Yesterday I visited my fellow NKS-moderator and good friend for her birthday. She organized a wool party for some friends and we had a lovely afternoon together! It takes a lot of time to reach her home by public transportation, but fortunately another woolly friend, MarvelKnits, offered to pick me up at a train station nearby. That meant I didn’t have to take the last two buses… very convenient!
We arrived and all seven cat/tea/wool ladies were now present. Our hostess took great care of us. She made delicious cake, and later also offered us some hearty treats that she had baked herself. We all oohed and aahed and enjoyed the great food and the nice company!
Did I say tea? Yes, this party could have dubbed as a high tea, now that I think of it. The birthday lady had a large assortment of quality teas, appropriately served in cat mugs! We gave her some birthday presents: spinning fibre, yellow yarn, amazing stitch markers, a cat mug… she was very happy with it all!
So was one of the cats, Suus. Well, she was mostly happy with the wrapping paper and the extra attention! With so many cat ladies in one room she could just pick and choose who would pet her or play with her. The other cat, a sweet, old, black cat named Sproet, also visited for a bit. He is blind and finds his way around the room by ear and whiskers. He’s a sweetheart and although it was a bit scary with all those strange ladies, he walked around the table, greeting us all.
Most of the ladies had brought their knitting or spinning, but I had decided to bring something else: my weaving loom! This was my first time weaving in public, and I think many of the other were a bit surprised that it was possible to create interesting things on such a small and portable loom. I explained a bit about what I was doing with the extra heddles and how that worked to some of them, and continued weaving while we chatted and laughed a lot!
I was working on my swap project (if you read the blog post from MarvelKnits you can see a little spoiler) and it is coming together now. The night before I started weaving in a different pattern, and it just didn’t work. The new pattern is much better, because now the yarns are working together.
MarvelKnits also brought a bag full of lovely silk yarns in amazing colours. Soft greens and purples, dark green, off-white, and a splash of pink. I had offered her that I would weave something for her in a swap, and we were looking at possibilities colour-wise. There are so many possibilities: you can put different colours in both warp and weft, and they meet somewhere in the fabric and work together or clash… I think we found a nice combination. The next step is deciding on a pattern.
I’m using a free weaving calculator to play with colour and pattern combinations. Last night when I got home I started trying things out after dinner. Here’s a sampler that I came up with. The final project will probably be different, I just wanted to see what the colours would do when they would meet, and what kind of patterns were possible.
At the top you see the way the heddles would be threaded, and at the right you can see the lifting sequence. I was playing a bit with adding some pink and white in some places. There is plenty of the light green yarn for the warp, but there probably isn’t enough dark green for the weft, so I need to add bits of other colours there. I also wanted to see what would happen if I combined a bit of the purple with the light green in the warp. The sampler is a bit busy, but you can see that the combinations are almost endless…
But first I have to finish the swap project. Until then I’ll play with the simulator.
