Kitchen Towels Off the Loom

I really love these kitchen towels. They are made from thick
and thin cotton, I forget the technical name for the type of
cotton right now. There may be some problems using these as kitchen towels as there are floats. There is also some yarn carrying up the sides for 4 rows at a time which could cause problems. We'll see. But in the meantime, I'll just enjoy looking at them.

San Jose California in February 2009

I just had to post this picture which I took this morning coming in to work. I was a passenger and the car was jiggling but I have an anti-jiggling thingie on the camera so it looks pretty clear to me. It's particularly interesting with the snow behind the palm trees.

The Towels Are Off The Loom

Yay! Took them off the loom last night and they look fantastic. I zig zagged the edges and washed and dried them and ironed this morning. Tonight I will cut them apart and hem them. I want to take them to the Blacksheep weaving study group tomorrow morning, along with a couple of knitting projects I've finished. This is a new group for me and I'm looking forward to going tomorrow (like I need another monthly meeting - I already belong to 3 guilds that meet monthly. But it's always good to be around fellow weavers to get your weaving mojo going and to learn new stuff. The guild meetings don't teach anything normally, they are either sharing what you're already doing or you are listing to someone talk about their work. It will be nice to be in a group where I actually learn something for a change.

Sweet Pea Coat

I finished this coat about a week or so ago. It was really an easy knit. It is a Kate Gilbert pattern that I downloaded from Ravelry. It was knit with a double strand of worsted weight yarn. I think I used Web's Northampton, which I absolutely love. I think the pattern was 2-1/2 sts. to the inch, and a really fast knit. There was a bit of confusion around the pocket area. She had you knit a separate little pocket liner and then insert that onto one side of the knitting at the top of the pocket area. But with the help of a fellow knitter, we figured that little puzzle out. I was also offered help by Kate Gilbert herself when I emailed her, which I thought was really nice. She said there might be a bit of a delay due to the volume of emails she gets at Twist Collective but she said I could definitely get help from her. I really appreciated that, even though I didn't take her up on it.

I have the sweater soaking as I write so I can block it out. It's about 2-3" too small at the moment but I think that can be fixed with blocking. I really like the sweater though and the buttons are bone and brass which I sent for from an online resource called www.ascuteasabutton.com. They had an amazing selection of buttons to choose from.

I'm weaving - yay!

In December I bought two weaving kits from the Yarn Barn of Kansas. They are nice people and their prices are good on most things. One kit are kitchen towels and the other kit contains yarn for colorful chenille bath mats. I got the loom warped this weekend and here is the beginning of three beautiful towels. I picked the colors because I love greens and blues and cool colors. The yarn is thick and thin mercerized cotton at 12 epi. That's an end feed shuttle and seems to be working very well. I still have a bit of draw-in on each side but not too much yet. We'll see how the rest of this weaving goes. Thank you Nancy Alegria for the inspiration to weave these towels. She posted a wonderful scarf with this design on www.weavezine.com in their first issue.