Random Acts of Color
Devoted to Weaving and the Fiber Arts
Thursday, February 15, 2024
We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties. Please Stand By.*
Monday, December 11, 2023
My Gift to You: a Free Cowl Pattern in Echo on Four Shafts
My gift to you this season: A free pattern (see below) for a handwoven cotton cowl in an Echo/Crackle design* on four shafts. No matter what holiday you celebrate this winter -- and even if you don't celebrate any holiday at all -- you have my endless thanks for following this blog and my work, for being a part of the larger weaving community that means so much to me and to all of us.
So what are we looking at? A pattern that calls for less than a yard of woven fabric and takes up less than 12" weaving width on your loom. To create the cowl, the fabric is sewn into a circle using a flat-felled seam on your sewing machine or by hand.
Threading:
Sunday, November 19, 2023
What to Do About Fraying Selvages...
A brief intro here: I like to use lots of photos in my blog posts, because weaving is such a visual medium.
But this month's topic doesn't really require photos, because we can all visualize the problem -- and who wants to see a photo of a fraying selvage, anyway?
So with that out of the way, let us begin with my first text-only blog post ;o)
A weaving friend from the Potomac (MD) Fiber Arts Guild wrote me recently about a problem she was having with fraying selvages -- a problem that most of us are all too familiar with. What follows is my reply. I welcome comments from anyone and everyone who has any other pointers!
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Saturday, October 21, 2023
'Weaving Outside the Box' with Katherine Luhring of Lunatic Fringe Yarns
This month I'd like to share an essay by "Katzy" (pronounced "KAHtzee") Luhring, one of the managers at Lunatic Fringe Yarns. Some background: Over the summer, I taught "Weaving Outside the Box: 12 Projects for Creating Dimensional Cloth" at the Intermountain Weavers Conference in Logan, Utah, a workshop based on my book of the same name. We were lucky to have Katzy in our class, as she brought a lot of knowledge and information about some of the special yarns that are sold by Lunatic Fringe.
Here's a post she wrote for the Lunatic Fringe blog, starting with an introductory paragraph about her weaving adventures. Thank you, Katzy!
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We Lunatics have gone to a lot of conferences over the 30-plus years that we have been in business. However, it isn’t very often that we give ourselves the time to participate in the classes offered at the conferences. This year at IWC in Logan Utah, we sprang our fearless leader, Katzy, from booth duty so she could take Denise Kovnat’s dimensional-cloth workshop. Let her tell you about a few of the wonderful things she learned along the way.
By Katzy Luhring
Denise Kovnat’s dimensional-cloth workshop at IWC was a fabulous opportunity to experiment with interesting yarns and learn some new things! Denise asked all the class participants to choose a project from her book, "Weaving Outside the Box, 12 Projects for Creating Dimensional Cloth." I chose project #1, the Deflected-Doubleweave Scarf on four shafts. To be perfectly honest, I chose it because the project didn’t have too many ends, it used 10/2 mercerized cotton yarns, and it would fit on the 4-shaft Wolf Pup Loom that we had room to take with us to Logan. Seemed like a perfect fit all the way around!
Saturday, September 23, 2023
Join Me for a 'Thread Talk' on October 5
Above is my most recent post on Facebook, promoting a 10-minute "Thread Talk" I'll be giving during Spinning and Weaving Week.
It's a wonderful opportunity for me to talk about craft, why we humans have always been makers, and how inspiration can come to us like a bolt out of the blue -- even to the point where we don't know how it happened or where it came from.
My talk is based on a longer presentation I've given at guilds and conferences, looking at craft around the globe and throughout history. The discussion reaches as far back as the cave paintings of Chauvet, France, discovered in 1994, which are thought to be around 33,000 years old. Drawn in charcoal on stone, these images were created at a time when Neanderthals still walked the earth.
Saturday, August 19, 2023
New Zoom Workshop Beginning October 14: 'Weaving Outside the Box: 12 Projects for Creating Dimensional Cloth'
Based on my book of the same name, this workshop is being offered for the first time online -- thanks to MAFA, the Mid-Atlantic Fiber Association, which is offering Zoom workshops this fall for weavers near and far.
For three Saturdays in October, you'll weave a project of your choice from the book, on 4, 6, 8, 12, or 16 shafts. The photo above, woven on 4 shafts, is one of the projects you can choose from.
Here's the link to register: https://www.lessonface.com/apply/Weaving-Outside-Box-12-Projects-Creating-Dimensional-Cloth
And here are photos of a few more of the projects you can weave at home, on your own time.
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
Here's the News from NEWS
Last week I taught at the New England Weavers Seminar -- well known as NEWS -- in Worcester, Massachusetts. Not only was it run very well (right down to the excellent IPA I had at the dinner for jurors and NEWS committee members), but I had a great time teaching my workshop, "One Warp, Many Structures: Explorations in Extended Parallel Threading."
Everybody was enthusiastic and their samples showed it -- as you can see from the 12-shaft samples above, woven in Jin (bottom) and Shadow Weave (top) by Diana Vaughan.
Diana was one of the conference organizers (forgive me that I can't recall her specific title) and the entire volunteer team did a terrific job in planning and running this big event, which may be the largest of the regional conferences in the U.S. (I don't have any research to back this up, just hearsay and a glance at the long list of attendees.)
I figure that, since weaving is such a visual craft, the best way for me to describe the workshop is to show it in photos. Unfortunately, I took pictures only at the end of the workshop on Sunday, so Amy Somerstein had already packed up her loom and left -- leaving me with no images of her beautiful work! But I think I got images of everyone else and if I didn't, my apologies.
Mayine Yu (who goes by Lynn) of Brooklyn, NY, also wove the "Falling Stars" pattern.
Christine Ross at work on her Doubleweave sample of "Falling Stars." |
We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties. Please Stand By.*
*Warning: This post is just partly about fiber. Remember those test patterns on your old black and white TV? They were typically accompanied...
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Last Saturday at the Weaving and Fiber Arts Center, I taught a class on "Getting the Blues: Natural Dyeing with Indigo and Woad."...
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How do you weave a countless number of structures on one warp? With an extended parallel threading, of course! This particular techniq...