? You got something on your mouth, there.

Felting is a process of making things smaller. Fine tuning the shaping on eyes and mouths can take forever since every alteration in outline changes the proportions and density of the entire feature. Above, Shelby's eyes are still pretty irregular. That can't be fixed until his mouth is on, since adding the mouth pulls in the entire plane of the face.

It might be awhile before I can finish him up though....