Been busy busy

We're solidly in our home once again, most of the boxes have been emptied (or hidden in the garage).  We made it through shearing 2010 and now I've got almost two full season's worth of fiber to work through, plus a bunch I got from a neighboring farm.  Of course now that I've been focusing on the natural colors people are going crazy for my dyed fiber!

Let's see - the latest news was I was a vendor at my first festival - Coupeville Art Festival.  For the month prior to The Weekend Tim started doing the Redmond Market - I'd open and then he'd come in around 10am or so to finish the day.  He's a natural salesman and of course the ladies love to listen to him go on.  I'll definitely get pictures of the man at work at the next market.

Anyway, I was working to make as many laminate scarves as possible - hand dyed silk blended with alpaca.  Even the ones I had to redo a bit turned out well - I thought anyway.  My favorite was a simple blue silk with black alpaca.  I thought it would be the first item to sell when the Festival opened.  Needless to say it didn't.  Sadly we didn't do as well as I had hoped that weekend and I have to say that the 90 degree weather didn't help.  The lady in the booth across the way as a hoot so all in all I had fun, but I doubt we'll do a festival in summer again, unless my non-seasonal items do well.

I've also decided I need to revamp the booth layout, again.  I'm going to get hooks that allow the scarves to drape better and have something for the hats and purses. 

I've been going through Pat Spark's book, "Making Faces" and I'm putting the finishing touches on the moon I made.  I've got the cheeks and teeth to do to try and make it not so frightening, but it's almost done.  It's so soft and my next one will be better - I hope.  But this is part of what I'm calling non-seasonal.  I'm also working on more flowers and small animals.  I'm out of all of them so I think I may be on the right track. 

Finalist with Camelid Quarterly

This is going to be a quickie - I just found out that my "Suri 'n Silk" felted scarf made it into the finals of Camelid Quarterly's Natural Fiber Showcase.  I'm amazed because the picture was not good (alright it was really bad) and the other entries are so gorgeous.  Anyway - it's there in www.llamas-alpacas.com/showcase if anyone wants to check it out.

Now that we're back in the house, sort of, I'm starting work again on suri 'n silk as well as other scarves and hats and such.  I've got about a month before the market season really gets going!

And the momentum continues

I didn't fib - the pile of fiber at the end of my last post went into this lattice scarf.

I ran it in my felting machine for 10 minutes, unrolled it and rolled it in reverse and ran it another 10 minutes to get it to this stage. I laid out a single layer for all the lattices except where they intersected. At those points another "shingle" of fiber was laid down for extra strength.

Once I got it started I put it in my Laundry Alternative spinner:

I thought it made a cool kind of "spin art" (-:

I hand fulled the piece and there was significant shrinkage. The red, dyed huacaya, fulled much more easily than the black, natural black huacaya. It has been a while since I did some hand fulling and watching and feeling it shrink as I worked it was very rewarding.

After this I worked on hand fulling my test suri scarf and now I'm considering needling it for a while. If it responds to that I'm thinknig that a Felt-o-Matic by Dianne Stott to speed that part of it up might be a good investment. Since I'm serious about focusing on suri it could be a good investment.

Finally this is a scarf I started today - started this on the felting machine and this shows the shrinkage from hand fulling with the bubble wrap and the wash board.

Assorted Fiber projects this weekend

This is me plying my two suri singles while watching "Ice Station Zebra" last night. This is the same yarn I started when i got my e-spinner, Essy, last Saturday. Each single is about 3.5 ounces and I finished plying just as "Where Eagles Dare" started - It was "movies based on Allistair Maclean books" night last night. When I'm done here I'll wind this off into a skein and start some brown huacaya from our boy Evgeny. If Tim gets going on the scarves with his sock machine he might be able to make one using this yarn!

I started a scarf earlier using white suri fiber and red/yellow silk hankies (finished project below). I completed that and it's now drying over a chair. I decided to do another scarf using the suri. I also decided to not be as careful about the fiber layout this time around - which is the chaos in the picture to the left. This is actually a picture of two layers of fiber. I did a total of three and then filled in the thin spots after the first round on my machine.

In case I didn't post this before - this is my felting machine. It's a Celtic Moon Princess. Projects can be up to two feet wide and the length is only limited by what can fit between the rollers. It won't completely full the felt, but it comes awfully close. The last step for most of my projects is to go for a vinegar rinse in my front loading washer. I don't have that in the rental, but I found out today that our builder can hook mine up at the house sometime this week - yay!!!

This is the result of the chaotic fiber layout. I left the edges alone to keep with the primitive or organic look. The locks are visible in the felt which is another cool effect. This will definitely go in my Charlie line of scarves. At some point I'll beat or rub the pattern left by the pool mat. Sometimes I leave it because it can make the lace felt look even lacier.

This is the final result of the suri with silk hankies scarf. You can't see the edge that didn't felt to the body of the scarf. That happened because I didn't do the plastic right for the straight edges I wanted on this scarf. What I did instead was put plastic between the edge and the body so instead of a nice straight edge I had what you see in the last picture.

Instead of folding the stray fiber over to the body of the scarf, somehow the plastic was folded between the body and the fiber. The edge looked straight but obviously wasn't. I'm probably going to have to try and needle this edge into place or simply snip off the excess fiber.