Eleven Shaft Tea Towels Wrap Up

My eleven shaft tea towels are done, done, done and it was a lovely project overall.

One of the neat things that happened while I was doing some random treadling between the tea towels is that these lovely hearts magically appeared.  This is just a partial pattern treadling and I know I’ll go back to it later and see if I can make it work as a repeating pattern.

The take up on this pattern was more than I expected and I ended up weaving right to the very end of the warp.  I really don’t like to go this close to the heddles because the shed was sooooo tight.  This is also a pretty good shot of the colourful hair clips that I use to hold the heddles that I’m not using together.  Everytime I sit down to thread a new warp I’m delighted by the Easter colours and of  course the bunny ears help!

Here are my tea towels off the loom, before wet finishing.  I love this shot.

I had a hard time deciding which side would be the ‘right’ side, frankly both are lovely.

These are the four different wefts that I chose for my Spring Tea Towels.

The front and back sides of each of the duplicate coloured wefts.

I placed an order with Maurice Brassard et fils in Quebec for more 2/8 cotton and this lovely box of possibilites arrived in just four days.

One of the things I do right away is take a sharpie to each tube of cotton and mark colour them in.  I choose a different colour each time.  This not only helps me with using up my stock by age, but really helps with keeping the dye lots seperate.

This shot is a bit blurry, but you can still clearly tell that they are the same colour, from the same supplier but differing dye lots.  I have been caught out more than once, I’m sorry to say, with a streak in my web because I got the dye lots mixed up.  Surprisingly this has also happened with white cotton, not only with the dyed cotton; I guess there are differences in the bleaching process too.

At this point I update my yarn binder and I can’t say enough about what a good idea this is.  I have written blogs about making this binder in the past and it is my best organizational tool. (Focusing on Fibres March 2009 and Confessions of a Compulsive Organizer December 2019); I would be lost without it.

Our Garden is really lovely right now and the perennial borders are at their best. This is a really lovely shot of Penstemon hybrid ‘Garnet’ commonly called Beard Tongue.  What a weird name for a truly spectacular summer perennial.  The hummingbirds and bummble bees love it.

Confressions of A Compulsive Organizer

I love organization, I love to see everything neat and tidy and if it’s colour coordinated, so much the better.
When I begin developing a new weaving project, my first step is to haul out my ‘stash book’ which I made and blogged about in 2009 , click to read the original post.  Honestly I use this binder nearly every day.

After ten years of hard use this binder is showing its age as I’ve pulled through the binder holes and it feels that now is a good time to re-visit how I made it and make a few improvements to the design.

I had recently bought some cardstock to make hang tags for the guild sale, so having the supplies on hand really motivated me.

I hauled out my wee Fiskars paper cutter and started by cutting the letter sized paper into 3 sizes:
4 7/8”x8 1/2”, 3 7/8”x8 1/2” and 2 7/8”x8 1/2”.  I was able to get multiple cuts from each page and I made 14 of each size.

I then made margins on the large page at 2” from the edge, 1 1/2” for the medium page and 1” for the small page.  I then made lines equally spaced down the page.  This is when I switched to centimetres because it just worked out better, my lines are 1 cm apart.

Punching the holes for the binder came next and frankly it was pretty hard on my hands.  It was at this point I discovered that hole punches can indeed become dull!

126 holes later and they are done, now just 840 more punches to go as I give each card 20 holes for the yarn!  This is the part that I made changes I made only 20 holes per page as I found the yarns near the bottom of the page tended to slip out of place and rip through the hole.  I also move the hole in further from the edge to make them stronger.

Now comes the really fun part for me.  I pulled out each of my yarn storage bins and weigh each item, then place a nice doubled strand on the card.  When I could I made note of the manufacturer and of the colour name and if I had mixed dye lots.  Naturally I colour coded too, just because it made me happy.

This is my on hand Tencel in all its beauty.   Ahh, one fibre down and 13 more to go!

I don't have a garden shot today because it's dull and drippy outside, but here is what we've been doing in the kitchen.  Cream puffs with cracklin crusts filled with creme patissiere, yummmm!