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Wine, Weaving & Woodwork

Posted in Methow Valley, weaving on June 16, 2013| 1 Comment »

I am leaving tomorrow for a week-long weaving conference in Bellingham, WA. It is the NW Weavers Conference 2013, sponsored by ANWG – the Association of Northwest Weavers Guilds. I am taking a 3-day pre-conference workshop on Tuesday-Thursday, then the conference itself starts on Friday. It included some mini-workshops (I signed up for 3 half-day workshops on Friday and Saturday) plus a whole slew of other events. So I will file a report in a little over a week!

Meanwhile, here are some pictures of the three rugs I finished this week, plus some shots from our exhibit at the Lost River Winery tasting room in Winthrop. It is on the North Cascades Hwy just west of Winthrop (26 Highway 20). Hours for the summer: Thursday through Monday 11-5 pm.

Here are pictures of the three rugs I took in the studio before taking them up to the tasting room yesterday. They are all woven with a mix of smooth (“wooly worm”) scraps and fringed selvages I get from the Pendleton Woolen Mill Store in Portland, OR. I pretty much have to pick these out whenever we are down there, as you never know what they are going to get in from the mill in Pendleton, OR from week to week. The “wooly worms” are just dumped into a big rolling bin, and I have to go “dumpster diving” (a very dusty affair) to pull out wads of the colors I like. The fringed selvages come packaged in plastic bags, but as I said, you can’t predict what they are going to have at any moment in time.

R140

R141

R142

and here are some pictures I took this morning up at the tasting room:

back wall behind the tasting bar

main wall to right of tasting bar

on the left as you enter the tasting room

Rick’s entry table from live edge Western Bigleaf Maple and East Indian black walnut

Do notice the beautiful display hangers Rick made for me, using cherry, for both rugs (using drapery ring clips) and scarves. They are suspended from the picture railings above with fishing line. He will finish up the wine cabinet (in clear vertical grain fir) this week, so I will get a picture when I get back from conference!

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Guild Goes For Gold

Posted in Methow Valley, weaving on April 3, 2013| 2 Comments »

My local weaving guild, Methow Valley Spinners & Weavers, is affiliated with a larger organization called ANWG, or the Association of Northwest Weavers’ Guilds. This is an association of fiber arts guilds located within the Pacific Northwest area of the United States and Western Canada. Every 2 years there is an ANWG Conference with seminars, fashion show, exhibits, vendors etc. The first one I went to was 4 years ago in Spokane, Washington; then 2 years ago in Eugene, Oregon. This year the 2013 ANWG Conference will be at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington – June 17-23.

In a moment of perhaps temporary insanity, our little guild decided to make something really nice for the “goodie bags” they hand out to conference attendees. We decided to weave earring hangers with an arrowleaf balsomroot motif, that being the signature flower of the Methow Valley.

arrowleaf balsamroot

We committed to ANWG last fall to make 400 of these, and they have to be done and sent off by April 20th. Since then enrollment at the conference has exceeded expectations, being past 500 now I believe. However, we do the best we can.

We have done 430 of them! And that’s with only maybe 10-12 people really working on it. Besides warping and weaving, we must wash and finish them, serge them apart and sew a hem for the dowels, cut and sand the dowels for the hangers, make cording out of brown yarn for the hangers, and finally we will roll them up and put an informational wrapper around each one.

They are all a little different

Big pile of finished hangers

47 of them hanging to dry in my shower

I personally have woven more than 100 of these over the last 2 months. Most of the weaving was done at the guild room on a Baby Wolf devoted to the project. Fortunately, one of our members has been a production weaver for decades, has a big warping reel, and was able to put 30-yard warps onto the loom for us as we went along.

Another member designed the wrapper:

I think that it’s pretty cool that our little guild pulled this off – and so ready for it to be done and over with!

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Irons in the Fire

Posted in family & friends, knitting, Methow Valley, weaving on March 9, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I have had many things going at once lately, but it feels good to be moving projects forward and also spending time with friends. I love the idiomatic phrase, as defined on Wiktionary:

Etymology

Describing a blacksmith working on several pieces at the same time.

Noun

irons in the fire

tasks in progress.

Usage notes

May be used with a positive connotation, e.g. “have other irons in the fire” (other projects are available if this one fails), or with a negative connotation, e.g. “too many irons in the fire” (overwhelmed by having too many tasks).

Weaving

Several weeks ago I put a warp on my “Baby Mac” portable workshop loom to try out an idea for placemats.

The draft is based on Bronson lace, believe it or not, and came out of an older issue of Handwoven magazine. I used 8/4 cotton carpet warp for the warp, and also for the hems and the tabby weft between shots of fabric strips. The fun came with trying out a variety of fabrics to see what worked and what was less successful. Also, I finished my placemat for our guild’s challenge project, which is due in April – we exchanged mugs or tea cups, and the challenge was to weave a placemat or set of coasters inspired by the mug you drew (which will then be given to the owner of the mug).

Here are some of the finished mats – they shrank up to 20% in length after washing and drying!

cotton quilting fabric in 1″ strips

heavy cotton drapery fabric in 1″ strips – hard to fold!

heavy fabric, may have been tencel not cotton – a pain to work with

an old cotton sheet in 3/4″ strips, good thickness and pattern

I will be doing more of these but may move the project onto my full size loom at the guild meeting room.

Knitting

I needed a simple carry-around or car knitting project, and settled on the Shawl Collared Cowl by Alana Dakos of Never Not Knitting. Actually I have knit two of these now. The first is softer and more comfortable and my favorite – I can wear it over a long sleeve T like a scarf – but the Icelandic one would be great on a cold winter day tucked inside the neck of a coat.

using Ella Rae “Kamelsoft” 75% merino/25% camel

using Tongue River Farm Icelandic from very old stash!

Also finished a sweater I have had underway for a couple of months: Bedford by Michelle Wang (also found in Brooklyn Tweed Fall 2011 collection). I used Cornelia Tuttle Hamilton “Heaven’s Hand Wool Classic” in the dark cherry colorway. I love, love, love this sweater, it is so comfortable and “just right”.

Socializing

We had out of town guests for 4 nights last weekend, and as they are very self-sufficient (having lived in the valley previously) it was an enjoyable and relaxing time. The weather was mixed – cold and foggy some days, gloriously sunny others – and we got out for some nice walks. Spring is definitely around the corner, although there is still plenty of snow on the ground here.

Last week there was the monthly Methow Conservancy First Tuesday program at the Twisp River Pub. The place was packed, maybe 200 people! And they were serving a buffet dinner beforehand- it was kind of a mad house. Anyway we lucked out and found a place to sit with friends, and had a great time. The speaker was David Moskowitz, who has just come out with a new book called Wolves in the Land of Salmon (the land of salmon being the greater Pacific Northwest). Fabulous photography.

Other People’s Knitting Dept

One of the women who took my beaded cuff class has really taken off with it. Mostly, she is coming up with her own pattern charts now. Thought I would share some pictures of her cuffs, as seen at our weekly Thursday evening knitting get-together:

with a thumbhole!

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Two Minutes of Fame

Posted in Methow Valley, weaving on February 8, 2013| 3 Comments »

Last weekend I got a call from a young man who is a videographer for the Methow Grist, the local online magazine produced by Methownet.com, an internet service provider in Winthrop. I have woven rugs for one of the owners there, and she suggested he come by to film me weaving in my studio. He has been producing a series of videos he calls “Gristisodes – Slices of Methow Life”.

So I somewhat nervously agreed, and he came by Monday morning and filmed and interviewed me. I told him about our guild, Methow Valley Spinners & Weavers, and suggested he might want to come to the weekly meeting on Thursday and see what the other weavers were up to. So he did, and here are a few pictures from that:

We were in the middle of a demonstration of different ways to prepare fabric strips for weaving rugs, placemats, etc.

Steven filming various guild members working on their weaving projects at the guild room:

Lill working on a beautiful, vividly colored blanket

Lillie weaving silk cloth with a butterfly pattern, to be made into a jacket

Cathie weaving a red scarf

Christina working on our guild project to make 400 earring hangers for the conference in June

Christina working on our guild project to make 400 earring hangers for “goodie bags” at the conference in June

Susan cutting cloth strips for a rug

The Gristisode just went up this morning and also features the local roller derby team, and ping-pong down at the Carlton General Store.

Gristisode Five – weaving, roller derby and ping-pong!

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Denim & Diamonds

Posted in Methow Valley, weaving on December 13, 2012| 2 Comments »

Last week I turned my attention to making two items I had promised to the Confluence Gallery in Twisp for the silent auction at their December 8th fundraising event. This year it was called “Black Tie: Denim & Diamonds” which gave folks a chance to dress up (or down) for the evening. I actually didn’t attend, as I was headed to Seattle that day for a get-together with friends and various errands – but Rick went and he said it was well attended and a lot of fun.

I was asked for a denim rug for the auction. Well, that meant I had to put rug warp on the big loom! I usually put about 50 yards on the sectional warping beam, enough for at least 30 rugs. This time I remembered to try an idea I had seen on the Macomber Looms and Me blog (it’s also in her PDF manual that you can buy and download from her blog). This is to use short sections of 1/4″ plastic tubing to “fence off” the sections on either side of the one you are winding, so the threads can’t jump the tracks, as it were. The original tipster said they bought the tubing at a pet store (used for aquariums). I got mine in the plumbing section of our local hardware store. For about 50 cents it solved all my problems with having to watch the section-winding like a hawk to make sure the threads didn’t get into an adjacent section. I needed 8 pieces of tubing, each about 4-5″ long, so I could place two on each fin of the beam on either side of the section being wound.

I still have several boxes of pre-washed denim strips that came with the loom, which I purchased from a woman in the valley in 2007. I pulled out 6 shades of denim, from white through pale blue to dark blue, then black and charcoal, and sewed them in sequence. This produced the rug below:

Then I turned my attention to finishing the polychrome summer & winter scarves that have been “underway” for months on my Baby Mac (Macomber model CP portable loom). I had put on a warp in shades of blue and it was perfect for the Denim & Diamonds theme. There was enough warp for 3 scarves and I wanted to finish them all if possible, rather than cut one off and then re-tie. I had finished the first scarf quite a while ago and was partway through the second one. So I did get them all woven, but only finished the fringes and washed/pressed this one, to have it ready for the Confluence event:

I really love the colors in this one, and wove a second one like it that I am planning to keep!

Also finished one more Mosaic Mojo Hat:

handpaint Blue Face Leicester held with Kidsilk Haze, plus charcoal Cascade 220

I am now taking a rest on these and actually <gasp> KNITTING SOMETHING ELSE.

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Scenes from the Road

Posted in Methow Valley on September 4, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I am home again – arrived here Friday late afternoon, 2800+ miles and 5 days of driving later. We saw a lot of beautiful country – it was like watching a slowly unfolding movie as we passed from state to state.

We had one layover day in Lancaster, PA before picking up the car and heading west. We were staying at a lovely B&B in Lancaster, the King’s Cottage B&B. Our hostesses were welcoming and informative, the breakfasts were healthy yet gourmet quality – in all, “elegant but casual” as advertised. Also a big “shout out” to Janis and Ann – I lost an earring but didn’t realize it until almost home, and they found it and are sending it to me!

We had a loaner car from the dealership so were able to explore the surrounding countryside that Sunday. It being Sunday, most businesses were closed, including Amish crafts etc. But we still enjoyed the sights and the lovely countryside.

Beautiful farmlands around Lancaster, PA

Covered bridge on a back road

On Monday morning we picked up the car and headed for the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Actually, we followed the turnpike through multiple states until hitting I-90 west of Chicago the next day.

We spent the first night near Lake Pokagon in Angola, IN. There is a wonderful state park at the lake, with historic Potawotami Inn on the park grounds. We took the time for a walk there in the morning before driving again – the Inn would be worth a visit, or at least dinner, sometime in future.

The second night we spent with a friend in La Crosse, WI. She got a spin in the car, of course!

in La Crosse, WI

The third day was our longest one – we drove up along the west side of the Mississippi River, which was quite lovely and reminded me a little of the drive along the Columbia River Gorge. Skirted Minneapolis/St Paul and then got onto I-94 to head across Minnesota and North Dakota. Neither of us had been in North Dakota before. It was flat, but a lot greener than I expected, with farm lands and pockets of trees. We saw huge crops of sunflowers there. Made it almost to the North Dakota/Montana border and spent the night in Dickinson, ND.

On day four we drove into Montana and spent the night in Butte, MT. We had hoped to see a lot of mountain scenery, but because of multiple wildfires it was all grey and smoggy and you could hardly make out anything in the near distance, much less the far distance! The roads were more fun to drive, though (and yes, we were behaving ourselves speed-limit-wise). We had a fabulous and inexpensive Montana beef steak dinner that night in Butte.

Day 5, Friday, it was on to Idaho and Spokane, WA and the air quality did clear up and allow us to enjoy the mountain scenery a little better. From Spokane, the most direct route to the Methow Valley follows smaller state highways, which were a lot of fun to drive with little traffic (still being good about speed!) with ups and downs and curves. That Porsche has plenty of power, and really hugs the road. Because of the time zone change, we made it here by 4:30 and had time to wash the car and enjoy a salmon dinner that Rick was ready to cook for us. Sweet!

Here is a parting shot from Saturday morning, as my friend headed off on her last leg of driving to the Seattle area, over the gorgeous North Cascades Hwy (Hwy 20 from Winthrop in the Methow Valley).

Back home in the Methow!

Also this weekend was the second annual Feast of Field & Stream, a fundraising dinner for Trout Unlimited/ Washington Water Project that honors area farmers who have earned their “Salmon Safe” certification for their farming and water management practices. As with last year, it was a fabulous meal using locally sourced food & wine. We met friends there and had a perfect early-autumn evening with the moon still almost full.

Feast of Field & Stream 2012

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Major Catching Up To Do!

Posted in family & friends, Methow Valley, pets, weaving, woodworking on August 6, 2012| Leave a Comment »

I can’t believe it has been a month since my last blog post. We have had a lot of things going on, but none seemed particularly blog-worthy or picture-worthy at the time. But anyway, here’s the news from Wolf Creek.

In early July, we went over to Seattle for family birthdays (Rick’s on July 6, his sister’s on July 10). Rick’s daughter and son-in-law came up from Medford, so we had a nice long visit with them and Rick’s mom and sister. Here’s a shot from dinner at his mom’s retirement home:

Towards the end of July we were guests at a paella dinner by the Twisp River. Our friends had bid on the dinner at a charity auction last winter. It was a beautiful evening which was actually a lull between thunder and lightning storms (complete with downpours and even hail), so we lucked out:

On July 23rd, the featured-artist exhibit at the Winthrop Gallery came down and I spent a fair amount of time moving things around, rearranging the gift shop area, and bringing some of my work down to the Confluence Gallery.

Meanwhile I have kept moving new weaving projects forward. I finished off the plaited twill scarves down at the weaving guild room and finally removed that warp setup from the loom. One of the other women in the guild is going to use my loom for a 12-harness project, then I will figure out what to do on it next. At home, I set up another warp for the polychrome summer & winter series, this time in shades of blue:

On Kingston, I set up another warp for three of the collapse-weave scarves, which I just finished weaving yesterday, but they still need to be washed and finished.

The past week and a half has been taken up with the 17th annual Methow Valley Chamber Music Festival. There were 5 main concerts between July 27 and August 4, and my Dad came over from Anacortes for the whole festival. He “camped” in our front yard in his RV:

Last Thursday, my brother and sister-in-law came over from Camano Island for the last 2 concerts. We had a great 3 days together:

family dinner at Twisp River Pub

Dad & Andy hanging out on the porch

At the Thursday concert, we re-connected with old friends from Seattle (they were actually one of Rick’s very earliest woodworking clients, so we are talking 30 years ago or so). They have a cabin up Cub Creek in the Rendezvous. Well, it turns out they also know my sister-in-law Patti from a long time ago (Harriet taught and mentored one of Patti’s daughters), and Harriet was the officiant at Andy & Patti’s wedding (she was a Superior Court judge in Seattle, now retired). So on Saturday before the concert we had a wonderful picnic dinner together:

We will definitely all be doing this again next year!

Early August now. We have diggers and plumbers coming to complete the hookup of the water and sewer lines to the shop building. The water and sewer had been run over to that building at the time the house was built, but not connected. We also had them move one of the frost-free hydrants from under the breezeway to a spot behind the shop building, and dug a long trench so we can get another frost-free line out to where we plan to put the vegetable garden. This made it an interesting experience to get in and out of my studio for a few days (I had to walk a plank).

long trench to the garden area

where it all comes together

Also on the home front, Rick finished up the new vanity for our main floor bathroom. He used straight-grain fir and we are both pleased both with the new look, and the much improved storage space:

He is feeling great and back to work in the shop. First up were 3 sets of bedside tables, two of them in cherry with ebony handles (one was an order, the other he did on “spec” to put out in the galleries) – the third set he did in afromosia for us! They are gorgeous:

This is the same wood he used to make the beautiful front door for our house in Seattle (no longer our house, we sold it in 2006 to move here to the Methow Valley).

And finally, the kitties have been doing great and really seem to enjoy having company as much as we do! Juno is into everything, including this basket:

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In a World of Her Own

Posted in Methow Valley, weaving on June 9, 2012| 2 Comments »

Tonight is the artists’ reception at the Winthrop Gallery for a featured-artist exhibit, one of whom is me! This is a cooperative gallery and a couple of times a year they feature the work of 3 members in the front half of the gallery. This time, it just turned out that we were 3 women working in media other than painting and photography – most of the work on display is usually in those 2 categories.

Here is the show card:

And here are a few pictures I took last Tuesday when we set up the show.

wall-hangings and totem figures by Susannah Young

We put Susannah’s embroidered silk blouse, one of my polychrome scarves, and one of Linda’s pins on a mannequin in the front window as a collaborative display.

the collaborative display

There was also a nice article about the show in this week’s Methow Valley News: read it here

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Almost Snowed In!

Posted in home life, Methow Valley on January 25, 2012| 2 Comments »

We got at least a foot of new snow last night – way more than predicted! I need to go in to the office again today, but I am going to wait until Chuck the snowplow guy shows up to deal with our driveway. This goes way beyond using the snowblower.

Looking towards Patterson Mountain from the upstairs deck

Our "snow gauge" - Loki in the Stars

Rick's shop and my studio blanketed in snow

We saw the MVSTA trail groomer go by out in the field this morning, so the ski trails should be fabulous. Too bad we have to work! Maybe we can sneak in a ski in the late afternoon…

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Sun & Snow

Posted in Methow Valley, outdoors on January 24, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Sunday it snowed all day long and our overall snowpack is looking pretty good! The MVSTA trail groomers have been out grooming our valley’s extensive cross-county trail system every morning. Yesterday there was a break between storm systems so we headed up to Sun Mountain in the late morning for a ski outing.

Not being in the best of shape, we stuck to the lower, relatively flat trails. We started out along the edge of the beaver pond:

to the Hough Homestead:

then back along the Yellow Jacket trail, which has its ups and downs. We decided we weren’t quite ready to quit yet, so we skiied back up Little Wolf Rd to the Overland trail, which is a higher route with beautiful trees and views down to the valley.