Latest endeavour - pillows

This is a Tlingit salmon.  I've been carrying the picture this is based on for years wating to be brave enough to attempt it either as a flat piece or in this case as a pillow.  It wasn't until I had finished making the pillow form and starting on the design details that I realized I messed up the tail - I left off the actual tail fin.  So now I get to figure that out in addition to deciding if I'm going to put the designs on the reverse side (I already did the mouth, but nothing else).  I also have to decide if I'm going to extend the mouth a bit.  But it's definitely a start.

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. 

a quickie

Here are my hats - the red one is a combination of rust/red huacaya and the white is from suri.  The two green hats are highlighted with silk hankies and these were all done on a lissome ball.  I'm going to try and do one a day for a while because it's actually a lot of fun especially when it comes to putting the nylons on the fiber-wrapped ball to hold the fiber in place while it gets bounced to start the felting process.

Hats for the last few days

And yarn.  I'm plying the singles I spun up last year at the Redmond Market - around making a few more hats.  I had some leftover hearts from a scarf I made a while ago and they worked perfectly as prefelts.  This is a bit on the small side, but I think it's cute.

I've got the pictures of the start of this when it looked like a big, green, fuzzy blob, wrapped in the nylons and this is what it looked like as soon as I took it off the ball.  The shiny stuff you can almost see inside is from the thin layer of silk hankies I used.

Here is my son, Edyk, modelling (mainly so he can stay up and watch some TV).  The highlights from the hankies are a bit more visible.  This is also after it took a "hand wash" tumble in the washer (front loader - yay).

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!

the pictures say it all

I think everyone got tired of my grumping about everyone sitting on their butts while I worked!
Edyk is spinning, he turned out his first 1.5 ounces of 2-ply merino yarn yesterday. Roman is running alpaca fiber through our PG Triple Picker and Tim is working on his NZAK circular sock machine.

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.