I mentioned back in May that I had been working on scarves
for the Geelong Scarf Festival but that they had to stay under wraps for a
while. Once I sent the 3 scarves off, life got
busy and I forgot about them until I went to the post office this morning and
found a nice cheque from the Festival as all three had sold. It seems as though my work appeals to the
patrons of this Festival as I’ve sold 10
of the 11 scarves I’ve entered over the past 3 years.
I documented this year’s scarves as I made them but wanted
to share some of the details here. This
year’s theme was ‘Galaxies’ and I’ve just heard that the theme for 2018 is
‘Life on the Land’, thank goodness they choose nice broad themes that can be
interpreted many ways.
First up was a chenille number. I’d had a skein of random dyed mock chenille
for years and I could just see a brilliant milky way under a velvety black
outback sky. I planned the warp
carefully as I only had one cone of the black chenille. I wanted to space the contrast threads
further out at the edges and more densely in the middle. I calculated very carefully and ended up with
20 threads more than I had planned. I
threaded it according to my plan and realised that if you warp alternate dark
and light threads – you get stripes, not stars.
I had to undo what I’d done and put the lease sticks back in. That’s actually harder than you might think
if there’s no-one round to help, but with heavy books on the treadles I managed
to get the lease sticks back in and threaded it again, this time with an even
number of dark threads between the light ones to give offset dots and some
illusion of stars rather than the previously mentioned stripes.
For my next effort I decided to recycle some silk fabric
from a window display at work. At first
glance it appeared to be an all over print and even as I seamed the edges
together so it would hang well as a backdrop, I failed to notice that it was actually a border print. Sitting at the front desk, contemplating the join on the back of it one day, I realised that it
was in fact a border print.
On other fronts there has been good progress with the small shirts and I've turned the heel on the second of the Catalina socks so it's been a reasonably productive week