Jumbo Flyer and Maiden

Jumbo Flyer Heaven!!!

Art Yarn

Here's a start and I've decided I need to change out my flyer for the jumbo flyer as these standard bobbins don't hold much! I th ought I might get away with using the standard flyer but was wrong, the oriface is too small for most of the yarn chunks to slide through easily.

Some Toys

I mean tools! Don't ever let anyone tell you that Angelina fiber cannot be spun up by itself here's a half spool of a lovely bubblegum pink color that I spun up quite some time ago.

Art Yarns

Wool batts, silk carrier rods, and more available in my shop

What I'm up to, making art yarns for embellishing my moss piece of course!

Silk Carrier Rods

I've been adding new silk carrier rod colorways to my shop this afternoon - thank you for looking!

Family Portraits

I drew these quite some time ago but they still crack me up!

Brown Out

We just got back a bit ago from picking cherries at a friends house, hey Becky, and found out our town had been having some serious brown outs while we were gone. Needless to say my electronics, computer, etc., were all freaking out when we got back.

More later from the land of the brown out.

More Wool Batts

Orange Dreamcicle

Nougat

More fond memories of the summertime! These lovelies are available in my shop and are completely feltable.

Embroidery Yarns

Very nice slubby yarns, I dyed large skeins of this and am using what I need for my embroidery project, the rest has been broken down into 20 yard skeins and are available in my shop. They have been dyed with natural dyes, cochineal, osage orange (the rayon turned orange for some reason) and natural indigo.

Wool Batts

I've been busy this afternoon making more wool batts, will do a big reveal on Monday of some new goodies I've made for the shop. I really love this colorway it's called "Taffy" , it reminds me of the treats we could only get during the summer months as kids.

Garden Detail

Garden Piece In Progress

I started this piece in 2001, I'm thinking of hacking it up into smaller pieces now in the spirit of getting it done. It's painted cheesecloth, silk flowers, bits of fabric chopped up, threads, yarns, and fabric paint on a nylon scarf.

Vintage Scarves

I've been collecting these for years to use in various art projects.

Shakespear Books

Cloth covered book 4.2" wide by 5.5" high, there are 36 of these in the series.

Nice gold gild lettering on the sides of the books, some are older and may have been purchased over several years?

I picked up 36 of these books by William Shakespear at an estate sale, now to find out their value as I have no idea when they were published. This particular book is titled The Tempest.

Texture

I put a bunch of yarns for sale on my etsy.com store, I couldn't resist the texture of these skeins and photographed a bunch of them in various ways for my texture gallery.

3 yo Jacob Fleeces

The quality of these two fleeces ended up being really nice, I was quite suprised. I now have about 30 more of these that I have yet to take a peak at so we'll see where things stand in a week right! The one furthest away is a lamb.

Jacob Wool

I managed to clean half of a fleece last night, here it is drying on my skirting table, it still has a lot of Vegetable Matter in it and now I'll work to remove this from the wool. I'm planning on dyeing this bit here with madder root and will probably spin it up for socks for John and I.

Jacob Fleeces

I managed to clean half of a Jacob fleece today, if it doesn't rain tomorrow I will clean the remaining half. I plan to dye it with madder root when done with this particular fleece, I'll pull the brown/black areas out and set them aside for when I have more of the black color.

Etsy Treasury

Liz Plummer included me in two Etsy.com Treasuries! Check them out and leave comments if you would.

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list.php?room_id=50397

http://www.etsy.com/treasury_list_west.php?room_id=13022

New Network!

View my page on The Natural Surface

Rain Rain Go Away!

The weatherman reported this morning that we will be without rain for the next three days! Cna you believe it!!! So later this afternoon after I get the back yard cleaned up, and it's a PIT, I've plans to start some dye bundles thus taking advantage of the reprieve. I really don't enjoy monsoon season, which was one of the reasons I moved to Iowa in the first place, alas it has followed me here!

Wrapping Paper

We have a wedding reception to go to later this evening and I didn't have any wrapping paper for the gift, so I made some. It was so sweet seeing John's jaw drop when I pulled the present out of the bag - yeah baby I did THAT! The tag could use a little work and I'm thinking of redoing it before we leave - well actually I'll use my wacky scissors and make a pretty edge to the tag.

There's about 9 yards of vintage binding ribbon, and threads, on here, I had to go around it several times to make it look like there was something on the package. Hmmmm I don't see any buttons, I have just enough time to fix that as well!

I used white butcher paper, distress inks, metallic paints, and a stamp to create this lovely covering.

Peonies

I took a bunch of pictures (185 pics in all) of my peonies tonight, and found myself being greatly inspired but the petal and leaf shapes of this particular plant. I have some silk fabrics that I dyed using cochineal and madder root that I stitched but never went any further with them, now I'm wondering how I can go dimensional with these fabrics, in effect capturing the essence of these beautiful flowers!

Note I"m not sure why the pictures are loading with this distortion, they don't look like this in Photoshop!

Bouquet of Peonies

Some Thing Pretty

Some Thing Pretty

Flood Warnings Again

I'm in prep mode right now, picking everything up off of my basement studio floor in anticipation of the coming flood waters. Maybe it won't get so bad this time??? Then again I could be wrong the ground is super saturated here, the rivers are quite high and there's not a whole lot of places left for the water to go, except into basements etc.,

So prep I must. Granted it doesn't get deep here, six inches in the one corner, but it's still a pain cleaning everything. I'm debating cleaning the floor in advance, less surface dirt means less dirt afterwards right? Maybe, so long as the sewer doesn't back up into the house, again, which is what the problem has been.

More later from the land of Flood.

New Ideas and a Rant

I've been cleaning our flooded basement the past few days and am finding all sorts of rusted mildew encrusted items, and it's giving me ideas!

A recent thread on one of the lists I'm on is price point on artwork at shows and apparently the going rate for items being sold is somewhere between ten and twenty dollars. Now this leaves me the artist in a prediciment I don't like - trying to undercut WalMart and Target. Lets face it that's exactly what we are doing!!!

Example: I make a necklace with high quality beads and craftsmanship but my customer demands that I sell it for less than $20.00 US. The same customer can go to WalMart, or Target, and purchase a crudely made necklace with beads whose color may bleed all over you and your clothes, for less than $20.00 US.

I've been wondering if this is a matter of educating our customer base or if this country has managed to "cheapen itself to death"? It's like people don't either recognize or don't care about quality anymore, could it be both???

It doesn't matter if it's jewelry, scarves, handbags, hats, aprons, hand dyed whatever, the customer demands the same price, or LESS, than they would pay at the local MegaMart. I'm just glad I'm not doing any shows this year!

Yes I'm well aware the price of gas has shot through the rough, it's the reason I'm not driving anywhere right now. But the demand for cheap goods actually hurts the economy more than it helps it right now, simply because the money doesn't stay here.

More later, I'm tired from cleaning and gardening today.