Category: All (-ish)

SKS: B&W Humboldt

Sara certainly has moved to an area with a lot of local postcards! This one reminds me of clip art montages, but fancier.

Sara reports that it’s gray and rainy and overcast (a thing that happens in Portland a lot too!) and she reports that it’s also Oscar Sunday and she’s excited to see my picks for the win. She writes that she plans on recording the ceremony and catching up later.

I can tell you from the future that she ended up watching in real time, so she saw the famous slap. We discussed via text and both were frowny face about the whole thing.

Another Speedweve-Style Creation

Because I have white sheets on my bed, I like to put a little something in one corner, so I can easily tell which corner goes where. I used my new loom (and followed a pattern I bought off Etsy) to mark one corner.

I’m quite liking the result:

This was the first time I used embroidery thread instead of sashiko thread. It’s very shiny. Here’s what it looks like after the ends are pulled through.

Since this wasn’t a darn and I wasn’t going to walk on the final result, I experimented with tying the knots off instead of weaving them in. This was slightly tedious, but no more so than threading my needle multiple times.

More Speedweveing. This Time with a Pattern

I wanted to mark the pillowcases I use to cover the cats heated loungers, so I tried this pattern on my darning device. I like how it turned out.

Here’s how it looks with the ends pulled back (and before I washed it to get rid of my square and the authentic cat hair.)

It is a very fun machine!

Deciding the Quote for My #YearofStitch Sampler

You can see my also-rans. I still like “Cleave ever to the sunny side of doubt”

I went with Century Gothic for the font (font choice was hard!) and held up the bird part to see how the quote fit.

Sadly, I left out the L in “world” and didn’t notice until I was tracing.

Happily, I didn’t like the placement anyway, so I made plans to spray away the quote after I finished embroidering. I can fix both the missing letter and the positioning.

Speedweve-Style Loom

Internet advertising on Instagram did a good job targeting me. I saw a reel of this little device, and after some obsessive research, I bought two of them, one big and one small. Mine is not as nice as the one I would have bought from Snuggly Monkey, if they had them in stock. And I may yet upgrade. We shall see.

Essentially, the device is a loom that allows you to weave a bit of a rug over your holes. Here’s a sock with two holes in the heel.

Setting up the warp yarns. (I used sashiko thread for this one)

After that, you weave the weft yarns back and forth, reversing the direction of the hooks after every row. You end up with a little checkerboard that looks like this:

My first attempt shows some shoddiness, but that’s what first attempts are for, no? At the last row, you remove the loom and tack the loops from the warp yarn down on the sock (otherwise you are left with a little pocket) and then weave the ends into the sock.

I wasn’t sure if the darn would me distracting to me. It does add an additional layer to your sock. I’ve found that I can feel it when I first put the sock on, but after about two minutes, my body adjusts and I don’t notice the rest of the day.

Hooray for this fun new thing! I’m excited to see what else I can do with it.