Love/Hate Warp

 

A couple of posts ago, I showed you the draft for the hot pink warp.  It's a twill gamp from Carole Strickler's book, and the color makes me very happy.  I am, in fact, in love with it.  The original warp was not wide enough for what I wanted, only 96 threads, so I added to it on each side with a solid pink.  The original warp is hand-dyed carpet warp, so the threads I added are also carpet warp, same brand, theoretically the same thickness.  But as I weave along, it has become obvious that the added warp threads are thinner, enough to make a visible difference in tension.  Which is really pissing me off.  But I have told myself this afternoon that it doesn't matter; these are washcloths.  I will be using them in the shower each day, washing them after each use.  They will be bright and pretty, and there will be a whole bunch of them, and if they're not perfect, it doesn't matter.  

It really irritates me, though, as I weave along, that the sides are tighter than the center, and I feel like I've wasted this gorgeously colored warp.  On the other hand, this warp has been in my stash for at least 15 years, doing nothing but collecting cat hair and dust, and it's at least being used up.  I will just have to dye another beautiful, cheerful, love-inducing warp soon, and make it into something gorgeous.  Until then, this warp will be pounded into wash cloths as fast as I can weave.

Recently, I've started attending two fiber groups, one at a local yarn store and one at the nearby library.  I knit at the yarn store, and am really enjoying knitting in public again, meeting like-minded people.  The  library group is a "fiber group," meaning there are beaders, crocheters, quilters and other fibery pursuits.  The first time I went, a woman who was also there for the first time was quilting, finishing a quilt by hand that she started many years ago.  We started talking about quilting, and I got a hankering for doing some of my own.  The quilt that is currently on my bed, and has been for the last few summers, is a Grandmother's Flower Garden that my grandmother made in 1988, using unbleached muslin for the background, and Hawaiian shirt scraps for the flowers.  My cousin owned a Hawaiian shirt company in Honolulu, and had sent her a box of scraps.  The way she made it is unusual, though.  You can see I started one the traditional way, cutting out hexagons, hemming them and sewing them together, but when I looked at Grandma's, I could see that she didn't make it that way.  She cut out circles, pressed them around a hexagon template, whipped the ends together in the back, then joined the hexagons with tiny whip stitches.  I had to take one apart to find out her method, because the only GFG's there are on the internet are the hemmed hexagons, some pieced, some appliqued onto the background.  

What I like best about Grandma's is that it's not quilted.  I use it in the summer because it's light and rarely too hot to use through the night.  I have a ton of scraps left from the quilt at the top of my blog, the sunburst, so I started with that fabric.  Then, because the yarn store is next door to a quilt shop (what???), I bought some more fabric.  I need a lot more of the greens to go around the flowers, because I want this quilt to look like my front flower garden, chaotic and cheerful. 

I have 11 flowers done, after a little more than a week, so this will take some time, but I am really enjoying it.

I'm so glad I took this aerial view of the finished pieces, because I was feeling a little anxious about the idea.  When people see it, they say things like, "Oh!  That's interesting!"  Or, "That's very bright!"  No one says they like it, or that it's pretty.  Well, I like it.  I even have some ideas for future GFG's, such as I think that once you whip the backs together, you could butt them against each other and faggot stitch them together, so it doesn't all have to be hand stitched.  Because to be honest, that's kind of painful to do for any length of time.  I might even do a pastel version!

As for the knitting, I've finished the body of the Ranunculus, but I'm not happy with it yet.  And then there's the sleeves.  I haven't decided how long to make them, so it's on pause.  I have been chugging along on the Oban, though.  I noticed this afternoon that I twisted one of the cables the wrong way, and will have to drop down and turn it the other way, probably tomorrow when I'm fresh and have a few brain cells to rub together.  

I've also wound the rest of that yarn into skeins to dye them barn red, but it's so hot here right now, I want to wait until it gets below 80.  And I have all those warps wound that I made for the scuttled coverlet project, colors selected already for space-dying.  

Have a fibery week!