A Family Affair

In the last post I showed photos of dyeing and weaving chenille scarves for a show at The Artery in Davis. This post is about that show. For this month's show we invited our family members to join us in sharing their art work.My sons and daughter-in-law entered their photos. Sorry that my photos don't show theirs very well. Chris took photos while on the fire line last summer. Matt and Kaleena's photos are taken in their "backyard" of the El Dorado National Forest. I wove 7 Fire scarves and 5 Sky scarves so that I could choose the ones I wanted to display with the photos. You can't tell from this but the Fire scarves have sparkles (and have a lot more color variation than shows up here).I also included two of my mom's pieces. She was always proud of her teapots because she could create a dripless spout. Mom mostly made functional pieces like plates, bowls, and mugs, but also made tiles for the kitchen, a bathroom sink (the actual sink !), lanterns, birdbaths, and a sundial. This is a rare statement on society......but I'm not really sure what she meant.I took only a few more photos in the gallery because I ran out of time. Artery member Marjan made the 3-D flowers and her mom did the silk paintings.Heidi's husband and dad collaborated with her making bowls.Sorry, but I don't remember whose work this is but it is all felt, including the rocks.Here is a wild "Dragon Drawn in Space" above member Chris' family's art.My regular work moved out of the gallery and is in the front of the Artery for the next month or two. A Family Affair will be in the gallery through February 1. I hope that those of you who are local can make it there.

Fire & Sky in Chenille

The Artery is having a show called A Family Affair. We invited members' family to include artwork in the January show and I invited my sons and DIL. They entered photos and I planned to weave chenille scarves to accompany the photos. The vibrancy of the photos inspired my idea for the scarf colors. I didn't want to just choose yarns off the shelf. For one thing I didn't have the right colors, but the main problem was that I didn't want stripes. I wanted to have colors that flowed in to one another over the length of the scarf. That means starting with white (usually) yarn and dyeing it.

Oops! Not enough white or off-white chenille yarn on the shelf. I had enough of that for two warps of two scarves each. That would be one warp for Chris' fire photos and one for Matt and Kaleena's mountain photos. I wanted more than that so that some could be "practice" warps. More about that later.

I also assumed that I had dye in the colors that I wanted because...well just because...just like I assumed that I had white chenille in the shop. I got the box out of the garage and pulled out all the containers that had yellow or orange or red (fire scarves) and blue or (mountain scarves) in their names. I was OK for Fire. I had wound the two white/off-white warps but wanted to start with something else to try out the colors.I still have some warps leftover from my Yarn from the Box project in colors that won't sell. I used these yarns with the plan that I would eventually dye the warp. Now was the time. I started with yellow but it didn't cover the colors very well so this warp went to oranges and reds.That was the "practice" warp. Now it was time for the "real" one and I decided to use just these colors.You can see the yarns that I used weren't all the same because I didn't have enough of any one shade. Here is where my photo documentary of the process has holes. This was a cold, damp day. I was bundled up in overalls and Carhart jacket and wool layers. I had footwarmers in my boots   but I had to keep switching from warm gloves to rubber gloves, neither of which lent themselves to taking lots of photos. And it was getting late in the day and I was starting to lose the light. So no more photos of these warps after dyeing. I wasn't satisfied with the dye job on the white warp so I wound another but this time used yellow yarns because I didn't have anymore white. I dyed this in those same colors.Dona was at the shop the day I was trying to get these warps to dry. She took this photo of them hanging near the heater. Back to the dye day. These were the blues. It was getting late so not many more photos.Here is one of the Mountain Sky warps. I wove seven Fire scarves (two were finished the night before the show so aren't photographed here) and five Mountain Sky scarves.I will do another post of how the Artery show looks.

Leftover Yarn

Never throw anything away. At the risk of being called a Yarn Hoarder I don't throw any chenille away if there is at least a three yard length. Three yards (or a little less) is the length I need to make a scarf. I dumped out a couple of bags of leftover chenille and organized it by color. This made two warps.The first uses the yarns on the left side of the upper photo, going into the purple range.The color isn't very good on this photo but this was mostly yarns from the right side. Here are the finished pieces:I used a fine cotton weft for this scarf mainly because I couldn't figure out which color of chenille would work across all of these stripes. By using a fine weft the color of that disappears and the eye sees just the warp color.This scarf was different. I used a blue chenille weft. The blue dominates but pulls all the other colors together. These scarves are for sale at the Artery now and on my website.