After acting odd for the previous week, Friday morning Oct 2nd Chickapee (black, sitting) gave birth to a beautiful little male! He is brown with black points, scampering around...adorable. Catawissa was also due on the fifth of Oct but so far nothing has happened. I have a show this weekend and wanted her little one born before I left. Still a little time. Any suggestions for names?
Wednesday was the long awaited shearing day. Bud and Karen from Shores Fiber Farm brought their trailer down from Ulster to use as a shearing shed. My friend Denise stopped by and took this photo of me clipping burdocks out of Boo's topknot before he was sheared. Bud handled the actual shearing and shots while I collected fiber and attempted to keep them as calm as possible! The strange surroundings and buzzing of the electric clippers got them rather excited. They all look so different without the bushy fiber. The first thing they did back in the pasture was roll in the dirt, I guess it is itchy like a fresh haircut. It was a long but satisfying day.
Here is one of the many projects I've been working on. The picture is one of my paintings, Valley Sunset, reproduced on canvas. All of the fabric colours are natural dyes and the button is natural dyed felted wool. Inside are two pockets, one is zippered.
Yesterday I embarked on my annual sojourn to the 2009 Philadelphia Flower Show. Philly got nailed pretty hard with the snow storm on monday. The severe cold temperatures kept the March snow intact, but inside the convention center it is spring. The theme this year was Italy and some displays were better than others at evoking Italia. I am, however, never disappointed at the opportunity to experience flowers. Spring bulb flowers, incredible tiny iris, blooming cherry trees, wisteria, azalea, roses, delphinium and an incredibly fragrant blooming grapefruit are just a few of the flowers we saw. An exhibit that got raves from me featured a plethora of lilies and amaryllis in amazing colours. All the way home I was imagining how to recreate the beautiful shading with my natural dyed wool. So many ideas that my head is spinning! I must get to work...
This odd looking pile is natural dyed wool drying on the coal stove. It actually got too hot so I had to move it over to the edge. It is a coarser wool than the type usually used for felting, but it is what I have available. I scoured it, dried it, carded it, cooked it in a mordant bath and then finally dyed it. I also dyed some red from Brazil wood and orange from coreopsis, but I couldn't stack any higher!
Last evening was 'Art Walk' in Bloomsburg, where artists are paired with downtown businesses and the public follows a map to visit everyone. I was a participating artist in a clothing store called Kricket Square. The weather was cold and blustery so the event was more lightly attended than in the past. We did have some wonderful visitors though, especially the BU art students who hung out for a while. Hi guys!
Today I am heading to NJ to investigate freelance designing of handbags, drop off my painting "Blue Moon"to it's new owner and go to a tea party with Alice at my former guild.
After spending a week working as a "freelance floral designer" for Valentine's Day, I am happy to be back in my studio. The bottom picture is the scarf as it came off the loom. The warp is natural dyed merino wool, the weft is natural dyed corriedale, nat dye handspun alpaca and a nat dye silk scarf that I ripped into strips. I carefully fulled it by hand so I wouldn't dislodge the silk scarf strips. Then I added bands of wool that I dyed with goldenrod to the selvedge areas to create a border, and help hold the silk in place. The colours are like warm sunshine and day lilies, they make me happy!
These are the yummy new colours that resulted from plying the natural dyed skeins of alpaca together. They are sooo soft. I make them to sell but sometimes they are tough to part with!
Here is one of the colours on the spinning wheel.
Here are some of the colours I have been natural dyeing this week. The yarn is from white alpaca that I spun. I washed the fiber several times before I spun it and washed again afterwards. Then I simmered it in an alum and cream of tartar mordant bath. This helps the dye adhere to the fiber. The yarn pictured (top left) was dyed with madder. The lovely green came from goldenrod with an indigo overdye. I extracted the goldenrod in the fall, and stored the dye in plastic milk jugs. The pink is from cochineal. There is purple someplace too, from overdyeing the pink with blue. After the yarns dry I will put them back through the spinning wheel to ply them together to make unusual multi colour yarns.
A special thank you to the lovely Lucy Lane who, through her kind words, has encouraged me to perservere with my hat. It is looking better. More to come on that next week! In the meantime I made two more alpaca felt hats but broke my plastic bucket while doing the last one. That is the end of hats until I can find another form to work on. The two new ones are much thicker, sturdier and 'hat like'. Now the real fun begins, decorating them!
I spun a spool of Catawissa's lovely brown fiber and then carded some together with fawn alpaca. I just finished plying the two singles together and the colour looks so much like a peanut butter cup that it is making hungry! I will ply the second spool now. I am working next to the coal stove where it is wonderfully warm. We managed to keep the fire going all night, more than 24 hours at this point. The temperature was in single digits again last night with a light coating of fresh snow.
I have never seen anyone felt a hat, but I read about it on the internet! This is my first effort made with fiber from my alpaca "Catawissa" and some from "Boo" that I dyed pink with cochineal. No one will ever wear this one because it is a bit too thin. Next time I will make the layers thicker and have a better idea about how to handle the brim. I certainly have enough fiber to try another! Today I am multitasking as usual: washing alapca, washing sheeps wool, cleaning rabbit coops, carding alpaca...later I will sit still and spin for awhile.
This morning I just finished spinning the fiber from my English angora rabbit, Blimunda, that I harvested last week. I blended her wool with some targhee (a type of sheep's wool) that I had previously cleaned. The result is a lovely heathered soft gray, but I will most likely overdye it. The heather will create wonderful tonals within the dye colour.
The actual painting is quite a bit brighter than my photo. Next time I will improve lighting (which means I will do something) since doing nothing didn't work so great. I just realized I didn't sign it yet. I have another painting underway.
Here it is in the middle of construction. I had fun doing the colour washes, now is the tedious part. About half of the weft painting strips are in place. After it is fully assembled I'll tack all the edges and then use acrylic medium to 'glue' it down.
