Silken Skeins

I’ve been a bad blogger again, mostly because I have been so involved with various Swap-bot exchanges that I haven’t had time for fibre crafts.  I think I may have to widen this blog’s scope to cover art and paper crafts.  In the meantime, my latest swap was a photo  challenge - to take a photo a day for a week.  I have created a page with my seven main photos and some others.  You can see it here.

Just as a taster, here are thumbnails of some of my favourites.  They are not clickable, so if you want more detail you need to go to that web page.  ;-)

I try to keep this blog focussed on fibre crafts, but sometimes I digress.  This bookworm meme, found here, is too tempting …

 In the list of books below, bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a ten-foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. +The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. +The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. +The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L. M. Montgomery)
9. +Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. +Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. +Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. +Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. *The Stand (Stephen King)
19. +Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. +The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. +The Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. *The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. +The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. +East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. *Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. +Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. *The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. *Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. +The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. *The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. *The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. *I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. *The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. +The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. +The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. *The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. +Bible (some of it, at least)
46. +Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. +The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. *She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. +Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. +Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. +The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. *The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. +Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. *The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. +War and Peace (Tolstoy)  (what can I say?  I went through a Russian literature phase in my late teens)
64. Interview with the Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. *The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. +Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. +The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. *The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On the Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. +Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. +Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen) –
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. *The Outsiders (S. E. Hinton)
97. *White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

PS  I’m now going to look up the “never heard of” books to see whether I need to add any of them to my “want to read” list.

As promised yesterday, we took the camera with us for this evening’s stroll along the Thames towpath. Unfortunately, we were too late to get good sunset shots, but our digital camera coped fairly well with handling the fading evening light. (All the thumbnails are clickable.)

First we visited the swans:

“Oh, you’ve brought bread!!!”:

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you that it is rude to snatch?”:

“Uh oh, 4 greedy swans is getting too much.” (Yes, I know there are only 2 in the picture, but by now there were 4 who couldn’t wait for me to throw the bread into the water):

And finally, the pictures of the Thames itself:

Coming soon, I hope, more real fibre blogging. At the moment, I’m mostly preocupied with a quilting swap, which needs to stay secret till it is finished. I do have more takadai braids to scan - I hope to get those pictures uploaded here soon.

The only fibre-related present I got this birthday is a Bosworth Moosie, but I’m not complaining as if I’m going to get only one, a Moosie is a good choice!

Mine is 28g (1 oz) and has a Cochin rosewood shaft. It isn’t easy to get pictures that show the markings well. Click on the side views for larger pictures.

Most of my other presents were paperback novels, plus one DVD set, but Rys also gave me this beautiful little fossil, only 1.2″ across:

Lastly, I have a better picture of the mini-socks, which shows the colours better. I’m still trying to decide whether to make them into earrings or just add cords to make them into ornaments.

First, here’s a look at the silk scarf (or belt or hairband or however the recipient wants to use it) which I entered in the Berkshire Guild Challenge. The theme this year was “Nature’s Colour Palette”. We got the results at today’s meeting. Mine didn’t get a prize, but that’s fine by me as there were 15 entries, all of them very good, and I loved the prizewinners.

Technical details: warp - 16/2 silk dyed with acid dyes, weft - Gutermann’s sewing silk, plain weave. It was sett to make it very drapey, but I think it may have ended up too sleazy and unstable. The judge didn’t say that, though, so perhaps it isn’t too bad after all.

After the meeting, we took a friend home. While we were there we got some photos of the blue tit nestlings being raised in an old cylinder vacuum cleaner ouside her house. It seems that the hole where the hose went is just the right size for the adult tits.

She keeps silkworms, and we had a look at her current ‘crop’. She doesn’t have any live moths at the moment, but she has some beautiful dead ones for display at demonstrations. She does have a lot of larvae at the moment, though. Moth-phobics are advised not to read on. :-)
(more…)

Yesterday, we played hookey from packing to visit the guild Dyeing Day, held at a member’s home. Our excuse was that we needed to meet up with some of the others involved in the Roman demo. While we were there, we got cuddly with some of her beautiful guanacos (members of the llama/alpaca family with wonderfully fine spinnable coats, only 18 microns thick).

Unfortunately the camera batteries ran out before they came across to make friends, but here are the best of what we did get. Click on the thumbnails for full-size versions, as usual, and use your browser back button to return here.

First, the boss of the herd .. well he thinks he is, anyway, and the third picture shows him about to spit at the upstart collie who was teasing him from outside the fence.

One of the breeding females. Rys thought she was going to spit at me, but she was actually very friendly.

… and another female …

… but my favourites were the crias (the youngsters). Two were particularly friendly. They cuddled and snuggled and rested their heads on our shoulders, and breathed in our faces (no, not ugh … lovely sweet breath) and tried to suck our T-shirts and … well, they were just adorable.

Unfortunately, one of the friendly crias is a male, and his lack of fear and espect would make him dangerous as an adult male, so he will have ‘the snip’ in a couple more months.