9 Goddesses

Working on Thanksgiving

'Round here, a holiday often means the opportunity to get some extra time in the studio. I've been working like crazy on pins for the MysticSpiral Etsy Shop, shows, and a couple of trade deals that I'm working on. Yesterday and today, the focus was on Raku Spindle Whorl Pins. I did the torch work yesterday afternoon and spent the evening in front of the television wiring the mica disks onto the bronze pins. This afternoon, I finshed the pins by wiring the raku fired spindle whorl beads onto the fronts. I'm really pleased with the results.

I'll be working on Stoneware Spindle Whorl Pins in the next week or two and then it will be time to start the whole process over again.

One of the things that I love about making these pins is that I am intimately involved with every step of the process. From shaping the mud to make the beads to shaping the bronze rod in the flame of the torch, each pin has a lot of me in it. Each pin is a synthesis of my interests and my love for 3 media, clay, metal and fiber.

I feel such a personal attachment to each and every one of these pins. I had a picture in my head of what I wanted the pins to look like as I carved the clay to make the original spindle whorl beads. I love what I do and I feel so blessed that others, seeing my work, love it well enough to make it part of their lives or to give it as gifts to people that they care about. I could not continue to work the way that I do without the support of the people who take an interest in what I make.

After I finished the spindle whorl pins, I wandered back out to the studio to spend some more time at the torch. I had so much fun making my two face pins that I just couldn't wait to make more. I have the pins done for another half a dozen or so and will probably choose faces from my bead box and start wiring them together tomorrow during the day. It feels nice to be using the faces since I'm not sure when I'll have the time, patience, and energy for the dolls again. Between studio work and puppets, I'm feeling a little like I'm neglecting the Sprout. Fortunately, she seems to enjoy the results of my labors.

New Goodies

I've been reading the One Hour Craft blog for quite some time and decided to take some time this morning to respond to the One Hour Craft Challenge. I've had these faces in my bead box since before I made Oya and Innna.

I also got some studio time in yesterday and got new spindle whorl pins made and some new stuff listed in the MysticSpiral Etsy shop. I finally got around to listing some of the scribble pins in the shop and posted shawl pins. I have 4 more scanned and ready to post sometime in the next few days.

I had so much fun making the mask pins that I think I'll probably be making quite a few more of them in the next couple of weeks as well.

My next show is an indie craft faire held at a local night club. I'm not sure what to expect from the show but it should be a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Happy Thanksgiving 2006

It's been a crazy couple of weeks and I've been offline as much as possible. I have new pins to upload to the MysticSpiral Studio Etsy Shop and a couple of wonderful swaps in the works that I've not forgotten. I've just been overwhelmed trying to get ready for holiday shows and puppet classes. (Speaking of which, the first puppet class was such a hit that I have one scheduled next week and another the week after... If you're in the Dayton area, and would like to get in on the puppet play, you can contact Arlene Graham's Fiberworks for information about the classes.)

I hope all of my US readers have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday. (For those outside the US, the annual food orgy is a big deal around here...) I'm looking forward to a wonderful holiday meal with Sprout and all of her grandparents and other loved ones.

Just Playing Around

For much of the last month, I've spent most of my spare time making puppets for Sprout using recycled wool sweaters. Once the basic puppet is stitched, I needle felt features onto the puppets to finish them. Ms. Sprout now has quite the growing collection.

I've left several of the puppets at my local fiber shop so that the owner could show them off to her needle felting customers when they come in. To make a long story short, interest in the puppets has been such that I will be teaching a puppet making class at the shop in mid-November. I'm also researching the notion of putting several of the puppets into my Etsy shop. I'm having so much fun making them and Sprout just loves them. She carries on complete conversations with them and gives them hugs and kisses. I love the needle felted eyes because it is so wonderful to have a puppet with no plastic parts. Because the eyes and noses are felted on with a felting needle, they're more difficult to pull free than even the "childproof" eyes recommended for young children.

I'm never quite sure what a puppet is going to be until I've stitched the muzzle shut and played with it for a minute or two. Once I know what kind of animal the puppet wants to be, then I can cut ears, which serve to underscore the identity of the animal. With the ears cut out, I can stitch them into shape and pin them onto the puppet to try to capture the personality.

With the ears stitched on, then it's just a matter of selecting the wool for their eyes and felting on the finishing details. My favorites, so far, are the dogs. There is so much variety available. Whether the sweater that I'm working with is brown, purple, or red, if I can get the ears right, and the muzzle shaped the way that I want it, Sprout has a puppy to play with that doesn't need to be walked or fed.

Birthday Update

My frantic search for spinable fibers in the deapths of my needle felting box yeilded a small section of Arlene's space dyed roving, precicely one ounce. I've been afraid to touch the handpainted roving I bought on Etsy until I was sure what I wanted to do with it. I figured that a lace weight, 2-ply yarn would be ideal but I'm still not sure whether I want to ply it back on itself or if I want to ply it with a solid contrast single.

In either event, I knew that I wanted the final result to be somewhere in the 18 wpi range. The space dyed roving from my needle felting stash proved to be the perfect practice medium. Based on a little trial and error, it drafted very similarly to the handpainted roving. So, I pulled the space dyed roving apart , figured out how I wanted the color repetitions to work for me, and began spinning onto two separate bobbins.

When I plyed the two bobbins, I had succeeded in spinning the two sections of the roving to within 6 inches of each other. (I love it when a plan comes together...) The result, shown above, is approx. 105 yards of 2-ply yarn. I wrapped the yarn 18 times around a size 10 knitting needle and it measured just a hair under an inch.

I'm actually really pleased with the results. All in all, I feel like it was a really great exercise and an excellent use of some fiber that I bought to add to the felting stash with no clue how I wanted to use it.

What can I do with...

I just finished plying approximately 183.75 yards (3.4 ounces) of handspun yarn. It started as a beautiful brushed sliver with blue, purple, green and fushia. I'm still trying to get the tensioning right on the wheel so my singles were pretty tightly spun. A tight twist in the opposite direction during the plying actually resulted in a pretty balanced yarn. I'm guestimating (I lifted about an inch worth of fibers from the skein and measured/counted it...) it at roughly 17wpi which would make it a fingering weight yarn. It may, however, bloom some when I soak it in hot water to set the twist so I'll probably re-measure the length and actually wrap some along a pencil or dowel to get a more accurate wpi measurement.

My friend H. is coming into town on Friday so I can pick her brain for ideas about what to make when I see her this weekend. (Consider yourself warned, H.)

It should be an interesting weekend. I'm having a birthday party on Saturday which I seem to have gone out of my way to sabotage. I don't remember when the last time I had a birthday party was. It's easy for me to blame K. for my reluctance to have parties because he's not the most social creature. The truth is, however, that if I wanted to have parties he'd indulge me in that as he does in almost every other way. (He won't let me start smoking again, but really who could blame him and I guess that I'd rather spend the money on spinnable fibers since I really only miss it when I want something to do with my hands.) I don't have parties because I become paralyzed by anxiety at the thought of preparing for a party and no one showing up. On some deep level I'm absolutely certain that no one really likes me or wants to spend time with me. Rather than face the rejection, I don't have parties, or (as I did this time around) I do something stupid to sabotage them like procrastinating on the invitations until everyone has already made other plans. I'm sick... I need help... Maybe I should find something to do with my hands other than letting them loose on a keyboard to dump the unfiltered contents of my brain into my blog.

What's distressing me at the moment is that my spinning options right now are pretty thin... I didn't think to grab the fiber that I bought from Arlene after my drop spinning lessons so I can't spin that. Of the fiber I bought at Wool Gathering, I've spun everything but the natural black corriedale that I still need to wash the chocolate milk out of. (My beloved put the bag containing the roving on the floor under the car seat. Somehow - we won't point fingers or anything - a bottle of chocolate milk ended up being dropped into it nipple pointing down...) the other options are some beautiful handpainted roving that I bought on Etsy and recieved last week or a fiber sampler that I listed in my Etsy shop and now am really wishing that I had kept it for myself so that I could play with it...

For now, I think that I'll try to distract myself by needle felting features onto a hand puppet that I need to get out in the mail. Who knows, maybe I'll find something spinnable in my needle felting fiber case. I'm afraid that I may have a bit of a problem here... I just love the rhythm of spinning.

BLOGTIPPING: October 2006

Given my current fiber obsession, I figured I'd focus my October blogtipping post on a handspinner. If you're not familiar with PippiKneeSocks.com I'd strongly recommend a visit.

I love the color sense represented by this site and the accompanying blog. The clean lines of the site combined with the dusky purple and green color scheme really serve as a soothing backdrop and manage somehow not to clash with even the most exuberant yarns posted to the site or the blog.

The availablity of tags for the blog posts makes it so much easier to find posts on the specific topics that I'm interested in at any given moment. I would love to invest the time and energy to read the entire back archive of the blogs that I stumble across either through posts in forums or through random web searches. Unfortunately, I don't have time to read and follow the forums I'm subscribed to and can't remember when I last managed to read a book so it's nice to be able to read selected highlights from the archives on topics that I'm particularly interested in of a moment. That ability keeps me coming back to the blog and encourages me to hit the subscribe with bloglines button on my tool bar. I wish every blog had tags... Which reminds me, I need to get my own tagging system back online. I'm in the midst of yet another computer migration and haven't made a point yet of pestering tech support for assistance in that area.

I love the eye candy. Pippi takes beautiful pictures and spins beautifully. The combination is inspiring to a novice spinner who does neither very well.

Which brings me to the tip portion of my blogtipping post... I'd love to see a photography tutorial for those interested in photographing their handspun. Whether the pictures are intended for use on a blog, ebay, or etsy, there are a lot of bad pictures of good yarn out there and I think Pippi may be just the person to change that.

Other sites that I'm looking enjoying (in part because of the usual acquisative frenzy of consumerist lust that comes with trying to answer the question "What do you want for your birthday?") right now are:

KnitPicks.com both their needle collection and some of their yarns. (They have an amazing collection of undyed yarns... Just what I need, another fibery obsession...)

Brainsbarn Custom Wooden Crochet Hooks are absolutely beautiful. Sometimes, beautiful tools make the work more enjoyable. I have some stunning handmade pottery tools that are a pleasure to use. I can only imagine how much one of these beauties would enhance the experience of creating crochet lace.

And, on that note, I think that I need to turn off the computer and spend some quality time with my baby and her daddy. They really are what's important in my life and I wouldn't want to get too carried away with my materialist day dreams.

My kingdom for a niddy noddy

It's hard to describe how rewarding it feels to have made my own yarn on my spinning wheel. The fiber is CVM (California Varigated Mutant) roving that I picked up at Wool Gathering. I had about 4 ounces to play with and absolutely loved spinning it up. I'm still getting the hang of adjusting the tension so that it winds onto the bobbin. And, speaking of the bobbins, I didn't do very well at getting the amounts on the two bobbins equal. I haven't had much luck with Andean Plying and the Handy Plying method from KnittySpin is not going so well for me yet either. Since there's not much left on the bobbin, I'm debating either plying it with thread and using it as an accent somehow or using it as an opportunity to learn how to handle singles. It's all about the learning experience.

And, speaking of learning experiences... I don't, yet, own a niddy noddy. This invaluable piece of spinning equipment enables you to wind your finished yarn off the bobbin and turn it into a skein. I have a very limited number of bobbins and/or drop spindles (although I'm making myself more of the drop spindles to play with so that won't be as much of a problem) so the products of my spinning efforts must go somewhere. Although the quality of the image above leaves much to be desired, the yarn is obviously in the form of a skein. Obviously, I've come up with a solution. In the spirit of sharing, I thought that I'd post my (temporary) solution here in hopes that it will help someone else... If you combine a CD drop spindle and my improvised solution to the niddy noddy problem, it is actually possible to begin spinning for almost no capital investment beyond the fiber itself.

Looking at the image above, you see a rectangle. This rectangle is intended to represent a hardcover book, although any rigid, rectangular object will work. (I just happen to always have a book at hand, and there was one there when I needed it so that I could unwind my yarn and free up my drop spindle for the next project.) The illustration should help, the rectangle is supposed to be translucent so that you can see how the yarn wraps around the back as well as the bold pink lines that show how it wraps on the front. The pointing fingers show the path of the yarn around the front of corner A, diagonally across the back to emerge and go around the front of corner B. The yarn then goes around the back of corner C and diagonally across the front of the book and around the back of corner D. This should bring you to where you started, in the middle of the short side of the book, to wrap around the front of corner A and repeat that path until you're out of yarn. It is a kind of elaborate figure-8 which allows you to wind the yarn around, and around, and around the book. Once you've finished, you can usually slide the yarn off one corner without too much difficulty.

Taking the long way

As a student in art history, I developed an interest in artifacts from Neolithic and bronze age civilizations. That interest is a large part of the reason that I started making ceramic beads and small vessels. Most of what we know about these ancient civilizations is based on the items (most showing exquisite workmanship considering the primitive tools available to them) found amongst burial sites. Some of the most common artifacts are spindle whorls. The spindles themselves, the shafts attached to the whorl around which the fibers were wrapped, were generally made of wood and have long since disappeared. The whorls, however, were often made of clay, stone, bone, or other materials. Many were carved with elaborate decoration. A favorite spindle was a treasured possession.

I'm not sure when I realized what these spindle whorls signified. If recorded history is any indication, spinning was generally women's work. Every thread in every garment was spun in more or less the same way and passed through the fingers of a woman before being wound onto a spindle. Textiles were precious and were, almost exclusively, the domain of women. As such, spindle whorls were vitally important.

Soon after I came to these realizations, I decided that I wanted to learn to spin. I began making beads intended to serve as spindle whorls and even tried (unsuccessfully) to teach myself to spin. On some level, I guess that I believed that learning to spin would connect me with all of those women throughout history who spun during otherwise idle moments to produce the threads that clothed their families.

My own work in textiles has been sporadic at best. I constructed a backstrap loom and learned to weave as part of an art education class that I took in college. I learned to crochet when I was young and have picked up the hook and put it back down many times over the course of my life. I learned to knit in a DoDDS elementary school in 1976 long enough to knit a small acrylic flag for a school project. (The stars on the flag were not knit. They were actually made with gummed foil stars that were glued to the blue field with the foil side facing down.) I promptly forgot whatever knitting I'd learned and didn't try again until about two months ago.

About a week after purchasing my first set of knitting needles and taking a knitting class taught by a friend of mine, I asked the owner of my favorite fiber store if she would be willing to teach me the fine art of spinning on a drop spindle. I'm pretty sure that my life will never be the same. I've been spinning for almost two months now. I have a beautiful spinning wheel which offered me the opportunity to learn about the parts, mechanics, and intricate workings of the wheel before I'd even had a chance to spin my first yarn. (A design flaw in the original footman resulted in a break, either while I was transporting it or at some point before it came home with me... The footman had previously broken in the same place and had been repaired. It was now time to replace it which became an unexpected opportunity to re-design the footman.)

Between spinning and knitting, my interest in fiber and the textile arts has gone from a mild curiosity and occasional hobby to an overwhelming obsession. Since those interests were what motivated me to start making the shawl pins again (combined with the self-doubt that grew from an interpersonal conflict that I've already wasted too much time re-hashing here) it seemed only natural for me to renew my acquaintance with spindle whorl motifs and begin to produce focal beads based on them.

I've already uploaded a couple of my new spindle whorl shawl pins to my Etsy Shop. I'll be uploading more as time permits. (Life with toddler has a way of impressing upon you the things that you **MUST** do vs. the things that you'd like to do.) The process of making them is actually a bit of a departure for me. After carving the spindle whorl beads, I made press molds of them. I've made press molds in the past with varying degrees of success but don't always enjoy using them because I like the intimate connection with each piece that I make. Since one of my goals for my shawl pins has been to keep them as affordable as possible, I wanted to press mold the spindle whorls to reduce the labor and keep the cost down. I used a simplified variation of the technique used by Melanie at Earthenwood Studio. Once the individual beads have been press molded, I refine the carving a bit to clean up the lines and ensure that they don't have a "stamped out" appearance. The result is that each of the beads has its own character and individual feel to it from being hand-worked but I'm not investing several hours in each of them. It feels like a good compromise.

IMAGE SOURCE: Woman, possibly Bedouin, holding spindle, standing in road [Stereo glass plate taken between 1898 and 1946]Taken either by the American Colony Photo Department or its successor the Matson Photo Service. Gift to the Library of Congress from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection