On Valentine's Day, Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild members Dorothy and Verna came to my house to teach a group of Sun Haven Waldorf School teachers, parents and children how to use the drop spindle.
Dorothy showed Mandy, the handicrafts teacher, how to warp the school's rigid heddle loom and how to weave with it. A fun day!
These are little bags I made as Christmas gifts for two friends and fellow dye pot stirrers. They're made completely out of plant dyed fabric and fibres. Even the wooden beads are dyed with Rooibos tea.
Going through my stash I came across some different coloured wool that I'd carded together so I spun it up and knitted a little Christmas bag.
This weekend three of us got together for a logwood dyeing party. I cooked up the logwood wood chips a couple of days previously, strained them the night before we dyed and took the liquid over to my friend's house. Before we put in the fibre we added a Tums which is supposed to help intensify the colour and the colour did immediately darken. The calcium in the Tums is a substitute for hard water which has this effect. Here are the results of our dyeing, fresh from the dye pot. The Shibori silk was done around the wooden bobbin.
At one of our Guild's stash days I picked up a small bag of soft brown fibre. When I opened it last week I found it contained lovely soft dog fur. I spun it up and had just enough to make a very small bag. I stuffed the bag with nature treasures and made a little Treasure Keeper to guard the treasures. There are many Treasure Keepers, the best known being dragons. This little Treasure Keeper is much smaller and more gentle. But just don't try to mess with her treasures...
I love making little beings and creatures. Years ago I had a powerful dream where I witnessed a group of nomadic people travelling through a snowy forest on their magnificent horses. They stopped to carry out a ceremony enacting a ritual birth. At the end of the ceremony they stood in a line and passed a doll between their legs. When the ceremony was completed an old woman, the elder of the tribe, carved a pattern in her leather saddle and coloured it in to record the enacting of this ritual birth.
The dream was very powerful and I wanted to do something to mark it and decided to make a dream bringing doll - the first little being I had made. I looked among my fabrics and found one with stars to make her gown. Amazingly, I also found some fabric with the same pattern that the woman had marked on her saddle. I made it into a dream-bringing bag and filled it with gold stars and chamomile, hops and mugwort from my garden.
After the dream I wondered why they'd passed a doll through their legs and not a real baby. It was only years later that I realized that this dream marked the beginning of a new joy in my life - making little beings and creatures. For a few of the ones I've made you can check out my Flicker set of Little Beings and Creatures.
In the summer I'm busy gardening and dyeing. But after a while my fingers start getting twitchy and I find myself fondling wool rovings. It's time to get back to my spinning wheel! I've started to spin up my natually dyed rovings, beginning with the onion skin dyed rovings I did a couple of summers ago.
I wanted to make some variegated rovings, something I'd never done before with naturally dyed materials. I loaded them onto the drum carder like this (the green is an onion skin dyed roving over-dyed with indigo).
This is what the batt looked like.
I divided the batt into a number of punis as I wanted the colour runs to be short. (If I'd wanted a striping yarn I would've done a single rolag from the whole batt).
Here's the result.
Ever since I was very young I've been drawn to things magical and have felt a deep curiosity about what lies behind and beyond the physical world around me. My imagination was rich with magical beings and creatures who lived in strange and wonderful worlds.
This magic wand in it's holder of hand-dyed, hand-spun silk and hand-painted silk lining is for small acts of magic. It's large focusing gem makes it powerful despite its small size.
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting at the car dealership sewing the lining to the knitted outside while I waited for my car to be serviced. An older gentleman - someone who looked as if he'd spent his working life doing something sensible like construction or truck driving - walked in and looked at what I was doing.
"That's pretty. What is it?"
"A holder for my magic wand."
That was a conversation stopper. He raised his eyes from the holder to me and I could see that I was being reappraised in light of this information. A bit later another older gentleman came in and we all had a very sensible conversation about the evils of black flies, deer flies and mosquitoes. I think I was redeemed.
I love making little bags out of bits of leftover handspun and scaps of cloth. This is my Summer Sunshine bag, knitted with handspun wool/kid mohair blend during the dark, rainy days of our West Coast winter.
A tooth fairy bag bought by one of our guild members for her granddaughter.
Another tooth fairy bag.
Tooth fairy bags and an amulet bag.
Little Christmas bags.
These bags are knitted with hand dyed, handspun wool. The blue one is a summer bag - the time when the sun is shining, the ocean is sparkling with light and the sky is brilliant blue. This is the time that gives our region its name. The greyish bag is for the other times of year when the sky is grey, the ocean is grey, the stones on the beach are grey. But when you look more closely you see a variety of subtle colours and the glisten of wet surfaces. Since this is the predominant weather for our region, clearly we are a glass-half-full people in calling this the Sunshine Coast!
As part of the celebration for the 25th Anniversary of our Sunshine Coast Spinners and Weavers Guild we invited internationally known art/textured yarn spinner Jayce Boggs to give a Friday night talk and an all weekend workshop. The workshop was held in one of the yurts at the wonderful Fibre Works Studio & Gallery owned by one of our very talented members Yvonne Stowell.
Jayce is an excellent teacher and took us through the mysteries of techniques such as slow coils, super coils, thick and thin and various types of core spinning. We all found the course very exciting and it opened up whole new possibilities in spinning.
Jayce brought some of her beautiful yarns to show us. Needless to say my first efforts don't look like these! However, I have the basics and it's now a matter of practice. I remember the challenges of learning how to spin and how I wondered if I'd ever learn. Then I made the commitment to sit down for an hour a day and practice. And soon I was spinning!
BaaBaa and Penelope (inseparable friends) inspect a small bag and a scarf knitted with handspun thick and thin wool. I'm having fun with this but still need more practice to get into a relaxed, steady rhythm of spinning.