Saturday, January 21, 2023

More textile arts and the New Misfits


 Yesterday's request about seeing a piece on the saw blade triggered a search in my still open art blog, Art The Beautiful Metaphor, and yielded this.

You can see the wires going around the teeth of the blade. This is the piece you saw finished yesterday, in progress.

And I neglected a couple of notes yesterday


On the left there is a box of cards I made for card weaving. I can't lay hands on a sample, so I probably gave them away. 

Card weaving involves passing four threads through cards, one through a hole in each corner,  in various configurations, then weaving snd turning some or all the cards to create designs, passing a weft thread after each turn. It gives the same range as four harnesses on a floor loom, I'm told. 

I made my own cards, though you can buy them. It's an ancient weaving art, stone cards found in old excavations, many hundreds of years old.

That dark grey piece of cardboard behind there is a bead weaving loom on which I made quite a bit of jewelry , and items like the seed bead decoration on the binding of this artist book I made from red onion paper. 


No, the onion smell doesn't linger long.

The other chunk of cardboard I used to weave these pieces


View of the cliffs at Saltburn, Yorkshire, looking from the beach.

And this more abstract Earth and Sky piece. Mostly I used my homespun yarn, which I'd processed from a raw whole fleece, dyed, combed, carded and spun, wonderful summer long adventure.

I don't use patterns or guidelines for weaving. It's like painting alla prima -- just plunge in, it will tell you how to go. Jump, and the net will appear!

Story of my life, come to think of it!

Last evening I spun more,  and wound off my output into a center pull ball, well more of a sausage, really, on the dibber repurposed as a nostepinne, sent me by Joanne, thank you.. 

That's a tool for winding center pull yarn balls in more skilled hands than mine. But it was the first time of trying.

And I realized ohemgee I have no banana bread. So I remedied that this afternoon, after the first walk since Virus Strike. It was lovely to be out smelling cold air, seeing flocks of mourning doves, currently populous, snd skeins of Canada geese shouting overhead pretending to migrate.

Then home to bake


Banana, cranberry, walnut bread. Minus the melted butter which I forgot and found later in the microwave. More famous cooks than I admit to doing this, too, including Melissa Clark. This makes me feel better.

Made my first order from Misfits since they changed. So excited about no minimum on cold pack items. After I splurged on chicken! Fish! Shrimp! Butter! I probably exceeded the minimum anyway. But I didn't have to over order. They had no eggs.  Let's hope delivery is good next Thursday. 

Happy evening everyone! Don't worry if you forget to add the butter of life, or the eggs are no-shows, all will still be well.



29 comments:

  1. Nice combination in the bread. I can’t tell you how many times I have forgotten something, including butter, in the microwave.

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    1. It's good to hear, from an experienced cook like you.

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  2. Mother was the master of the dibble. Perfect balls. From the day she came into the studio and said Teach me to weave, she mastered every technique that came her way.

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    1. She sounds so gifted. Nice to handle something she handled. Maybe the center pull ball skill will rub off on me.

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  3. I can see those cliffs by the sea. Well done.

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  4. I love your weaving pictures. So very clever.
    Who needs butter anyway. Just added fat we don’t need lol

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    1. Thank you. About the butter: it's a little drier but because of the fruit still moist enough. And I toasted a slice for breakfast, and that was better than with butter. So now I have a new recipe!

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  5. At least the bread was still good. I love the Yorkshire beach scene.

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    1. It is still good, just a bit different. I'm glad you like the weaving. It's a scene remembered from childhood.

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  6. Replies
    1. It's a recurring want in my life! Doesn't last long what with handsome son and neighbors helping.

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  7. You are an artist who holds so much knowledge and skill in your hands and heart and mind.

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    1. Thank you. I think some people are born wanting to make. It can be a mixed blessing!

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  8. Interesting all the ways a person can weave but this post was filled with a lot of words I have no meaning for.

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    1. Can you give me examples, please? I would like to be clear, and not leave people wondering. Of course there's always good old Google!

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  9. Wow! When I can sit still enough for a while, I'd like to try my hand at making a rug on a loom like my grandmother used to make. She made the most awesome rugs that weren't always beautiful, but that lasted forever.
    She made me an entry way rug out of bread bags. It lasted forever and only needed hosing off to clean it.
    Her materials were always things at hand for her loom. Grandpa's old pants, shirts, old blouses, worn out jeans.
    You certainly are talented!

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    1. I hope you get to make that rug. About bread bags -- it's very hard on your hands to crochet or knit plastic strips or bags. They stretch and pull on your fingers. She must have had very strong hands.

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    2. She did have very strong hands, she worked the fields and farm all of her life and then some!

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  10. You do intricate work. Beautiful. I'm Melissa Clark but I will admit forgetting an ingredient a time or many.

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  11. These last two posts have been absolutely fascinating. Knitting I can pretend to understand; weaving not so much. Then all these variations - truly eye-opening!

    I will be sending a knitting (or de-knitting, actually) question to you shortly.

    Chris from Boise

    PS So glad you got out for a walk!

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    1. Question received and answered as best I can.

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  12. Resident Chef made banana muffins last week but I have to say I prefer the bread format.
    Reading the comment from Val above about making rugs using bread bags - our quilt guild collects milk bags and they're sent somewhere to be made into sleeping mats for sending to third world countries. Not sure how they're made but I suspect they're cut into strips and then hooked onto a base.

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  13. Thank you for finding a picture of the saw blade weaving, Liz! I didn't imagine the wires. Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention when you showed your finished project in an earlier post. Love the other weavings, too. And FWIW, I have forgotten items in the microwave until the next day when I opened it to put something else in. Always a shocker, usually a groaner, when I do that.

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    1. Usually the saw blades lend themselves to wire weaving that will hold its shape vertically when it's cut off the blade.

      It's consoling when I hear other people forget stuff in the microwave.

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  14. I just got an announcement from Misfits saying that my minimum order is now $55 and delivery charge is now $8.99 because "In the past few years, it’s become trickier for us to deliver to customers in areas like yours." Charming.

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    1. I've heard this from another customer, too. Disappointing. I suppose their economics are geared to urban neighborhoods

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