Hey! Hi!

I've been blogging over at the official Folk School blog this week. Click on over to hear from me & Charley!

Almost a quilt...

Remember this quilt-in-progress from the end of January? It has a pretty cool story to go along with it. Basically, I was working as fast as I could to get the front and back pieced together by the end of the class, but i had no idea what I was going to have to do to it next to turn it into an actual quilt. I was sort of timidly asking the ladies in class, "so how in the world does this whole thing come together?" and they were telling me that I'd pretty much need to either send it off to be quilted (which I had just learned was different from piecing) or that I'd need to purchase a fancy machine to do all the quilting myself. (Or do it by hand, at home, and have the quilt done about when I'd be expecting grandchildren. My own grandchildren.)

To my utter surprise, on the second to last day a woman who had been sitting on the opposite side of the classroom, far from my plight, came over and said that she was a professional quilter, and that as a wedding present she would like to take my front and back and quilt them for me. For free. And she would provide the batting. And it would be done before I left the Folk School. Hello, amazing!

She proved true to her word and a great quilter as well. I've had the quilt back for almost a month now, and have been working on it just here and there. I just finished hand stitching the binding last night. I'm going to gently wash it in the machine to soften it up a bit, and then I'll post the big reveal! Stay tuned!

Spinning and Dyeing

I wanted to show you the amazing colors we were able to get out of various vegetable matter last week in Martha Owen's "Sheep to Shawl" class.


(results of our dyestuffs, from the top, going clockwise: lichens, onion skins, osage orange sawdust, copper pipe in ammonia, indigo over osage, indigo over onion skin, straight indigo, indigo over cochineal, plain old cochineal, madder, walnut shells. The center is what we started with.)

I've been to various Sheep to Shawl competitions, just as a bystander, and had a general idea of the order of things before I signed up for this class. What I really wanted to get out of it was spinning experience, and luckily for me, that was one of the main focuses. Because it's still 6 weeks too early to shear here, we used several fleeces that Martha had lying around. We learned how to wash raw fleece, and pick out all the bits of hay and poop and separate the curls into fluff, and wash it again, and pick it and dry it again, and then we learned how to card and/or comb and when its appropriate to do one method as opposed to the other. Finally, I understand worsted vs. woolen spun! (Click here to see the Folk School's Official Blog posting on last week's Sheep to Shawl class.)

Here's everything I spun last week:







I'm super proud!

One thing I thought was incredibly useful was the dyepots' flexibility as far as being used more than once. For example, check out this cochineal: the dark fuchsia was from the first bath, and then we put more wool into the spent pot and soaked up the weaker dye, and behold! Pale pink! (which I immediately threw into an indigo pot, because, you know, pink. Ugh.)


And here's lichen, first and second go 'round:

I think those two would be really pretty spun together.

Also fun is playing with different dyepots for overdying purposes:

Beth brought us two bags of osage shavings from her woodturning class, and they yielded this neon YELLOW! shade that was too bright for all of us (save Elizabeth, who totally dug it). When you toss it into the indigo pot, you get green. Cool!

All in all, I loved spinning. I love that you can turn a giant pile of fluff into useable yarn, and that (in theory) you have so much control over what kind of yarn you're making. However, I do not want to be a hobby harlot, and I will forego a spinning wheel until I've at least gotten the new off of my rigid heddle loom (which at this rate, will take another three Christmases). But it's nice to know that I know how to spin, and that perhaps when I'm hanging around someone else's wheel I could use it.

Fell in love with a book

Martha brought a bunch of yarny books with her to spinning wheel class last week, and I feel in love at once and completely with this book, A Symphony for the Sheep.






With Mary Azarian illustrations (swoon!) and an Irish author, how can you go wrong? I ordered it at once from Amazon (there are more! Go now!), and soon it shall be mine. Look out, future children, for I shall be reading it to you for decades to come.

Time flies when you're making beads, spinning yarn, and contra dancing...

... I am so satisfied with my life lately. Sure, I haven't yet made myself get fit or wealthy, but I'm loving the fact that Spring is inevitable and that I'm this close to having successfully completed one of the most intense (and magical) periods of my life so far. Oh, the whole truth of the hosting experience won't be evident until some time has past, but I already know that I feel so full from being here. Want to see what I've been up to?

Click on over to my Flickr page.

Last weekend Niki, Charlotte, Robin, Jackie and I drove to Charlotte for Gypsy Meltdown, an amazing contra dance weekend. It was sunny and warm (!) and we packed a picnic, hoops, and our dancing shoes. The whole weekend was spent dancing ourselves into sweaty, blissful grinning piles of tiredness. The people were fantastic, I made new friends, got to dance in my favorite ways, taught some hooping in the sun, and topped it all off with late night crashing at my Mom & Step-dad's house (including 2am soaks in the wee hot tub). Ahhh!



Kenny has agreed with me that a perfect birthday weekend could include another contra weekend, so we are officially going to Bug Stomp in Charleston! Not only will I get to relive the amazingness of this past weekend, but I'll have my sweetheart with me as well, and we get to stay with our lovely friend Lilla, whose home I have not yet seen. Oh, and it's Charleston. In April. How good can life get?!

So now I'm back, and it's cold and snowing, and I have a million things I'd like to do this week (my last week of hosting). Blogging my past few classes is one of them.

Let the Banjar-makin' begin!

What have I gotten myself into?


Way back last summer, before I even arrived at the Folk School, I got to pick out my three "silver bullet" classes and send them in to Kate, our registrar, who at that point I didn't even know. What must she have thought of me, this mysterious soon-to-be-host who picked out glass beads, a sheep to shawl class, and make your own fretless mountain banjo from an honest to god freshly skinned groundhog hide?

I'm so lucky to be marrying a man who can play just about any instrument he chooses to pick up, and even luckier that one of his favorites to pick up is the banjo. My grandpa played banjo, loudly, crowing out "You Are My Sunshine" to the front porches of his upstate New York neighborhood. My step-Dad rocked the banjo all through college in a South Carolina bluegrass band, and now he drives long distances to meet back up with those same guys and have jam weekends. A banjo being played clawhammer style, especially on an old time tune in a minor key, has got to be one of my favorite sounds in the world. So of course I wanted to be in John Huron's banjo making class.



The class starts tonight, and so far we've picked out our wood blanks (I chose walnut with a cherry center ring) and learned how to skin a groundhog. The closeups are on Flickr here and here, but I wanted to keep the front page of the blog relatively guts-free, so click on over if you're fascinated (I am!).

The little bit of knitting I have managed to eke out...

... amongst the quilting and the felting and the endless hand sewing going on around here, I managed to cast on for the long pined for mate of my sampler mitten, made way back in Martha Owen's Fair Isle class. (In my excitement to finish the first one in time for the student exhibit, I cast off the thumb at least a half inch too short, so technically the first one isn't done, either. But at least now there are (almost) two of them.

My week in Blacksmithing has come to an end.

When I first arrived at the Folk School I was excited about trying my hand at the forge, but then I promptly came down with a sinus infection and it seemed like a bad idea to be in the middle of a soot and smoke cloud for a week. All of a sudden months had gone by, and I realized that if I wanted to try, I'd better get in a class quick. Luckily for me there were several spots open in Susan Hutchinson's class, and she is awesome! It turns out I really, really liked being sooty all week. (I also learned that I really like operating a drill press). On the pro side of blacksmithing: I made so many things that I've wanted for a long time, and also my grey work pants and I have bonded. On the con side: I see so much coal when I blow my nose that I wonder if I'll end up with black lung. Also, I burned my hand a few times, but that's no big deal.

Here's my end-of-the-week haul!

We all made a sweet pair of barbecue skewers as our 1st night intro project:



Then I moved on to racks of hooks. This was my main goal in taking the class. My FMIL (future mother-in-law) Patty has an awesome iron rack of hooks on which all her necklaces are hung. I'll fess up to having coveted it for years. Rather than continue to stroke it every Thanksgiving break, I made my own, with twelve hooks on it. (In the photo at the top of this entry, it's the curvy rack with, well, the twelve hooks). Then I made a mini version for our keys, to be hung near the front door. Here's the key rack, ready for assembly:


And here it is, all neatly put together and oiled.

(excuse the iPhone pic).

A detail that I really like from the jewelry rack:


Here's the next rack I made, with bigger hooks, intended for our coffee cups and to be hung near the kettle.

I really love that it curves out from the wall. I can't wait to see what our mugs look like on it!

I ended up making another rack late last night, because I had so many extra hooks left over. (I also really liked making hooks. Who doesn't?) The whole week I had been hammering my steel by hand, as well as building a coal-burning fire in my forge by hand. Susan and a few of the more experienced students in class had fired up a propane forge and were also using a gigantic, scary-looking hammering machine (I'm sorry I don't know what it actually is called), and they were getting their work done super fast. So I tried making this last rack in the propane forge and hammering it with the hydraulic machine. Here's the difference:

(hand hammered is on the left, machined is on the right).

One of the less obvious benefits to using the propane forge is that no matter how long you keep your steel in the fire, it will not burn. Somehow the forge only gets hot enough to make your piece glow, but it will never spark (bad) or burn (very very bad). Huh. So yeah, there are some burn marks on all my other pieces. But I also really like the hammer marks that a human makes. They're both good methods, and I'm glad I learned both.

The very last project I completed was a pair of brackets for a shelf. This was tough because a) it was the biggest steel I had used and b) I needed them to match almost perfectly. Here they are, in progress and then at the exhibit:



So, any blacksmith who is reading this has probably already said to themselves, "oh, she totally cheated. Those (small) hooks are horseshoe nails!" And it is true. For the small hooks that I used on three of the racks, I used horseshoe nails instead of cutting round or square stock (long bars of metal). This, I have heard, is blacksmith cheating. However, my racks are so pleasing that I do not mind at all having "cheated." I mean, I still had to heat them correctly and pound out the heads and curl the tails and shape the hooks! And drill the holes (squee!). It was a lot of work for a beginner.

(Horseshoe nail as god intended, and after being manipulated by a cheating cheater).

All in all I'm super glad I got to take blacksmithing, and am glad I took it from Susan. By the end of the week I was starting to see how addicting it could get. I do miss my nice soft yarns, though. And fabric. It's hard to burn yourself on yarn.

Boots in progress

Remember these boots from last month? Here's a WIP shot of how they're coming along...



Eventually, the buttons are going to run all the way up the outside of each boot. It's an awful lot of hand sewing, and I have so many other things to work on that I'm rarely motivated to sit down with needle and thread and a lap full of wool. But I guess I'd better finish them soon, or it'll be way too warm to wear them!

Did I tell you about crochet class?

In high school, I definitely thought crochet kicked knitting's butt. I made my brother Aaron a series of ill-fitting crocheted beanies (too thick, too short, rather like a puffy yarmulke) and my Aunt Glo and rather terrifying scarf that I'd rather not even describe here. Then college hit and my dorm buddies reminded me how to execute a few basic knitting skills, and my costume teacher Martha lent me a set of double points and I never looked back. My crochet skills were only the tiniest bit revived when I co-taught the Montessori crafts camp with Cindy, a famous crocheter (I just love those two words together).

So when I had the chance to take a crochet class aimed partly at knitters who wanted to branch out, I was very excited. Deb, our teacher, had a slew of project choices for us, each of which would help us get the hang of certain skills. Our first project that we all did together was a felted box. (Hey, all this time I've been swearing that Lamb's Pride is the best basic worsted weight yarn for felting, and it turns out, it's actually Cascade 220. Huh!)


After boxes, we branched out into washcloths (mine is a shell stitch):


and granny squares (I didn't spend much time on mine because I want to do one of those amazingly humongous granny square blankets made with some yarn that has long color repeats, like Noro or Mini Mochi or Tie-Dye).


Then I went stash diving and came up with the perfect half-skein of gorgeous Brooks' Farm Primero, 100% kid mohair, that Meg sold me at the yarn swap last year. This was the perfect project: done by the end of the class, used up almost exactly the amount of yarn that I had, required no counting or pre-planning. Done. I love it!