New scarves

At last, I've gotten a listing up for one of the rather large number of new scarves I have made. You can see it in my Etsy mini in the sidebar of my blog. I really need a model, but I'm short of cooperative or geographically available redheads.

I think I need to fix that, but it might be a while. I know of an ideal candidate, but it isn't straightforward to hit someone up without seeming like a stalker. Alas. Anyway, the new listing is pretty low key in comparison to some of the others, so stay tuned!

New scarves

I've finally gotten some bamboo scarves woven, about two years after I planned (hey, biz was good without it, so I guess that's good). Here are a few of the new ones:
The bamboo is pretty, for sure, but where it really shines is in how it feels - super soft and slinky like silk - and drapes. Wow!

For fun at the end of the warp, I tried (in the righthand scarf) a fairly straightforward overshot pattern (that's just weaverese for cloth that has a simple fundamental structure overlaid with fancy patterns):
I say "fairly straightforward" because even though I'm good at this, I erred once, as you can probably see. Maybe the error in the pattern is actually a design plus. I'm sure it is for people who believe symmetry must be disrupted to avoid the appearance of evil spirits.

Weekend fun

As usual, the weekend was too short. I need more hours in the day, especially when I should be sleeping. But alas, that's not how things work.

While winding on a new warp (gorgeous red, photos to come if I remember!), I re-listened to "Nebraska" a bunch of times, especially this song:

Well, that and Highway Patrolman. It is easy to work with the Boss.

How long's it take to make one of those things?

Psychgrad posed a question I'm often asked: How long does it take to weave a scarf?

I don't think she knows it, but that's a loaded question, so my usual answer is: Well, it depends.

Weavers tend to avoid giving the actual time they spend weaving, because a) weaving goes very quickly; and b) there's a lot more to making a scarf than the weaving, and if you look at the price (up to $165 for my scarves), it is easy for some people to say, "OK, 165 bucks an hour?"

Of course, those folks aren't likely to buy anything, anyway.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Figuring out the specific amount of time spent on any given scarf isn't feasible, but here's a rough sketch:

You have to put on a warp (I put on enough for about 12 scarves), and thread the loom (each piece of yarn goes through two metal pieces, and my scarf warps usually have about 175 threads). That's about four or five hours from start to finish.

You also have to conceive of the warp and choose the yarns, which takes who knows how long. I think about warps all the time, in the back of my mind, kind of like how I think about newspapers, writing and one or two other things I will leave to your imagination. To put a number on it, though, I'd say that after the inspiration strikes, designing a warp takes a few hours.

After I weave a scarf, I tie knots in the fringe - to make it pretty - about 5 or 10 minutes per scarf. I wash the scarves to get out the sizing and dust (hey, I live in Walla Walla, the land of blowing dust), then dry them, and sometimes spot iron them when they're dry-ish. Maybe that's another 10 or 20 minutes per scarf? Maybe more, hard to say.

The weaving itself depends on what kind of yarn I'm using and the pattern. I'd say for a 78-inch scarf, weaving times range from an hour or so to two hours for complicated work.

What's that work out to on average? Three hours? Four?

For the set looking to assess the dollars per hour, the ace in the hole is this: Besides the time I spend actually in production, there's that whole "artist" thing, plus the 31 years
of experience I have on the loom bench, plus the Internal Revenue Service, plus the yarn company...

But yeah, a few hours :)

What I've been weaving lately

Here's a blue warp I'm working on (partly for my own fiendish plots, partly for someone else's), which will soon be seen in stores...

from one side:
from another:
and the makings of a turquoise capelet or twist (plus my knees):
The weft (the turquoise part) is this really lush rayon chenille made by Silk City Fibers. Oo-la-la!

What did you do today?

I was up to a few things...

These kind gentlemen were part of a crew assembling the craft I got to ride in this morning (my first balloon ride).How about this view?
I can see why a balloon ride is on the do-before-you-die list - it was an unparalleled experience, hard to describe. The sensation was like the moment after you do a flip turn in the pool and are coasting/surging out for the next length, only the view is much, much better.

Quasi-evidence it was me up there:
If you're a reader of the Union-Bulletin, you can look for a column about the ride in the Balloon Stampede tabloid, and also a photo feature (with not these shots) in an upcoming Panorama.

Also, what I've been up to on the loom lately.
I got the gold silk I used in the weft of this scarf as a throw-in with my new-to-me loom. It is a Wow! yarn for sure.

Third time the charm?

So cool! One of my scarves has made the front page of Etsy today - instant sunshine.What luck! Looks like a few hundred people have taken a look, too.

Outfitting the loom

So I bought a new (to me) loom a while back and finally scrounged up enough dough to buy some needed items to outfit it for production work. One difference 'twixt a hobbyist and a production weaver is the need to put on long warps (i.e. 50 yards instead of two, three, five), and the upshot of that is a need to put these rake-like items on the beam the warp is wound onto.
That I did, with a couple of trips to the hardware store, and one to the lumber yard (where a kindly worker cut a really superb piece of no-void plywood into 1.25-inch strips that I glued to make double-thickness and cut to suit my purposes).

Anyway, after that, and some previous repair work, I now have a loom that should take me through the rest of my career as a weaver. Unless, of course, someone decides I'm such a brilliant scarf maker that I change professions!

Lee's Surrender

So, my dear sweet mother found this unusually fantastic birthday present for yours truly:


It is, as you might guess from the post title, Lee's Surrender, from a coverlet placed in Old Kirby Knob, Kentucky. As you can see, this is an impressive display of hand weaving. My mother found it in Missouri, made by a woman said to be of questionable character.

For certain people, Lee's Surrender is instantly recognizable. "Certain people" probably most often consist of people who have read these dark materials:



I suppose this piece she gave me would be something like the feeling you might get when you realize "that's really a Klimt!"

Another brief brush with immortality

The butterfly lady - more alert to these things than I - spotted another of my scarves on the front page at Etsy today - cool!

I'm not sure if the appearance will have a direct effect on, um, sales, but it did drive a heck of a lot of traffic to my shop, which is very nice.

Hey, cool!

I sense an item of mine was on the front page of Etsy last week - this scarf now has 396 views and has been added to a whole passel of people's favorite-items lists, pretty much all Jan 6. Nice!

Would have liked to see it find a new home, of course, but this is a good second place. :)

Busy weekend

Thanksgiving weekend was a busy one:

• Drove to Willamette Valley on Thursday morning for visit/studio sale/etc.
• Drove to Bellingham (and back) on Friday to pick up loom.
• Helped with studio sale on Saturday. Went shopping afterward.
• Drove to sunny (well, usually sunny) Walla Walla on Sunday (about 1,200 miles for the weekend).

So now I have a different new-to-me loom, one that is similar to the one I'd been using and therefore much easier to get into working shape for production weaving.

I also sold and/or traded five scarves, which means I am due for a couple of massages in Portland down the line and also have some inventory actually out walking around in the world. This is a nice validation.

Of course, the butterfly lady and I also got to have a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat with my mother, who made a great dinner. We consumed a healthy amount of wine, too.

Damn, that was a lot of driving.

More Etsy fun

Well, having put up a portion of my inventory, trusted advisers suggested I reconsider my brilliant studio photography, which truth be told was only brilliant if you turned the dial up on your monitor too much.

I reshot the lot, and although I still have a lot of scarves left to list at my store, I think it is much improved. You can admire my handiwork in the sidebar to the right...

The makeshift studio was actually fun to set up and shoot in, but not so much fun as weaving the scarves. Lowest on my list is the generation of catalog copy for the listings, but even that's kind of fun. That would be a trippy job: Catalog copy writer.

I suppose it would depend on the catalog, though.

Etsy shop, a work in progress

As you can see, I now have an Etsy shop, which I'm slowly but surely populating with my scarves. There are many more to come, but it is slow going...

New arrival

Well, the planned-for pickup of Marigold, the loom I've used for the past couple of years, and the one I learned on 30 years ago (!) went off on schedule earlier last week, and my new-to-me loom arrived the same day.

Newby is not yet named, but I think she's a she.


As you can see, she's a counterbalance loom, not a jack loom (which is the only genus I've used to date)


Hey, this is upstairs! Yes, true. The tall part, which is called the castle, rules out getting downstairs without some major disassembly of either the loom or the house, neither of which seems like a good idea.


That's the view over my shoulder...

There are some significant tasks ahead: I need to fine-tune the counterbalance of the harnesses (the frame-like things hanging from the small ropes. I need to adjust the beater (the part that has the baleen-like reed). Most significantly, I hope, I need to convert the backbeam - the part that has canvas wrapped around it on the back of the loom, in the top picture - to a sectional beam. This means adding struts, crossbeams and section separators at 2-inch intervals.

This is not a small project. The last part is a little intimidating, but hey, measure thrice.

On a side note, my Employee of the Year bonus included chit that I'm redeeming for some super neat yarn derived from bamboo, which I intend to convert into some equally neat scarves. On a side, side note, the butterfly lady located a weaver at Etsy who makes eerily similar scarves, also out of yarn derived from bamboo, one of which is in the same pattern I plan to use. It is a Gothic cross, which I used in a scarf I wove a couple of years ago. As you can see, if you visit the "weaver" link and shop around a little, the effect is strikingly different - and glorious - in the finer-gauge yarn she uses.

Change is in the air

But nothing too dramatic.

The last box of fabric is being sent to my employer today, and two of the three warps I'm preparing for her are wound on: A 50-yard warp in kiwi and a 42-yarder in brown. Really, the brown is more like a grouping of rusts with some other ingredients. A black warp I intended to finish winding Monday is awaiting an emergency shipment of more yarn.

The loom I've been using is also my employer's traveling loom, so all of these items (warps and loom, plus many accessories) are due to be picked up Tuesday. I had hoped I would receive my new-to-me loom at the same time, seeing as how my employer has that loom at her house, but I don't think that's going to happen. I guess that means I will have to get around to learning to knit if I want to do textiles this fall.

Coincidentally, the swimming pool, which was closed for the summer (of course, who wants to swim in summer?) is open now, so maybe a break from weaving is well timed. I'm disappointed, though.

Art and craft

I rarely think about art, but I *do* art a lot. Or so I think.

Over the weekend, I participated in a local show, dubbed Alley Gallery (a self-proclaimed lowbrow art sale). I also wove 19 yards of cloth, enough for seven wraps of varying sorts. I'm sorry to say the latter was much more lucrative work.

While I was at the show Friday, an artist pal and I chatted about this and that, mostly money, sales and how to get by as an artist. These topics seem to occupy a fair amount of her waking hours. I don't need to make a living as a weaver, but I could if I had to. I'm sure I'd have worries, but one thing I would not worry about is whether people would buy my work.

I think weaving full time would count as being an artist for a living, but my pal hinted that might be up for debate. I know there are divides among craftsmen: Painters and photographers aren't the same animal as weavers, woodworkers, potters and metalsmiths.

And I know that people who show in galleries or do installation art aren't the same as craftsmen (and women, though I've met few craftswomen who see craftsman as a gender-specific term). But I wasn't aware that any of them really thought we (craftsmen) weren't doing art.

On the flip side, I see a lot of art that is done with very poor craftsmanship. If it were my call to make, my alma mater would require studio art majors to take (and pass, god damn it) a course in craftsmanship. I'm not saying you can't have good art without good craftsmanship, but if you're going to sell something, a little professional pride wouldn't hurt.

I guess that's another can of worms, the selling part. I've yet to weave something I think nobody would buy, but I don't think that spoils the items as pieces of art. I think that might be up for debate, too.

Still wicked busy

I thought summers were for relaxing, but this one is not.

The shuttle has been a-flyin' for weeks now, and I put on a new (60-yard) warp over the weekend. I keep alleging that I'll post a photo or six from this venture, but I will need to bend the space-time continuum to add time to my days in order to do that.

But I *can* talk out of both sides of my mouth: I have "discovered" that a perfectly serviceable margarita can be made with mostly non-official ingredients:

Tequila - about a third of one of those little flask-y bottles
Juice of two lemons
A slightly greater amount of key lime juice
Three heaping tablespoons of powdered sugar
About three quarters of a tray of ice cubes
A few dashes of bitters

Blend the lot and serve as you like. (This is enough to share, right?) I think this would be a poor recipe for a rocks 'rita.

New loom

I have not yet met her, but I will soon be the owner/operator/caretaker of a new-to-me loom. It is a 36-inch counterbalance loom (translation: Uh, I don't know how to translate that), and it is believed to be handmade. Its recent past is sad, but I am sure that a few hundred yards of cloth can fix that. When she finally arrives, I will a) figure out how to use a counterbalance loom (I have been weaving for 30 years, but on jack looms, a different species); and b) post a picture...

Fortune is fickle, I guess. I wasn't shopping for a loom, but maybe one was shopping for me.

yarn

I think this is self-explanatory. You might be surprised at how much weaving you can get out of this little yarn. I figure I can eke out three or four more scarf warps with this. I really need to get around to selling more!