Here I have shared some of my many interests - fiber arts, adventure travel, cycling, and crafts. I hope you enjoy perusing the site! If you are curious about anything, drop me a line at !
This wedding ensemble took one year and over 1000 hours of work to complete. I not only designed and wove the fabric, but also designed and sewed the dress myself, with help from Sharon Bell. There are three fabrics in this wedding ensemble – an eternity knot pattern, a Chinese double-happiness character pattern (the double-happiness character signifies a happy marriage), and a three-strand Celtic braid pattern. Together they symbolize a wish for eternal happiness in marriage!
The Handwoven Magazine “Not Just for Socks” reader challenge inspired this shawl, a collapse weave in two different sock yarns. I was rummaging through my stash of sock yarns for the contest, and found some Cascade Fixation, an elastic sock yarn with a crinkled appearance that reminded me of cooled lava. This, in turn, brought to mind my trip to Hawaii and the beautiful rivulets of fire in the lava flows there. So I set out to recreate the beauty of flowing lava, fiery ruffles against crinkly black stone, flecked with fire.
A lovely garnet red/black handwoven coat, in a Celtic knotwork pattern of my own devising. Still in progress.
Alice’s comment (on her blog) that she had recently reached her 1,000th blog post got me curious about mine. So I looked in my Dashboard, and discovered that I had just passed 1,500! But then, I have been blogging nearly eight years, since October 8, 2002. On that fateful day, I left home and started my 6-month trek through Southeast Asia, blogging as I went.
Then I took a look at Google Analytics, which I set up around the same time I migrated my website. To my surprise, in just 11 months, I’ve had 34,485 visitors from 164 countries, and served up over 134,707 pages. At this rate, I should have nearly 150,000 “hits” this year! That was a huge surprise.
Anyway, I did some fiddling and added the NeoCounter widget that Sandra Rude has on her blog, so now you, too, can see where people are coming from.
Creatively speaking, I’ve been booked in the evenings, so not much has happened except a little bit of fiddling with the peacock-feather draft. I lengthened the end of the feather so there’s not as much overlap, and I think it looks much nicer now:
peacock feather design, old version
peacock feather design, new version
In the old version there was a blobby bit, a solid green area that ran between the feathers and obscured the feathery bits at the top of each feather. So I lengthened the shaft of the feather and made it narrower, to the point where the shaft blended neatly with the top of the next feather.
Today I plan to test-weave the revised version of the feather pattern. Saturday the actual threads I’m using should arrive, and then I’ll do one more test-weave (to see if I like the colors), and then launch into the actual shawl.
