A Quickie Project

After the semi-success of the knitted-roving-then-fulled bag I decided to try my hand at another fulled bag made from unspun roving. This is the perfect project for roving that had already started fulling when I dyed it - still usable for spinning, but not without a lot of prep work.
This time I started with a garter-stitched rectangle for a flat bottom, then picked up stitches all around to knit up the sides. I decreased a little on the way up. I didn't have enough of the original roving, so I added some dark purple, also slightly fulled, roving in a wide stripe and as the rim of the openning. To get the right thickness for knitting, I split each length of roving, being careful to not draft it out at all since I didn't want weak spots. I used slightly thicker roving peices for the rim around the opening to give it a nice rounded effect. The strap is 2-stitch I-cord. It only took a couple of evenings, and I was feeling pretty smug when it went into the wash. Then I took it out. :-( The purple accents in the multi-colored roving had washed out to a dirty pink, no longer matching the purple roving. Sigh. I stretched the wet bag over a Christmas cookie tin to dry (I knew there was a reason to procrastinate putting those tins away). Here it is finished. After a couple of days I have concluded that it is not the ugliest bag ever, just kinda unattractive.
Lessons to be learned: 1. A quickie project results in a quickie product. 2. Just because two dye jobs look the same color, it does not mean they will stay that way when washed. 3. More pre-planning will result in a bag big enough to actually be useful. And 4. Regardless of how advisable it is to balance the load, NEVER felt your bag in a washer load with a white terry-cloth towel, unless you want to perform a chimpanzee grooming ritual of picking little white bits out of the felt.

Giddy Up Part 1: The Trailers

Hi Folks! Sorry to be away so long. I was off debuting my little trailer at the Sisters on the Fly 2007 Giddy Up. It was quite the adventure! I'll have to split the narrative (and pictures) between several posts.

The Giddy Up officially started at Usery Park near Phoenix, but for me it started when I took off from Reno. I spent the first night in Tonopah. Here is the lovely sunrise over Tonopah, NV.


I joined up with a caravan of fine folks (and their trailers) in Rock Springs, AZ. This was the "Northwest Caravan" that had traveled down from Washington, Idaho and Utah, collecting folks along the way.


We traveled together into Usery Park and were greeted by AZ Sisters with cold Coronas and (my favorite part) someone to back our trailers into place for us.


There were a total of 100 vintage trailers at the event. Plus a few more sisters in tents.



Most of the trailers were painted with custom graphics and decorated beyond amazing. The most common theme was cowgirl, but with lots of variations. Everyone was fabulously friendly and happy to show off their trailers. Here are some shots:

Cat Gallery

Although I usually stick to the stated parameters of this blog, home (er..trailer) improvement, gardening and fiber crafts, I have had a specific request to include more pictures of the cats. What mother can resist such a request? So here is a gallery for your entertainment. Click on any picture to see a larger copy. Clara is the brown tabby and Zach is the black and white.

3/28 NOTE: For mysterious technical reasons, these photos are no longer available.

Ready to Fill 'er Up

I have finally completed all the trailer projects necessary for her debut. Although weather did not permit an outside paint job, I am very happy with how the inside came out. Here are some pictures from different angles.

Today's final projects were to install the dishcloth hook in the kitchen area and add straps to ease lifting the seats to access the under-seat storage.

The wall pockets help to solve storage limitations, though I will have to limit the weight I put in them.

Snowy day projects

We had even more snow. My poor Philadelphus (mock orange) is bent over to the ground under the weight. It is getting warmer so hopefully there will be no more shoveling.

Meanwhile I have been getting my little trailer ready for its debut. All the sewing is done (hooray!) and I completed one last wood-burning/painting project. This time I decorated a bamboo tote box I found at a home-stuff store. It wasn't completely successful burning on the bamboo, so I settled for a much less intricate design. Snakes, like I did on the spinning wheel, but no vines.

Having finished my second lace project, I am hot to launch into another. I had 4 oz of gorgeous roving I bought at the last Black Sheep Gathering.
It reminds me of Monet's water garden paintings. It is a very soft 70% mohair, 30% merino.

I spun it fine with a lace project in mind.
It worked up beautifully, with lots of drape, but McMorraned at only 448 yards. Not enough for what I had in mind. I looked through all my lace books, and lots of patterns online, and decided to adapt the Print O'The Wave pattern from this stole. For ease of reading I moved the lace chart into Word and spaced the edge patterns away from the repeat section. I have only about half the yardage needed for the stole, so I will make a scarf with only 2 or 3 repeats and no grafted edges.

Snow

Snow:












Clara's opinion:

Smile like you meant to do that...

I've been watching others come up with fabulous felted (OK, fulled) handbags and I decided to use the concept to make a hot water bottle cover. First I had to find a traditional hot water bottle that I could use in my electricity-less, heaterless travel trailer. This is harder than it sounds, since most folks have apparently switched over to microwavable pads. I eventually found one in the traditional ugly-pink rubber. I dug into my stash and found some hand-painted blueface leicester roving left over from a previous project. For maximum speed and fuzzyness I left the roving unspun and knitted it up as is. Unfortunately I didn't have quite enough. Knowing it would probably be too short, I threw it in the wash anyway. Here it is after a single run through the washer. It was, indeed, too short. On the plus side, it would make a fine bag. But I was out of roving. I did have a ball of the yarn left over from the original project. I hunted it down and blew the dust and cat hair off. Even if the texture would be different, at least the color would match. I knitted the ball of yarn into about 3 yards of 5-stitch I-cord. (For any non-knitting sorts reading this, I-cord stands for Idiot cord, because after a few feet the knitter tends to turn into a raving idiot from the boredom.) I decided to send the I-cord into the wash and also threw the now-bag in for an extra go-around to further merge the colors. I meant to only agitate it a little while, but there was something interesting on TV, and, well.... 2 hours later I remembered to pull it out. Bit of a mistake.

The bag was now smaller, thicker, and the rim of the opening was oddly uneven. Hmm... how to recover? Should I just cut my losses and consign the evidence to one of my multitudinous totebags in hidden corners of my fiber room? Taking a lesson from my cats, who firmly believe you can pull off any ungraceful misstep by looking like you meant to do that, I created a braided strap from the I-cord, leaving a longer bit at each end. Then I sewed the longer bits onto the rim in a coiled pattern that emphasizes where the rim bumps up unevenly. Viola! It is now interestingly irregular rather then mistakenly uneven. Just as if I meant it that way.

So I started out to make a hot water bottle cover and ended up with this nifty bag. Life is full of surprises.

No more icky pink

Icky pink.











Icky pink over-dyed with sun yellow.

Much better!

I have Curtains!!!

In a burst of energy I sewed up the trailer's curtain panels. I didn't want the standard gathered curtains because they wouldn't open enough to completely clear the windows. I wanted something bold and bright, yet simple and in keeping with my folk art theme. So I conceived flat curtain panels with metal rings at the corners that could be hung on simple cup hooks.
Finding the metal rings turned out to be the hard part. I ended up using key tag rings, removing the cardboard tag bit. This worked increadibly well, and was really inexpensive. The cup hooks are small enough to not drill all the way through the trailer wall, yet large enough to hook more than one ring, allowing several open-or-closed configurations of the panels, or even rolling the panels completely up out of the way. All the panels are dark purple on the outside so that they will go with the eventual paint scheme. Inside, they are batiks in colors to match the painted table and picture frames.
As you can see, I REALLY need to get rid of the blue on the seat cushions. Sigh - more sewing.

Interim Report

Here are a few pictures from projects underway:

First, here is a picture for Birdsong - I finished my first Delicato Mitt. Definitely not a beginner pattern! I am knitting them from handspun alpaca. Once done, I will overdye them to cut down on the icky pinkness.











Second, here is a picture for Barb. This is the batik fabric I found for my trailer curtains. I have cut them all out and still need to sew them up. Good thing there is a 3-day weekend coming!












And last, here is another teaser picture of my mystery project. More about that in a later post.

Seraphim complete!

I am happy to announce the successful birth of my Seraphim Shawl. Finishing an actually useful shawl is quite a triumph for me (having started and not completed at least a half dozen). Here it is being blocked on my futon bed. I don't have carpeting, so it is the only pinnable surface large enough. Even so, the ends had to be pinned off the edges of the bed. The yarn is 50% mohair, 50% wool that I bought as pre-dyed roving from BearDog Yarns at Black Sheep Gathering. The color was listed as "Spring Leaves". My original plan was to spin the yarn for a sweater, but I am much happier having it as a shawl. I like the way the variation of color worked up. Part way through knitting it, I realised my row guage was way smaller than the pattern called for so I added about 20% more pattern repeats. The result is an extremely generous sized shawl. Better over large than over small!
I wanted to take a pretty picture of it outside, but it is still cloudy and muddy and wintery-looking, so the best I could do looks pretty pallid. Trust me, the color is far more vibrant.Now back to making curtains. I have the fabric cut out and need to start sewing.

Meanwhile, here's a preview of another project:

The Art of Surprise

Or rather the magic of surprise art. I am very fond of good landscape design, and one of the prime tools of great garden design is the little secret pockets where one can turn a corner and find a hidden surprise, maybe a little fountain, or a piece of sculpture, or even just an exceptional plant. This same principle is found in clothing design when the designer lines the inside of a jacket or purse with a special fabric or color, only to be seen by the wearer, or in brief flashes. I have a plain black nylon tote bag that when unzipped reveals an inside that is blue sky with puffy white clouds. I smile every time I look in it.

When I decided to decorate my little trailer, I knew I would be adding lots of hidden bits of art. For the most part they would be satisfying only me, but why not? Under the table lives a board that serves to extend the bed area. This board is only visible when the table is put down, but before the cushions are turned to make up the bed. A night time picture was appropriate. I'll see it briefly each night as I make up the bed. A little art just before bedtime should encourage technicolor dreams!

Woman vs. Machine

Anybody who knows me at all well knows that sewing and I do not get along. In fact, I will go to great lengths to avoid it, knitting everything possible in the round to avoid seams. Several years ago, in a fit of good intentions towards decorating, I bought a reconditioned sewing machine. I took it home, placed it in a corner of my fiber room, and there it sat until tonight.

I am proud to say I met the beast and I conquered it!

I found this cool purple cotton chenille fabric at Windy Moon Quilts in Reno. It just had to become pillow covers for the trailer! I like how it is sort of both vintage-looking and quirky at the same time. Being 100% cotton it feels great. I bought all they had. When I put it through the wash for preshrinking, it sent purple fuzzies out the dryer vent and across my front yard. After minimal experimentation (and only 1 broken needle) I knocked out covers for 3 pillows - 2 huge ones and one smaller one. I am pleased and proud of how they came out.


Tomorrow I attempt curtains.