Weaving and Other Woolly Things

I've been  checking things off my endless list. Make buttons. There are over 150 buttons here.Weave more products to take to Fibershed's Grow Your Jeans event on October 3. This are four shawls using very soft wool from Anderson Ranch.

Deal with sheepskins. I got one batch in and one batch out. At first I got four boxes with 29 sheepskins that were not mine. Those went back to the tannery. Yesterday I got the boxes with my 30 sheepskins and I photographed them for my website (although they aren't there yet). Not artsy photos, but I  need to show the size and the color and this is how it has worked best for me. In addition I shipped off 42 more sheepskins and am keeping my fingers crossed that I get them back before December. That's a pretty big investment and I need to be able to sell them before Christmas.

Weave a blanket for a customer using her handspun yarn that she sent me last year. I hate having things hanging over my head. When I was finally ready to get to it I opened the box that I though held her wool. Nope--there was something else in that box. Then I almost panicked wondering if it was possible that her yarn had ended up out in the big yard/estate sale that I had over Labor Day. Fortunately that was not the case.

I had spent a lot of time thinking about how best to use this yarn. One worry was that using yarns that are very different is likely to result in tension issues and different elasticity in the finished piece (showing up as ruffly places where it should be smooth and flat). I'm glad that I waited to plan this blanket because one of the last emails that I had from the spinner had the word "gradient" in it. That gave me the inspiration for how to wind the warp and weave it.

I made a gradient from the darkest brown all the way to white in the warp and then I wove with the same pattern. This is double width so this photo shows only the half that goes from dark to mid-brown. The lighter half is underneath. After weaving and unfolding the blanket...

...this is what you get. This is not a very good photo but I just don't have a good place to take a photo of a full size blanket spread out. I am really pleased with this piece and am inspired to do some more like it.

One last thing. At Spinners Night Out one of the spinners said that her husband had made a discovery in his bowl of popcorn: