What's New?

Thanks to my Santa Fe guild, Las Tejedoras Fiber Arts Guild, for sponsoring me to be a guest on the Handweavers' Guild of America series, Textiles & Tea. Catch me on November 15th at 4PM ET. That's 2PM here in the Mountain Time Zone. In case you are not familiar with the video interview series, there have been many wonderful episodes so far! Here's more information from the HGA website:

"Each week the Handweavers Guild of America, Inc. (HGA) hosts Textiles & Tea, a conversation with some of the most respected fiber artists in the field today. In our 45-minute discussion, we focus on their artwork and their creative journey. We allow 15 minutes at the end of our conversation for questions from the audience. Textiles & Tea will take place every Tuesday at 4:00 PM (ET) and is broadcast via Zoom and Facebook Live. These broadcasts are free to view and open to all."

If you want to watch live, you can register in advance here on the HGA website. https://weavespindye.org/textiles-and-tea/  

Following that, it will be posted on HGA's YouTube channel where anyone can watch it at any time. https://www.youtube.com/user/hgaweavespindye/videos 

So many guitar straps! Click on the photo to enlarge it and see the patterns up close. 

 In September and October, I had the pleasure of being a vendor at a couple of excellent local music festivals. (Michael Hearne's Big Barn Dance in Taos and the Albuquerque Folk Festival) It's good to get back out to events! My love of weaving guitar straps leads me to choose music festivals as my top selling venues. The best thing about this is, no matter what else happens, I get to listen to wonderful live music!! AND I meet cool people! 

One of my favorite bands from the BBD is Beat Root Revival, the duo of  Andrea Magee and Ben Jones.  Wow! Do they put on an awesome performance!! They are really rockin' it in this video and you get to see a lot of footage of  one of my guitar straps in action!! https://www.facebook.com/beatrootrevival/videos/245616480606972

 This makes me happy!

My next show will be in Santa Fe at the Scottish Rite Temple on November 18th-20th 2022.

 Hosted by the New Mexico Fiber Arts Center, the Fall Fiber Fiesta is an annual showcase of local fiber artists. This large ballroom in a lovely historic building gets completely filled with fiber art and artists. With over 40 artists, this is New Mexico’s Premier showcase of local, handmade fiber art & supplies! Shop thousands of one-of-a-kind gifts, wearables, art, supplies and more!

Working With Variegated Yarn in Inkle Weaving

EDIT: Since publishing this post almost a month ago, I have seen photos popping up on Instagram from all over the world!! Please scroll to the bottom to see how others have been using this tip!

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This beautiful skein of variegated cotton from Schaefer Yarn was recently given to me. I love the colors so much! I took extra time and wasted a little yarn in order to line up the color changes in my warp, creating a sort of faux ikat look on this guitar strap. 

 The interaction of color at the transition points is so interesting! 

Of course, they don't line up perfectly.  

I started by winding the original loop from the skein into a ball so that it was easier to work with when warping my loom. 

 Since the length of my warp loop did not correspond with the size of the original loop of yarn as it was dyed, it took some playing to get the color changes to line up on the loom. In this video, I show how I did it. 

Here are a couple of other examples of pieces I've woven in the past using this same technique.

And, in these pieces, variegated yarn was used totally at random, not taking care to line up the colors. 

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Woven by Marta Tokuyama, Japan

Woven by Marion Verloop, The Netherlands

Woven by Anthony Flynn, Ireland

Four Colors, Multiple Choices, Many Possible Combinations

In my Etsy shop, www.ASpinnerWeaver.Etsy.com, I sometimes sell my favorite yarn, Omega Sinfonia, in packs containing 4 colors and include a sheet with a dozen possible combinations using those colors. 

Below is one of those sets of 12 patterns which I invite you to use for yourself as they are, or as inspiration to create your own designs. These use 39 threads, and for me, when I use them with the Sinfonia, the woven bands come out to about 1" in width. This width is great for dog collars and leashes, hatbands, key fobs, lanyards, ukulele straps, and lots of other things! For a list of suggested uses for woven bands see this page http://aspinnerweaver.blogspot.com/p/uses-for-woven-band.html

All of the patterns below were created using the "Pattern Editor" the best free online design tool ever to come along for us band weavers. Jeff Bigot, its creator, is always working on it to add more great tools. Thanks, Jeff! Check out Version 2 here: https://www.raktres.net/seizenn/v2/#/

There are many more patterns like these in my book, "In Celebration of Plain Weave: Color & Design Inspiration for Inkle Weavers". You can find it here in print or PDF form: Taproot Video 

 

An Invitation to Play With Color

 

This summer we bought a weaving from our friend, Emily Trujillo, at the Traditional Spanish Market in Santa Fe. She and her mom, Lisa, shared a booth this year. Both of her parents are weavers and she has joined them, becoming the 8th generation weaver in her family. They have a fantastic weaving shop in the village of Chimayo, north of Santa Fe. Recently, they have been doing a bang-up job of selling my straps. They represent quite a few weavers in the shop besides family members and I'm honored to be among them! The area has a rich weaving tradition which you can read about here on their website. You can also find out more about Emily here. 

The weaving which my husband and I chose is unique and modern in design.  It has such a nice pop of colors right in the center! Recently, I decided that I'd like to weave a strap drawing on this piece for inspiration. How can I use the colors and asymmetry? Hmmm...  I'm still pondering. 

Here are a few of my attempts. There are 77 warps in each of the patterns below. Click to enlarge them if you want to see more detail. I haven't settled on one yet. The first two are plain weave, but the third one has some pickup pairs. 

What would you do? Can you imagine a strap design from this? I thought I'd invite you to give it a try just for fun. If you like, save your pattern and post a link to it in the comments section below. 

Here's the link to the Pattern Editor. https://www.raktres.net/seizenn/v2/#/inkle 

By entering the code: KO1 in the box where it says "Load from a short code", you will be able to start with all of the colors which I used and the same number of threads.