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 !
A lovely garnet red/black handwoven coat, in a Celtic knotwork pattern of my own devising. Still in progress.
I expect this project to take me a year or so to complete – I intend not only to design and weave the fabric, but also to design and sew the dress myself, using couture sewing methods. 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!
May I present to you the result of much work this afternoon?
plaster mold for my dress forms
I wish I had photos of the intermediate stages, but here’s what’s been happening the past few days:
And voila! the sculpture you see above.
Tomorrow I’ll start pouring the foam. This is 3-pound foam, so one cubic foot weighs 3 pounds. I have a two-gallon kit of foam, which should be plenty for two dress forms. I probably won’t finish pouring foam until Saturday, though – you have to do the stuff in layers – and after that, I’ll remove it from the plaster mold (hopefully not damaging it too much in the process), sand/rasp down the dress form to the correct measurements, and mount it on the stand. There are actually more steps, but I’m omitting them for the sake of brevity…I expect this project to take up a good chunk of the weekend.
Wedding-dress-wise, I’ve sewn together and finished all the seams of the second lining. Tomorrow morning and/or Saturday, I’m going to sew on the pearls, and then on Sunday I’m going off to Sharon’s again, so we can work on dress and coat together.
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.
These are really cool. (No, really.) The colored stripes and moire patterns in these socks are achieved using very precise skeining and dyeing technique – carefully space-dyed (handpainted) yarn. I call them “ikat socks” because they look a bit like ikat (warp-painted) fabric.
