Disappointing

I am sorry to have been so silent lately in terms of my Felted Vessel Project, but it turns out that March is an abject failure. Well, maybe I should be quite so harsh. I did learn a lot. Isn't that usually the way though.

If you remember (it was so long ago in time, but only a few posts) March was inspired by seeing street lights at night from an airplane. This necessitated finding streets upon which to set some lights.

Google maps came to the rescue. I started in Ottawa and "flew" towards Montreal ( the one place even I recognised from the air) and stopped when I found a particularly pleasing arrangement of streets. Just as I had no idea what towns I was flying over, I have no idea of the name of the particular town that I used. A print out and a couple of enlargements later, I had my streets. I had to do a bit of creative rearrangement to make a flat town fit on a curved surface, but through diligent application of scissors, managed to come up with a pleasing arrangement.

Through trial and error, I decided that the best way to mark out my town was to lay "lights" along the streets, and some how mark them.

preparation of pattern pieces

Enter the tiny hole punch (1/8th of and inch) and dressmakers chalk.

Patterns, chalk, and holes

Next came the punching. Hundreds of little holes. To punch effectively, I put a dowel into the vice, the vessel onto the dowel, and with my trusty hammer, beat the thing into submission.

Punching holes like nobody's business

After a while, the center of the dowel would be so chewed up as to not actually work as an effective brace against which to punch, so I also had to saw the end off the dowel several times.  Actually, this was a job that I pawned off on my wonderful husband.

A pooped punch pole

I was left with a bunch of small felt plugs. Every 5 or 6 holes, I would have to stop pounding and dig the plugs out of my punch. I ended up buying a couple of more punches, which turned out to be a good thing because I damaged my first punch a short while later.

Doughnut holes

and the doughnut

Next, I started to stitch the beads in. This in itself was a trial. I had finished the punching the night before I, my mother, and my friend Sarah were scheduled to leave for a Fibre Arts Retreat in Nova Scotia. The drive was about 5 hours and I felt safe that between going and coming home, I would have enough time to stitch my vessel. Not to mention that there would be time to stitch when I was not spinning, eating, etc.

I was right. I had plenty of time to stitch. I thought that I might not have enough beads so before we left, I ran to the store and found some more gold beads. What I didn't figure was that the beads were a slightly different gold. Not much of a difference, but enough of a difference that I couldn't use them.
If I had been at home, I could have taken the beads out of my trial piece, or run back to the store to see if I could find the right gold colour. As it was, I ripped the beads out and started to stitch with the new beads. I managed to get most of the stitching finished on the drive home (thanks Mamoo for driving!)

Finished....or is it?

Beads all in, and all of the same colour, it was done, but all of the manipulation that it gone through had left it somewhat.....floppy.  No worries, I thought. I'll pop a balloon into it and give it a quick felt to firm it up a bit.

Smart eh?

Not so much. It seems that there were a few places where I had punched the holes a little too closely and with the further manipulation the holes actually ended up acting like perforations in paper.

They tore a bit.

And created holes.

@#&^%$% holes!

As you can see in the "finished?" picture, there was still snow on the ground. It was actually just a couple of days into April when this happened and I have to say that with everything else that has been happening in my life, it acted as a bit of a gumption trap. It took me a couple of weeks to decide how to proceed.

First was to decide to start on April without having satisfactorily finished March.
Second was to decided on April.
Third was to accept that I will be redoing all this work and using my hard earned knowledge of what not to do, hopefully end up with a successful piece.

But give me a couple of months to get up the gumption to punch all those holes again!

Blanket

Before Christmas I was approached by a woman who wanted me to weave her a blanket. "I've looked for a purple blanket that I liked for years and haven't found one. Would you be interested in making me one?"
Hmmm.
Commissions and I have a shady past. I haven't done a lot but with the exception of one dyeing commission, I have always had a problem with something going wrong. Sometimes my fault, but not always. Stupid calculation error when I estimated and then took the estimation as "fact". My fault indeed.
So I was hesitant to agree. But a commission is a guaranteed sale and so thinking "Guaranteed sale" I worked out a quote and presented it. She agreed and so I went ahead.
The way that I normally work out my prices is to take the total time to make the warp, dye the warp (if necessary), and warp the loom and divide the total hours by the number of projects on the loom. So if it takes me two hours to make the warp, three hours to dye the warp, and three hours to warp the loom and there are four scarves in the warp, then I average it out to 2 hours per scarf before weaving, finishing, and washing.
In this case I did the same thing. I decided that I would put on two blankets and weave the weft differently. Only that I never would have been putting on a blanket in the first place if not for the commission. There was NO possibility of selling a second blanket. I also didn't take into account the hour and a half that it took me to make the skeins into balls so that I could use the yarn. So I should have priced the blanket as a "one off". Alas, I did not.
My Bad.
And my lesson learned. So I think that from now on commission work will have a premium price that will take into account any glitches that may arise.
All was not lost though. I had decided early on that the second blanket would make a wonderful Christmas gift for my brother and his partner.
And I was right.

Waaahhhhh

The holidays are a busy time. On this we can all agree. And sometimes when we are rushing to complete our assigned tasks, we over look some small, but important details. Like that single purple sock that ended up going through the washing machine and dryer. Sigh. If I hadn't decided to knit the mittens out of the leftover yarn, I could have knit a replacement sock. But alas, that is not to be.


Merino really does shrink a lot, doesn't it?
So I have decided to knit a new pair of socks to replace the one so foolishly lost in the washing machine incident. I dug into my "yarns for sale" stash (seeing as I am done selling until the spring) and hauled out two skeins of this dark blue yarn. Maybe I'll have them finished before spring this time.

I just gotta share

a couple of things.

The first is that I finally finished spinning the cochineal silk. I have come to the conclusion that I really don't care to spin silk. It took me so long to spin because I just kept ignoring my wheel and making up excuses as to why I had no time to spin. And while I was busy, I could have been doing some spinning on it. The big clue was when I took the silk bobbin off and grabbed some black merino. Just because. And it was like entering an oasis after a trek in the desert. Speaking of oasis, there were two things that helped me finally finish this stuff. One was Whitefeather. At our spinning group, I asked her for some pointers. Pre-draft was the answer. It helped. The other was Viggo Mortensen. We watched Hidalgo last night. He kept my mind occupied while my hands were busy cursing the silk.
The silk is really different from anything else that I have yet spun. The fiber staple is really long (of course it's long, duhh, it's SILK) and it has a mind of it's own. I think that I am going to have to try some blending with the silk that I have remaining. Or maybe I'll just let it sit for a while. It's not going to go bad.

Here it is in all its glory. It's about 4 ounces and heaven knows how many yards.
Now I have to decide what to ply this stuff with. I have several options and will be performing some tests in the near future. I have several different colours of roving that I have recently dyed and I also have just plain black. The plan is to spin the merino, ply it with the silk and then knit my self a lace shawl. I've wanted to do this for a while and I have a friend nearby who is willing to give me a quick lace tutorial. The shawl that I want to knit is kiri from all tangled up. The pattern is under the e-mail sign on the top right. I love it. But I fear it too.

The socks that helped to get us lost are almost finished. I'm down to the toe on both!

The last thing that I have to share is Chris Jordan. His photos are incredible and really put the consumption of our society in perspective.

BIG learning Curve

Socks. Not a hard thing, RIGHT?
Well, I have been having quite a time with my little socks. And now I know why. The pattern has both a child's sock and an adult sock on it. So far so good. Except that they are on different pages of a paper which has been folded in three.I know that the picture is backwards, but I've tried to fix it and it doesn't want to up load properly. IN ANY CASE...... In the picture above , to the right is the general instructions, in the middle are adult socks, on the left are child socks. On the back middle section of the patten is a ruler which is very useful for measuring heel flaps. So I happily knit my heel flaps and every now and then consulted with the ruler on the back. Then came time to turn the heel and back to the pattern I go. But not the adult pattern. No! Not me! I happily flip it to the CHILD'S pattern. No wonder the bloody heel wouldn't turn! I kept on having stitches left over on one needle. So after consulting the "to make heel" section and realizing (or so I thought) that I had read the instructions wrong ( reading a 21 as 27) and had made the heel too many stitches, I took a deep breath, ripped them both back and reknit the heels. Now I find that I could have been in the home stretch if only I had been paying attention. Now we are back to ripping AGAIN and re-knitrting AGAIN. I will not make THAT mistake again. I hope. Some day I may learn.

And just to show you that I can do something right, here is some fleece that I dyed last week.

I love spring

Everything is melting. We are down to about a 4 foot snowbank in front of the house. In a couple of weeks, we will be down to grass. Brown grass from last year, but soon the little green shoots will show their heads. I looked out the window the other day and saw the heart in the snowbank. I think that my neighbour thought that I was a little bit cracked when I ran outside and started to take pictures of the snowbank.
I have to say that there is one thing that I don't really like about spring. The sand that gets tracked in daily. Here in the land of ice and snow our sidewalks get plowed, sanded, and salted after every snow storm. Storm after storm. Sand layer after sand layer. When all of the ice and snow melt, you are left with a lot of sand. Which gets tracked in to my front hall. I suppose that I could save it to put in the sand box for the babe.


And do you remember the pyrex episode ?


Well, I did it again. This time it was rice in a pot on the back burner and I meant to turn on the front burner. One burnt pot of rice later, I decided to do something permanent about my "little problem" You can see my solution above. F stands for FRONT. B stands for BACK. It has been a few weeks and this new system is working for me.

Note to Self.....

When Pyrex says " from stove top to oven" the don't really mean it.

Yesterday was one of those rare days when Bill had to be downtown at lunch. After he did his business, he stopped at Victory and picked up a few things including Chicken breasts. He lovingly brought these home, chopped and diced and poured various thing on them and left them to marinate. So (joy and bliss) when I got home from work, supper preparations had begun. I still had to cook it, but the thinking part was done. Note: "the thinking part was done". Apparently it was really finished for the evening.
I decided to steam some carrots, put rice on, and make a onions-mushrooms-red pepper concoction. Sounds good? Hmmmm.
So I put the carrots on to steam. Turn the oven on to preheat. Move the glass dish that the chicken has been marinating in to the stove so I can pop it into the oven as soon as it gets up to temp.
Have I mentioned that we got a new stove a few months ago?
On my old stove, the top dials were the back burner and the bottom dials were the front. Makes a bit of sense. Right? On the new stove the dials are reversed. You would think that by now, I would be able to get it right. But no. I apparently turned the chicken in the glass pan on to steam, while the carrots sat there cold. I heard a "plip,plip,plip" and thought "that doesn't sound right". And sure enough, there was the chicken, in the glass pan, on a red hot burner, boiling. Oops. "No worries", thought I. And I popped it into the almost up to temp oven.
So far so good. And then.....
About 5 minutes later, I heard a loud shattering sound. Followed by hissing. Picture if you will screaming Jackie running to the oven, opening the door to make sure that it really is what I think it was ( duhhh, what else could it have been?) shutting the kitchen door, opening the back shed door to let out a bit of the smoke. And then proceeded to laugh my fool ass off. Have I mentioned how cold it has been lately? Well last night was no exception. After the smoke cleared a bit, I looked back in the oven to find the chicken, high and moist, sitting on the rack, while the marinade and a whole lot of glass sat on the bottom. What to do.
Well, in the end I did what any frugal person would have done. 6 chicken breasts does not come cheap, so I washed them, checked for broken glass, put them in a stainless steal pan, and cooked them on the stove top while I cleaned out the now cooled down oven.
Thankfully when Pyrex breaks, it doesn't break into shards, but shatters into chunks. And even more thankfully, it was in a contained space. Can you imagine the mess that it could have caused? And if any of the kids had been standing around, the results could have been much different.
It was delicious, by the way. And now my oven is clean. Sort of.
Have a happy weekend. I hope the sun is shining where you are.