I haven’t been making much progress on any one thing lately, but I have been working on lots of different projects! We took some pictures of the finished Passegiata shawl the other day. The colors really glow in the light from the setting sun.

 

This closeup also shows a little bit of the i-cord bind off that I used for the project. I’ve never tried one before, but am really happy with how it came out. I did just a three-stitch version, so it’s pretty tiny, but it’s very flexible and gives a nice finish to the very stretchy fabric.

 

I intended to make a second version of the same shawl, but the Passegiata has a bit of a hump at the center back that I wanted to get rid of. I did some poking around online looking for shawl-shaping strategies, played around a bit with different yarns, and before you know it, I’d gone off and designed my own shawl instead. We all knew the pattern thing couldn’t last long, didn’t we?

This is a photo of the new shawl from a couple of weeks ago. I was playing with different options for the color patterning in the main body of the shawl. The two yarns are almost too similar; you can’t see the stripes at all in the stockinette rows at the bottom of the piece, using either the solid pink or purple as the contrast band. In the end, I settled with the option that I tried first: four rows of variegated yarn separated by two rows of garter stitch in the solid color. That adds a little bit of extra dimension that helps the contrast rows to (literally) pop out a bit.

I’ve also been doing a bit of weaving, here and there. I cut this piece off the loom a couple of weeks ago, and gave it a good wet finishing last week. This is my first foray into using novelty yarns in weaving, something that I’ve long suspected I’d enjoy. The left hand side of the accent stripe is made up of 7 strands of novelty yarn – two of a bumpy-spun peachy rayon, and 5 of a black glitter yarn to give a bit of sparkle. It’s subtle and toned down, but the fancy yarns add a lot of interest to the piece. I also added details in the off-white background fabric by interspersing random threads of a thicker gauge to help give the ground fabric a more interesting texture. It was a little slower to wind the warp, but I really like the result.

Now that that’s off the loom, I’ve started working on the next project, a set of tea towels in summery teals and yellow.

This first one uses yellow as the weft color also – probably not my favorite combination, but it does make a nice greenish color for the main fabric, and I have a lot of yellow yarn and not as much teal. This project is just puttering along in an on-again, off-again way, but it’s nice to have something on the loom.

In keeping with that spirit, I’ve been planning a new warp for the big loom, too.

This one will be a more complicated project, with lots of different colors to mix, so it will take a while to get this one ready to weave. The main warp pieces (piled on the table in the photo) are a pair of warps that I painted in Madison at a guild workshop in 2010. I knew I wanted to make them into a wider fabric, so I held off until I got the bigger loom, and just haven’t gotten around to warping it up since then. I’m hoping that will actually happen this summer; I’d like to turn these into something I can actually weave!

I’ve been doing a major reorganization of my studio lately, which is how I came across those warps again and decided to pull them out. I also came across a bunch of fabric cut out for project bags, just waiting to be embroidered. Rather than sticking it back in the drawer I found it in, I decided to throw the whole pile of stuff in the middle of my office floor so that I’d be reminded to deal with it. (This is a favorite method of mine for getting things done that I never seem to get around to. If I can’t put it away, it will make me crazy that it’s out, and I will actually work on it. Making a mess is surprisingly effective at motivating me to get things done.)

I’ve been doodling a few accents here and there.

That last one is a deliberate attempt to do something completely outside of my comfort zone. It’s so easy to stick with things you know and like, and to shy away from things that feel gaudy or “too much.” I find that shaking things up a bit often helps to jumpstart my creativity in other areas as well, so every once in a while I’ll decide to do something completely unlike me. “Hideous” is the word I probably would have applied to this particular pattern through most of its evolution, but I have to admit that it is beginning to grow on me. It’s not my style – a bit too 70’s/retro for me – but it is starting to come together into a coherent design. Sometimes it’s fun to see where “I would never” can take you.

I’ve also been spinning a bit, after neglecting my wheel for too long. I didn’t want a big, long project to start off with, so I pulled out the braid of yak/silk blend that I bought at SPA in February, and started working on that. It’s hard to capture the luster in a photo, but it really does shine like gold. I must be in the mood for sparkly things lately, because this really appeals to me. (There were metallic threads in the embroidery, too, now that I think of it…)

And finally, yesterday a friend of a friend came over and taught a tatting workshop at my house. I’ve never tried tatting before, and it was fun to play with. I still need a bit of practice, but I ended up with something that looked almost like the butterfly in the pattern by the end of the day. It’s always good to stretch those learning skills and try something new!