The Blue Brick

Mothers Day Scarf 2

May 14, 2014

I’ve been sitting on photos of this scarf for days, not wanting to give it away! For Mothers Day my lovely mama got 2 scarves from me, and here is the second one. The best bit about this scarf is that the warp was my own hand-dyed creation. I based the colours off a photo I took that my mom loves, taken in Grand Turk on a family vacation:

Remember my ombre yarn dying experiment? Here’s what became of it. I warped from the centre outwards, so that my colours would change gradually, in a mirror effect. At the 2 ends I warped black threads to create a border.

The weft is simply black Malabrigo Silkpaca Lace, beaten in very loosely to create a super drapey fabric.

The colours really shine; the warp is a silk and sea cell blend which gives the finished piece amazing sheen. I am using a pick up stick technique to create warp floats which further emphasize the warp colours.

Mom loves it :) Pinks and purples are her favourite, and turquoise is my favourite, so it’s a perfect blend of what we both adore. The fact that I’m using my own hand dyed yarn made it that much more special.
Mothers Day Scarf 1

May 13, 2014
First of all, I’m in love with my boat shuttle. it doesn’t snag on my warp threads, it can be shot through in one smooth movement, and best of all, it can be loaded up using a power drill in less time than it takes to make a smoothie.

I took extra care with this one because it was a gift, I was especially pleased with my hem-stitching.

Warp Yarn:
- Brown: OOAK blue label scraps from Tanis Fiber Arts
- Purple: Sweet Georgia Silk Crush in Amethyst (I think!)
- Pink: Anzula Cloud in ‘Candied Apple’
Weft Yarn:
- 15 picks (rows) of brown and pink are at each edge.
- Scarf body: Tanis Fiber Arts Pink label in ‘Tartan’
I know the Tartan was completely swallowed up by the pink, and it didn’t shine the way it would have if I had used it on my own. I’m using a 12 dent heddle, so the warp threads are quite close.

I wanted something other than another pink for the weft though, and it had to be something with just enough variegation to keep the body of the scarf interesting. I regret nothing ;)
Mothers Day Farm Fest

May 12, 2014

For Mother’s Day I wove two huge scarves (pics of the second one to come later) and took mom and dad up to Gryphon Highland Cattle Farm for the day to meet Kim and spend some time with her critter collection.

Here’s mom showing off her scarf :)

Here she is with Bourbon, Kim’s 5 month old bull.

Kim, rocking out her gifts, the Aurora scarf and a metallic print of her and her bull (because Kim is the uber Mama).

Lunch :)

Kim has a 2 week old baby who is a real heart-melter!

Kim and Yummy.

Family photo.

Another baby pic.

Mom and Jethro.

Jethro trying to come home with us.

My new best friend :)

It was a beautiful day, perfect weather, and my parents had a blast!

To be a mother is to selflessly give of yourself to look after a little life. I wish a belated Happy Mothers Day to all the mamas out there, no matter how many legs your babies have <3
How To Use Up 1500 Yards of Lace Weight in 6 Hours

May 6, 2014

Rayna has been hedging about getting a loom. She’s on the fence, and ready to tip over to the dark side. To give that last little push I took my loom to her place, and showed off by making an entire scarf in a few hours. If enabling were an olympic sport, I could enable for Canada.

This one is using 2 skeins of Blue moon Fibre Arts Marine Silk. The pale colour way is called ‘Ess’ and the turquoise one is (I think) called Ramalaba. I really should start keeping the ball bands.

I warped randomly, and then I wefted randomly. I would work with a colour until I got bored, and then switch. I didn’t know how the final composition would look until I pulled it off the loom.

Once washed, the yarn fluffed out nicely, closing the gaps and giving me gorgeous sheen. I am really thrilled with how both colours turned out.

The final scarf is 62” long by 14.5” It’s a really nice size for wrapping around yourself on a chilly day, though I think I’d like my next creation to be about 75”, so I can double-wrap it with ease.

I confess, I haven’t casted on a thing in weeks. It’s really tough when the loom is beckoning! Not only am I loving this new way of combining colour and texture, but it’s much easier on my wrists. I do have a few things on the needles that need my attention, but knitting has now become my ‘walkabout’ craft instead of my home craft. Because, you know, it’s tough to weave in the car.

And on the loom now? Remember the ombre yarn I dyed a few weeks ago? It’s been warped up and I’m weaving it into a secret project that I can’t blog about yet, but here is a sneak preview!
Things that I suck at.

May 5, 2014

“You should blog that photo” said Rayna, “You know, to show…”

(Leslie finishes) “That you suck at something.”

The girls were playfully ribbing me as I produces this laughable yarn :) it was my first time on a wheel, and it really feels like the yarn is getting away from you and you can’t possibly draft fast enough. I know this isn’t true, it’s just practice. Practice that I shall be able to get more of as soon as I get my wheel back from Mr. Raimer :)

At least samosas were involved.

Our crafty Saturday party.

Purple dog is unimpressed.
Aurora scarf (AKA Warping up the Drinking Problem)

May 1, 2014

I don’t do anything in half measures, so when I decided to try warping the loom all by myself, I chose to use my 12 dent heddle and a lace weight yarn, for a 17” wide scarf. 260 threads later I realized what a commitment warping up a 12 dent heddle could be… and I promptly ordered a double heddle kit and another 12 dent reed. Go big or go home, right?

The results were a bit wonky to say the least, I had a lot of tension problems with the warp, that got pretty bad around the last 12 inches. This morning I learned that pushing a strip of cardboard, or a pick up stick under the warp threads on the apron rod fixes this, something to try next time!

Onto the yarn! I am using a skein of Tanis Fiber Arts pink label (1000 yards) for both warp and weft. I wanted to see just how far I could push that one skein, so I warped up for a 16 inch wide, 6 foot long wrap. The colour of the yarn is one of Tanis’ newest creations, ‘Aurora’. It’s almost as hard to photograph as the real thing – the yarn is so varied and subtle that I feel like I didn’t do it justice here. Even the warp was stunning.

After warping I had 52g left (520 yards). I was worried that it wouldn’t be enough, but I needn’t have; I took the wrap off the loom when it was 57 inches long, and there was still 9g of yarn left in the ball (I didn’t go the full length because of aforementioned warp problems). I think I can confidently say this scarf could have been at least 8 inches longer.

It’s just right for draping around your neck though, and the generous width makes it a great choice for covering up your back on a chilly night!
Crazy Talk.

April 29, 2014

Frolic was on Saturday, and of the many things I succumbed to that day my favourite acquisition was a pair of new heddles. I bought a 10 and 12 dpi to go with my 7.5 dpi. Tito has named them ‘Not bad’, ‘Crazy Talk’ and ‘Drinking Problem’.

I decided to test drive ‘Crazy Talk’ by warping up a skein of ‘Crabby McHappypants’ from Blue Moon Fiber Arts Socks that Rock. It’s a palindrome skein, so Tito and I warped it with a slight offset, so the colours would shift across the length of the scarf.

For the weft, I’m using Misti Alpaca lace, and beating it in very loosely. I warped up 16 inches, almost the full width of the loom.

It came off the loom last night, and it’s so amazingly soft, with beautiful drape! It’s rainy and wretched here today, so it’s hard to get good shots, but you can see that the colour shift produced some really fun results.

It’s the perfect thing to wrap around your neck on a day like today. The 10 dent heddle is a total win.
Leno-Lace Table Runner

April 23, 2014
For my latest loom experiment I wanted to try making something for the home, instead of another scarf. This is not even a little bit because I’m bored of scarves, but because all the delicious yarn I want to use is sock or lace weight and I’m waiting on my 10 and 12 dent heddles before using them up.

I don’t know why I thought a table runner would make sense in my home, considering that I own a cat who likes to eat yarn, but that’s where I ended up going with this one.
- Warp: Alternating threads of misc. black scraps in worsted and sock weight.
- Weft: Cascade 220 Heathers in turquoise
I’ve tried to do something new with each of my pieces to help me learn. For the table runner I warped up alternating strands of sock and worsted weight black wool – 3 worsted, 1 sock, repeat, ending with 3 worsted. When I was ready to start the pick-up stick pattern I picked up the 3 worsted and skipped the sock yarn warps.

Resulting in these long weft floats on the back.

I wove 20 picks of plain weave with scraps of navy blue yarn, and hem-stitched my edge before continuing. To dress up my edges, I’m using 2×2 Leno on an open shed, which is a fancy pants way of saying that I twisted the bottom warp threads over the top and ran my weft through them. Changing the shed and running your weft back locks the twist in place.

Leno feels a little tedious because it’s done thread by thread, but the results of this simple technique have huge potential. I can definitely see myself trying different variations for more complex lace on future projects.

I’m using a pick-up stick technique again to add warp floats to the work. Unlike my first pick-up stick project, I’ve left my outermost warp threads out of the pattern, so there is a 6 warp edging on each side of plain weave. This was intended to stabilize the piece, because I knew I’d be leaving long weft floats on the back, but it ended up giving me a different problem.

The edges of my piece appear to be a little longer than the centre of my piece, resulting in slightly buckled edges which no amount of blocking or steam ironing seems to fix. I’m not entirely sure how to avoid this, other than to reduce my edging width.

On a side note, this post seems boring, and possibly irrelevant to my usual readers (pretty pics aside) but I decided to keep all the details in. Learning weaving techniques, lingo and best practices has been an interesting journey this past month, and it’s been good to document what I learned. Hopefully these posts can be useful to another new weaver as well :)
Photo-trippin

April 21, 2014

For Easter weekend we had a real treat–Rayna’s parents came to Toronto from Newfoundland for a few days. Rayna’s folks are from Newfoundland, and her dad is a super talented photographer, could it get any better?

Yes it could; for a start they actually flew to Toronto with flash-frozen fresh fish (because, we all know you can’t get good fish in land-locked Toronto) Rayna’s skills in the kitchen are exceeded only by that of her mom and her dad’s idea of a good time is poking around in abandoned buildings with his camera. People after my own heart!

We started the weekend with an amazing dinner for Good Friday, and Saturday the 6 of us (plus Kayleigh) took off to look for abandoned buildings outside of Toronto. We ended up stopping here:

And here:

And here!

I had already decided that her dad, Jerry, was a kindred spirit, but he sealed the deal when I decided to make the short, but rickety climb to the upper level and, rather than try to talk me out of it, he said ‘I’ll hold the ladder’. When Tito expressed dismay about our adventure, Jerry simply said ‘She was going to do it anyway’. Yep, 2nd day, and he knew me already.

We also had a bit of fun with Kayleigh. She gave us two good jumps for cookie before deciding we were ripping her off.

Jerry had mentioned a huge abandoned cathedral just off the 404, on Woodbine. I’d seen this place a million times from the highway, and always wanted to go take a closer look, but I’d had no idea that it was abandoned. Apparently, it had sat lonely on an empty plot of land for a very long time, but today there is a housing complex (named ‘Cathedraltown’) encroaching on it’s doorstep.

The story there is sad; someone spent millions to build it, died before it was done, and his family refused to invest any more to complete it. There was a sign on the plot indicating that it may well be torn down to make way for a mall.

We finished off the day at the cathedral and picked Jerry up on Sunday for a trip to the brickworks and the Leslie Street Spit, two of our favourite spots for shooting, but this post has become image-heavy enough!

Photos, food and new friends, a perfect Easter!
Weaving FO – Ombré Scarf

April 18, 2014

This is officially the first thing off the loom that I really enjoy wearing.

Warp: Alternating strands of Indigodragonfly MCS worsted, ‘Unemployed in Greenland’ with strands of Indigodragonfly merino sock, ‘Is The Money Ok? Did They Hurt The Money?

Weft: My own ombré dyed skein, sock weight, merino, 437 yards.

The result is light and silky with beautiful drape. I’m using a pick up stick technique to add a little texture. It’s just warm enough to use as a springtime wrap, I’m in love!