It's been a while ...

... but I haven't been idle. One of the fibre groups I belong to has an exhibition at a local gallery coming up at the end of October and the theme is 'The Garden Party', a short story by New Zealand writer, Katherine Mansfield. The timing of the exhibition and the theme were chosen to coincide with the local Rhododendron festival. No doubt there will be lots of flowers amongst the exhibits by the felters, tapestry weavers, embroiderers, etc., but other than slaving over a boundweave I couldn't come up with any bright ideas as to how I could depict flowers in my weaving. So I've opted for weaving a couple of scarves in flower colours, and have ideas for two wraps which will hopefully represent phrases in the story.

So far I have Wallflower, which is my first attempt at a painted warp and the first time I've used tencel in both warp and weft. What glorious stuff it is to work with. I dyed the warp purple and bronze some time before I knew the theme of the exhibition, and it had been lying around waiting for inspiration as to a draft. The draft is from Carol Strickler's 8-shaft Pattern Book, p. 52, #219.

I took this for show and tell at a recent group meeting and much to my delight/amazement one of the members told me she just had to own it, so it'll go into the exhibition with an NFS tag.



... and Hellebore (winter rose). I adore these flowers with their wines, dusky pinks and lime greens and chose the colours from my stash of fine wool before I'd decided on how to weave them. While flipping through some old Handwovens I'd been given I came across a project using almost exactly the same colours. Try as I might I couldn't kill the plagiarist in me, so that's what I wove. However, I'm pleased with the end result as I see winter roses every time I look at it.





Cream puffs are mentioned in the story, and this is a dummy run to test a draft adapted from a Handwoven project. The warp is 110/2 wool and the weft a firmly spun, but not particularly overtwisted, wool single. I'm relatively happy with the result, but will tweak the sett in the real thing (which will of course have a cream warp) so that there's a bit more 'puff' in the finished item.

The bottom inset shows the weaving on the loom; the top a detail shot of what happens when it hits water. Note to self: adjust colours on photos before cropping and pasting them as insets - the main scarf is the accurate colour (according to my monitor).

The 4th item I plan for the exhibition will be an earthy shawl, to reflect the context of the story line which inspired the idea: "... one of those women's shawls even." Hopefully it won't be another 2 months before I get to post it here.