I am weaving a length of fabric  to make placemats.
I am weaving it on my Saori loom, and am taking a very Saori approach to the placemat weaving.
What’s Saori?
It’s a soulful, contemplative  approach to weaving that is all about being experimental and open minded.
I’m hoping to get 8 placemats from the warp that’s on the loom, and am planning on doing lots of playful things with them.
My plan is to have each placemat be clearly part of a group, but to be unique.
Kinda like the family!
That way, everyone can choose the placemat that they want to use for that particular …read more

Knitting socks is one of life’s great pleasures.  Handmade socks are just luscious, and they….well….. um….  knock the socks off of any kind of store bought sock.
Lately, I have taken to adding a touch of whimsy to my sock knitting.
Now, I add tatted flowers to the top edges of my handknitted sockies.
I posted the pattern for tatted sock toppers a few weeks back:
Tatted Flower pattern
For awhile now, several of my friends have been asking me to please make a video about tatting.
I was kind of chicken to do that, because I hold my hands in an unconventional way in tatting.
I …read more

The ‘Baseball Stitch’ or ‘V’ stitch is one of the most useful stitches, ever.
You can use it to join virtually any kind of fabric: Knitted, crocheted,
woven, felted, whatever….
I have received a lot of requests from people, asking me to make a video of how the baseball stitch is done. I decided that the time had come to finally make the video tute.
Yesterday, I was alone in the studio, so didn’t have a willing extra pair of hands to hold the camera while I stitched away.
I decided that I needed a stand to hold the camera, so I went looking around …read more

Recently, I was given a copy of a wonderful old book: Spool Knitting by Mary McCormack.
It is a treasure. It’s 100 years old and has delightful photos.
I find it interesting that Mary McCormack consistently calls the spool knitted cords, ‘webs’, rather than cords.
I think that this is probably because she likens a child (she always uses ‘he’ as the supposed spool knitting  child, never ’she’, sigh) to a spider spinning a web.
Her projects all involve spool knitting yards of cord, mostly on 2 peg spool knitters, and then stitching them into shapes that are then assembled for the finished project.
To …read more

I am making a cap for a friend. He wants it in synthetic yarn, and it has to be quite thin yarn, so I went mooching through my stash looking for the perfect yarn.
I had some discontinued Caron Shadows that I had used in another project that was rejected, so I figured I would be eco friendly and recycle and upcycle the yarn.
By splitting it, I was able to divide out the color shifting sections and use them in the design of the cap.
Splitting yarn is a pain in the neck if you don’t have the secret to doing it …read more

Of course, I couldn’t stop at just one bracelet…
so I made a second one:

Because I had a plan…. bangle bracelets look better when there are more than one….
(BTW, the flash does nasty things to the bracelets…. in real life, they look smooth and kind of irridescent. The flash seems to expose their undies. How rude!)
AND, because I love Furoshiki.
What’s  Furoshiki?
It’s an ancient and elegant Japanese solution to carrying things in the greenest possible way.
Here’s a link: FUROSHIKI
I’ve impressed the heck out of all kinds of people by whipping a headscarf out of my purse and tying a couple of knots …read more

My husband started it all. He bought me a bag of mystery synthetic cheap and cheerful thread at our favourite second hand store, and then magically made it appear in my studio.  (He’s such a romantic! He knows that I am addicted to thread in all it’s manifestations – even cheap and cheerful mystery thread! LOL)

Part 1- upcycling a bag of funky mystery thread
So, I got out some of the tatting shuttles that I love to carve and filled them up with multiple strands of the threads:
Part 2 – Choosing colors and loading tatting shuttles
Now, some folks might say that …read more

In Part 3, the tatting finally began!
This is a rather unique approach to tatting…. there are no lacy bits, no loops, picots, chains, just plain Josephine Knots over a simple flat wooden bracelet with upcycled funky thread.
(Feel free to do this with gorgeous thread! It will be – well….. gorgeous!)
Now…..
What if you want to change colors?
Easy peasy….
1 choice is to cut the first color, leaving a few inches to spare.
Just pick up the next color, and hold the thread end from it together with the last  thread end, and carry on as if you were in your right mind.
When …read more

Once I had all the tatting shuttles full of the mystery thread, I started working on the bracelet:

I didn’t tie the thread to the bracelet (by the way, this would work on any bangle bracelet).
I just took the thread through, and pinched it to the bracelet with my left thumb.
Then, I started making Josephine knots over the bracelet. What’s a Josephine knot?
Basically, it’s the blanket stitch.
∞The tatting shuttle goes through the bracelet, from the front to the back, and a loop of thread goes over your left index finger.
The shuttle comes up through the loop and then is pulled …read more

My lovely husband, Jim, brought me home a goodie bag of mystery thread from the Sally Ann.
Not primo for sewing… so what to do, what to do….
Hmmmm…. good for spinning… yes! Will set some aside to use when spinning ‘designer yarn’.
Wait a minute…. this is T H R E A D, right?
T H R E A D !
Thread = tatting……yessssssssssssssssssssss………..
And, then I HAD it!
I decided I would  finally get around to finishing some wooden bracelets that I made last summer.
My plan was, cut out plain wooden circle bracelets and crochet yarn around them.
Good plan…. but – I have a …read more