Sunday, April 29, 2012

Back at last

I have not dropped from the face of the earth.  I have been weaving and doing the usual things in my life.  It turns out there is a long list of the latter to which gardening and lawn mowing have been added.  Phew!  Anything that gets done at my house is done by me.  No exceptions.

The tartan was finished, including inspection, correcting and washing and pressing a couple of weeks ago.  The man who commissioned it picked it up Saturday a week ago.

While I was waiting for him to come and waiting, too, for some yarns to arrive I made a silk scarf from 20/2 hand-dyed silk I bought from RedFish Dyeworks.  I had purchased it some time ago and it was getting close to Holy Relic Designation--that thing that the longer I keep it the more valuable and untouchable it seems so that I can't bear to weave with it at all at the end.  Well, these skeins escaped that fate.


The warp is a shade of blue green and the weft a frank purple.  The cloth is iridescent, as I had planned it would be.  The colors reverse on the back except for the plain weave field in which the figures appear.  I like it a lot.

The yarn I was awaiting arrived and the first cloth from them is well underway.  The taupe-y color is worsted wool and the fuschia is a loop mohair.  I arranged for the mohair to appear in small squares on the right side of the cloth.  The squares are arranged in a half-drop:

Those thigs alone would make me very happy--and they do--but to add to that is the fact that the lily of the valley is in full bloom.  My whole front garden is scented by them. (O! Bliss!)  A small bouquet is in my kitchen table:
If only you could smell them!