Dear Weavers
I hope you all had a wonderful Easter time with lots of chocolate and Easter eggs. We actually managed to dye some eggs and got wonderful colours out of the onion skin and hibiscus flowers. I usually start to collect onion skin after Christmas and by Easter I normally have quite a large bag together. The more onion skin there is, as darker the colour. This again all depends on when Easter takes place, March or April. The later the more onion skin I have. The hibiscus flowers made this beautiful purple water when boiled, but the eggs show rather a greenish colour. Fascinating, isn't it?
Before I go into the nitty-gritty of what happened since January, my last blog post, I would like to announce that all Glui7 products are now also on BB Yarn Supply. Or for better description you will find a link there, that takes you straight to the Glui7 website, where you can easily purchase the products. When you go to BB Yarn Supply's website www.bbyarn.com and click on Glui7 products, you can see pictures of all my lines of creations. There are bamboo scarves, messenger bag, pullover scarves, bookmarks and amalgamation scarves. If you then click on the photo you like, it will take you straight to Glui7 website www.glui7.com Or if you feel like going there right now, please click on one of the photos below.
Amalgamation scarves
Bookmarks
Pullover scarves
Messenger bag
These and more are all my creations. Ideas I had in my head and put into fruition over the last years. It is my passion to create practical products that look good, but are also useful. My products are all handmade from A-Z with much love and care. I always aim for absolute perfection. Most of my articles are unique and none of them are totally the same. Each article has its own unique quirkiness and is in itself very special. I love to see my products go to people who treasure the product but at the same time also use it. The enjoyment of using such an article every day is the best gift you can give to me. So please if you would like to support me, go to www.glui7.com and buy your mother a gift from me to her this year!
Staying with weaving, since January I have been busy weaving and posting my adventures on Instagram (myweavinggarden) and Facebook (BB Yarn Supply). I find it rather nice to share what's happening in my studio. Since January I have been weaving some commission work placemats in Summer & Winter and Antimacassars. Now I'm pretty sure you are asking yourself, what the heck is an Antimacassar???? Well this is a very old word for a piece of fabric to protect chairs on the armrests and the back of the neck. In some cases these fabrics were made in beautiful and intriguing patterns to decorate the chairs. But overall an antimacassar is used to protect the chairs from dirt and sweat. Meaning it would be washed often and should be made with an easy care fibre. Well to make these antimacassars turned out to be an easy and lovely in between project for me. It was fun!
After the antimacassars I fell into a rabbit hole with the interleave project. This is a project for the Eight Plus sample group and it basically means to interleave two threadings/patterns together into one. It is really fun to play with on the computer and find new exciting patterns. That was exactly the problem. It leads from this to that, and what if.... on and on it goes. I eventually gave myself a timeline and simply picked the best out of all the ideas at the end of the day. It turned out to be a good choice and at the end I was really happy with the samples. And did I mention I had 24 shafts to play with?!
So what is on my loom right now? Last year I made a kid mohair scarf and had all sorts of problems weaving it. There were many, many broken threads and lots of frustration. But....BUT the result, the scarf was such an amazing product, that I had to figure out what I could do to make it work and not have so many broken ends. Well I'm happy to say (and touch wood) I think I worked it out. The first change was soaking the warp in an oily liquid which was so kindly given to me by Wagtail yarns in Childers, where I've got the yarn from. I don't know what exactly is in the liquid, but it smells and feels oily. Once the warp is on the loom and under tension I also spray the warp with water. This seems to work and "touch wood again" I haven't had one broken thread yet!!!! Thank you Wagtail Yarns, brilliant advice! At the moment I'm working on two purple scarves and after that I will go orange.....
Beginning of March we finally received some rain. There was forecast for a wet and rainy weekend. All weekend we were waiting for it and nothing happened, just a few showers. Then came Monday and it poured! All day long we had this massive downpour. We were singing and laughing. It was just so wonderful. Of course we were as usual flooded in, but we didn't care. We finally got some good rain. Since then nearly all of our grass trees started to make spears/flowers. The beauty of nature! Everything looks happy still, even though we haven't had any rain since.
So this concludes my update and I leave you with a wonderful sunset from our veranda.
Take care until next time
Ursula
