So its been awhile, I had made that promise to myself about blogging more often, and then my life got crazy and I did not know how to talk about it. In the end the place I have worked for a long time, and felt like was a big part of me, closed. It was a small business and the owner got tired and just wanted to be done, it wasn’t financial which is good. But I have been sad and the process of closing was exhausting mentally and physically, it felt like a long goodbye with old friends. But on the flip side while I look for something new I can get a bit more studio time in and catch up on a lot of work.

    
     I am staying positive about all of this, before I found out about my losing my job I was offered a spinning wheel at a great price and I am so glad I bought it. I haven’t named her yet but her style name is Elizabeth and so for now its been lizzy...... I am in love.

So here she is....................

 

    

 

And this is what I spun on her for the first project it is an alpaca with sari silk bits blended in. Did I say how much I love my new wheel, this yarn was so easy and fun to spin.

I am also trying to get back to weaving I have a half threaded loom that has been siting from before Christmas. So back at it I hope to get everything threaded and get to work this week. The problem is I never do short warps, and this is a long one. It will be good to be weaving again. I am also in need of updateing my etsy shop which can be found here https://www.etsy.com/shop/NODesignsTextiles . Check it out and let me know what you think.

So here is to change, which is painful but good.

Little Things

Ok here we are at the end of the year, and one of my resolutions is to post to the blog more often. I am saying twice a month but I am hoping for much more. Life gets crazy and sometimes I have to reset and start again. So today is reset day, and I am adding another resolution to the list while I am at it. I am going to try to slow down and enjoy the little things a lot more. I have a feeling these things are going to come from my home, my studio work and my yard. I do not think I have shared this here before but I have chickens we started with a small number and what we have is a coop for 20-30 with 5 hens in it. They can entertain me for hours, so I am sharing a photo today that made me smile. I had a hectic morning with a flat tire and a few hours at the repair place followed by some more errands. I came home and let the dogs out and walked to the coop and what did I find 4 big brown eggs waiting for me.






On the walk back to the house I saw this it made me smile again, the fresh snow was melting and raining off the tree above the fresh snow on the ground. The pattern made me think of silk dyed with kamosage knots a shibori technique. I think this photo may end up printed out and hanging in the studio I see great potential in it for what I am not sure yet.

I am looking at the new year with a great amount of hope, hope that I will find more studio time, hope that I will find more family time and hope that things will go smoothly and that I will notice the little things more and more.

So if you want to follow me on facebook you can find me at http://www.facebook.com/pages/NODesigns


or check out my etsy store at
http://www.etsy.com/shop/NODesignsTextiles

Nostalgia

So its been a long while, I have started new post on several occasions and never finished the writing. I million things have happened in the time I was away. I moved back to the area I grew up in, I am living in my grandmother's old house and really loving being here. I planed a wedding and got married. Through the marriage I gained a wonderful step daughter, and she is the inspiration for this blog post. I grew up being a Girl Scout and continued to be a scout through high school even earning the highest award possible in scouting the Gold Award. I am a life time member of the Girl Scouts, so anytime someone is selling cookies I am buying, and any group of scouts fundraising I am stopping to see if I can help out. But this summer we had my stepdaughter E for a week so she could go to Girl Scout day camp and nostalgia set in. I went and took pictures of her doing the closing flag ceremony on Tues, just being there and taking pictures of the flag pole, and then the ceremony made me nostalgic for the simple days I had at camp.

Then I found out they were in need of additional moms for the overnight, and I could be of help. So after work Thursday I went out to camp parked my car where we would be sleeping and walked across camp to meet the girls for the evening activities. I feel at times like I grew up at this camp, I made amazing memories there. And I was happy to be able to be at camp again and even happier to be seeing E participate in these activities. Now you could not pay me to go back in time to those ages, but I have to say that at camp I was happiest growing up.

E took this picture of us together at camp.

It is amazing that one night sleeping on a mat could get me jump started in such a way, but I have a million ideas floating in my head of projects I want to do and Ideas for fine art pieces I want to make. I have been working on a scarf that has been great fun it is the Mini Mania Scarf by Sarah Core. I have been using min skeins up like crazy and the colors just keep changing, it is a simple linen stitch but the color is what keeps me so interested. I am going to try to post once a week what I have been up to.

A Gift

I came home to the most wonderful thing yesterday, an unexpected package from a friend. I was so excited that this friend of mine Katie sent me a package that I immediately opened it, and plunged my hand in to the most wonderful soft material to pull it out and discover a note and a beautiful pair of hand knit socks. Now Katie and I have been friends for 5 or 6 years at this point, we meet through knitting and we often buy knitting and spinning related gifts for each other.

When I was leaving for Graduate school Katie gave me the most beautiful hand knit lace shawl. While she was knitting the shawl several of us kept telling her we each would be a worthy recipient of such an object. So when Katie gave me this beautiful object I was honored, touched and overly emotional. I wore that shawl to the first exhibition reception that I had work at in Graduate school. It has been a treasured object for the last 4 years of my life. As a knitter I know the labor that went into the shawl, and for that alone I treasure it. 

So the socks that arrived yesterday came with a note, explaining the gift. Katie said that I had gifted her this yarn several years ago and that it had been in her stash since, that she found the pattern that the yarn wanted to become and she had knit these socks. The thing is she said that “EVERY SINGLE TIME I picked u these socks to knit on they SCREAMED your name at me. I am pretty sure they were telling me that they belong on your feet. Hope they fit.” Well Katie my dear friend they fit, they fit perfectly now I just need a big important event to wear them for.

I am a knitter and I have a drawer full of hand knit socks, but these are special because someone who loves me made them for me and felt I was deserving of them. I hope that the people who receive my hand knit object feel this special. And I will wear them after all that is what they were made for. So thanks Katie, for teaching me a bit more of what I preach, that hand made is always better. I hope you all enjoy the pictures of my new socks. 

Wonderful

So this weekend something wonderful happened. I have been trying hard to decide how to weave up a group of threads, and was not successful in any of my groups. So I just had the yarn sitting in my studio wishing for the answer. It came on Sunday, I had breakfast with a few friends and one came back to my studio to see what I have been working on, I excused myself to the restroom and came back to this. And it was the perfect solution, I was just making it far to complicated and this is the simple solution.

I have been bogged down lately with lots of stuff, I helped a friend move Friday, lots of stairs and really hot. It was not fun. But she is a great friend and she did help me move earlier this summer. So the weekend was spent knitting, and reading. I have spent the day today getting ready for school to start. School starts two weeks from today and last week I got a contract to teach one fibers curse at the University of Missouri Columbia. So today has been a day of decision making and planning, along with syllabi writing and this will continue into tomorrow. Things are coming together nicely in my plans lets hope the semester goes as smoothly. 

New Yarn

Short blog post today, I finished this yarn of last night and wound it off into skeins. I am in love with this yarn, it is a wonderful range of colors. I purchased a series of Baby Cakes from loop on etsy. I did ply it with a solid black. I hope you enjoy.

I will be posting more later but I got really good news about the scarf line I have been trying to get going today. I will share more when I can. 

This weekend I had the great pleasure of teaching a 9 year old girl to spin on my spinning wheel. While Emily loved plying yarn, she had a harder time spinning singles out of roving. So what follows are the photos of her first yarn, she plied it from singles I had.

These are the skeins that Emily made. 

These are the balls of yarn she wound. I started the balls and she then wound them herself. I have placed a AA battery next to them for scale. 

She was very proud of herself and was determined to understand the process and tried to fix the problems that came up on her own. She would try to fix the problem or try to understand what went wrong before she would ask for help. It was a joy to teach this one how to use the spinning wheel. Now she has dreams of spinning the yarn for her next knitting project, as she is learning how to knit this summer as well. 

Meanwhile I have been getting a bit of my own spinning done, I have several singles spun that I am planning to ply. This is what I have done.