Alberta

I'm still in Alberta. We has a wonderful time hiking through the Rockies and made it 2,300m above see level. 

We then went to Calgary and I was able to make it to two places I wanted to go. I weaving/spinning/yarn store and a woollen mill!

Shuttleworks - here, I bought two louet spinning bobbins and a longer weaving shuttle. 

Custom Woolen Mills - on the way to Edmonton, you can take a tour around their industrial revolution era mill. They had some reallyneatprocessing equipment! I did end up buying one pound of raw Cotswold fleece too!

Now that we are in Edmonton, I wonder where else fibrey we can visit??

http://www.shuttleworks.com/ 

http://www.customwoolenmills.com/index.htm

End of summer

I finished work yesterday, which means that another school year is nearing. But first I am going to my brother's wedding in Alberta. A long day of traveling and I am sitting in a cabin at a hostel while the rest of my family sleeps. How kind of them to leave me with piece and quiet for a bit!

What is on my loom now? Well, I decided to make 3 LARGE blankets on the 60" loom.

This was taken before much was wound on. I left it in a ready-to-thread state so when I get back from my travels, I hope to be able to work on that. Fingers crossed.

E

New machine!

Summer is quickly coming to an end. How depressing. I feel like I barely had a summer at all.

But on the plus side, I have acquired a new piece of machinery - not another loom though (3 is probably enough for now).

One of the volunteers who helps a lot at work and who I've spend a decent amount of time with got a new sewing machine. I guess when her husband agreed to the purchase of the sewing machine, he told her that she needed to get rid of one of the five sewing machines she already had. Guess who was in the right place at the right time?! Me!

It has a beautiful cabinet with large fold out extensions, so there will be a lot of space for the fabric to sit and not weigh down. It needs a bit of a tune up since it hadn't been used regularly in awhile, but it's very exciting! It's a Singer Model 774.

Model 774

Lots of table space!

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More tea towels

Now I'm making a blue tea towel!

Tea towels and silk scarves

Another tea towel nearly done. Only 10 left! I don't have a lot of time to weave at work, so I'm going to start going in a bit early if I can to get it done. And I've given up for a bit on the overshot. Maybe once I'm closer to the end of the warp, I'll try to fix it.

Blue stripes

In other (great) news... I sold two hand dyed silk scarves today! That's four total over the summer. Fingers crossed that a few more sell!

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More tea towels

The loom I brought to work hasn't been seeing as much action as I would like. First it was too hot to be in the upstairs in that building, or I forgot to bring more cotton, or we were busy, or I needed a break from working and needed more than anything just to sit and do nothing.

But I finally got one towel off. These are the set of towels that I decided to try overshot with. Of course since I've never tried overshot before (and will be learning it next year in school), I was bound to make a mistake or two. My main mistake was that I didn't research what the sett should be - in other words, I didn't really do my homework. I am using 4/8 cotton and chose 12EPI as my sett. Previously, I'd used  14EPI, but I knew it needed to be a bit more spread out because I was planning on doing mostly plain weave. Little did I know, the sett for overshot needs to be even farther apart. So I did my first towel and it didn't look the greatest. It definitely looks better in the picture than in real life.

Overshot attempt #1

Believe me, it doesn't look like this in person. You can see the pattern starting to show, but with the tabby shots, it just looks too spread out in person. So I understand why the sett needs to be farther apart. 

I cut this towel off last week and might try changing reed sizes. I have a 10 reed I'm not currently using, so I feel like it would be worth it - otherwise, all 11 remaining will be completely plain weave within occasionally shot of blue thrown in there.

Oh well. I'm learning. :)

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Another Fibre weekend

I was in Fredericton this past weekend to have another spinning weekend with some girls from school.  But it was so unbelievably hot that I didn't end up actually doing much spinning. The feel of my touching the unspun fibre reminded me of going out in hot sweaty bars and women flipping their hair around and smacking you in the sweaty arm and the hair would stick there for a couple of seconds. Gross.

Photo borrowed from Jasmine

One of our (favourite) teachers, Rachel, was getting married on Saturday night, and her reception was open to the public, so we went. It was a lot of fun and the warm welcome and amount of love showed to us by the couple of teachers there was great. I'm glad we went.

The girls!

And of course hanging out with those fibre girls is always fun. And we ate well too.

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