Painted Moth Fiber Arts

There is a wonderful bead store in my neighborhood, and I stop in a few times a month to pick up interesting beads for making stitch markers. Occasionally I find pieces that I instead use for fast, inexpensive jewelry.

I loved these tiny enameled flowers, and the beads that look like garnet are actually made from horn. I put them on a simple silver chain to make a delicate charm bracelet. Total cost was around $6, and it took 15 minutes assemble.

The tiny clusters of pearls were a new find this weekend. I spent a long time trying to decide what colors to pair with them, and was disappointed by some pearls in colors I wanted, but which were drilled asymmetrically for stringing on a necklace. I had to pass up on my favorite, a lovely green and purple combination. I liked the powder blue tear drop pearls, and at first I was going to settle for pairing them with brighter blue round pearls, but mixed in with those I spotted a single dark teal iridescent glass bead. I scoured the other trays of beads in the store and found more of them. Perfect.
The total cost was $9 (the pearl clusters were pricey!) and they took less than 5 minutes to make.

Long overdue, but here’s my quickie report on Stitches West! I attended Saturday and Sunday, and spent most of my time helping out at the Stitch Diva Studios booth. Owner and designer Jennifer Hansen has so much amazing stuff there – patterns, silk yarns, bags – that it was almost always busy.

But I did find some time to wander and shop, and I even played with a couple of Schacht wheels for a little while. It took me a few tries to figure out how to get the wheel going in the direction I wanted, but once that obstacle was surmounted it was pretty easy. If you already know how to draft with a spindle, it’s easy to switch to a wheel.

I didn’t a lot of shopping because I had a strict budget and some solid plans for what I wanted. A large, lightweight spindle for plying, fiber for spinning (but only unique blends or things I hadn’t tried before), and I really wanted a skein of Socks that Rock yarn.

Success #1: A spindle and new-to-me fiber from Creatively Dyed Yarns. This gorgeous blue fiber is a blend of Wool, Seacell, and Milk Protein! It’s a dream to spin, and super soft. I have some iridescent blue seed beads that I’m planning to add to it when I ply the singles. The spindle is beautiful in its simplicity, spins very smoothly, and was an absolute steal at only $15.
I’d budgeted $60 for a spindle, so that left me with a nice chunk of extra cash to spend on yarn!

Success #2: More unique fiber blends! This is a blend of wool, mohair, silk, and…cat hair! Dyed and blended by Feline Fibers. Not only is it a color I love, it was just too amusing to pass up.

Success #3: Socks that Rock! I looked through the skeins a few times early on Saturday and just couldn’t settle on one item, so I didn’t buy anything right away. I came back on Sunday and was disappointed to see that almost all of the lightweight was gone. I was about to leave empty-handed when they suddenly started putting more skeins out – and they were mill ends! There were a few colors that I loved, but this was the one that I couldn’t put down.

So, mission accomplished, I still had some cash left for impulse buys. I picked up some beads at Talisman, and got two skeins of yarn that I can’t find here in San Francisco.

One is the Brooks Farm Solo in merino that I’m using to test knit my fingerless mitts.

The other is a gorgeous skein of merino sock yarn from Knitting Notions. Besides the fact that this is just amazing yarn, they’re from Nashville, where I used to live.

So that was my weekend at Stitches, and I’m already looking forward to next year!

I’ve lived in the same house for almost 6 years now, and we have a constantly rotating selection of flowers and plants in the backyard, subject to the whims of the landscapers. This year is the first year I can recall having tulips, and a beautiful assortment of them at that. Dark dark burgundy red, and vibrant orange scattered all over the yard.

I really love flowers and floral designs. I made these little felt flowered pincushions several months ago. I plan to put the two unused ones on Etsy. The one with pins in it is all mine!

And this is my latest roving colorway, Strawberry Fields, which I had to sample by spinning and knitting up half an ounce of it. I’m not usually such a fan of pink, but I like how it looks with red and green. And I love strawberries!

I’ve almost finished test knitting the right hand mitt of the pattern I’m designing. This is the fifth or sixth incarnation of it, because I keep changing my mind about the center lace pattern. I think I’ve settled on exactly what I wanted now.

I’m knitting them with a skein of Brooks Farm Solo that I picked up at Stitches. It’s really lovely yarn, a single ply sport/dk weight merino, and it’s stood up to being frogged over and over without getting fuzzy or flimsy. And the subtle variegated colors are beautiful.

This is a super simple pattern that is perfect for using up small amounts of bulky thick and thin handspun yarn. I used 30yds of a two ply that I had spun from a pile of scraps of various rovings, but if you don’t spin you would also get great results from a super bulky commercial yarn like Malabrigo Aquarella or Collinette Point 5.

This is so easy to that it hardly warrants a formal pattern! Here’s what you do:

•With US 15 needles, cast on 11 stitches. You can make it wider if you want, just make sure you have an odd number of stitches.
•K1, p1 and repeat this pattern across, ending with k1.
•Turn work and p1, k1 across, ending with p1.
•Repeat these two rows until your neckwarmer measures about 16 or 17 inches long, then bind off in pattern.
•Sew two buttons on one end of the neckwarmer. I used two different sizes of buttons for an assymetrical look. No need for buttons holes or loops – just use the space between the stitches as the button hole. My largest button is almost 1.5″ in diameter, and it still fits between the stitches.
•Wrap around your neck, button, and prepare to receive compliments!

My dyeing studio is, at this time, my kitchen. With everything else I do (freelance work, figure skating, my day job) I can usually only eke out one day a week for dyeing, and I have to make the most of it! While my early efforts involved a lot of experimentation with the dyes and struggling to make brown dye (seriously…it’s what everyone says they accidently end up with when they first start dyeing. Why couldn’t I get brown on purpose?) I’m now focusing more on making repeatable colorways and larger quantities of each colorway. I decided to start out with a fairly easy color scheme – yellow, orange, and brown.

I had a few pounds of fiber to dye, so I mixed two jars of each color. I ended up having to make more of the yellow! The dyes never go as far as you’d expect.

I paint the rovings in semi-random stripes of color, and splash on splotches for variety. Since yellow, orange, and brown are similar colors, I wasn’t concerned about them overlapping and running together – in fact, I was planning on it.

The roving looks very pitiful when it is wet.

But very lovely when it is dry! I wish I could hoard this all for myself.

One of the rovings that I purchased at Stitches (which I’ll blog about next when I have more time). I really enjoy the earthy muted teals and the rustic heathered look that the yarn is taking on. I’m adding in little white flowers cut from felt, very simple, strung on scraps of handspun that I’m drafting into the yarn as I spin it. I’m going to ply it afterwards, to make sure the flowers are anchored securely.

This roving was supposed to be purple, but either I poured the wrong dye stock into the pot or it just developed wrong, but it ended up black and grey. I overdyed it with deep red and some bits of purple, and I’m spinning it up at a DK weight to give to my friend Kate, as a bribe to test knit the fingerless mitts I’m designing. I’m calling this colorway ‘Night Queen’, after the dahlia variety of similar color.