Some days are better than others....

Last Thursday was Fantastic!

We cut Museum Quality Rug # 11 off the loom, finishing off the same sectional warp we wound on nearly 11 months ago.

Fred & Louise work "closely" to tie off the fringe knots on our latest creation.

And, we were blessed with the presence of two new apprentice weavers, Tracy and Sandy. Both recently retired educators - both enthusiastic learners.

And, they couldn't have shown up at a more opportune time. The "lesson" of the day involved winding on the sectional warp for our next series of projects, threading the heddles and sleying the reed - pretty much the whole nine yards.

I did not expect to complete the entire set up in one day, and clearly couldn't have without the able and enthusiastic support of our growing group of weaving friends.

The new sectional warp will give us 25 yards (and many months) of easy weaving - that's a lot of placemats and table runners.

Rug # 11, Work in Progress

You start with a pile of rags. Cut or rip them into strips and randomly connect the individual strips together into long multicolor strips.....

Wind the strips onto shuttles....

And then unwind them in the loom to see what they look like when they are all lined up.

Pretty neat eh?

Faculty Show

It's hard to believe that I signed out a couple of weaving books from the county library two years ago to see what I could learn. Time really does fly when you're having fun.

If you're passing through Aiken, check out the Faculty Show in the Brooks Gallery upstairs at the Aiken Center for the Arts. I have a few weavings on display there. One of my personal favorites is Dori’s Place, the colorful rug on the left. When we finally said goodbye to Dori, her favorite doggie bed beach towels were too tattered for further use and too full of memories to be discarded casually. I cut the towels into strips and wove the memories into a cushy rug that will always remind us of Dori’s Place in our lives. "Go to your place, Dori. Good Girl!"

Great Horned Owl

We went birding at Tybee Island and the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge a couple of weeks ago with some of the local Audubon folks. We added a purple sandpiper to our life list at Tybee and Helen was able to get a pretty reasonable picture of Mrs. Owl sitting on her nest at SNWR.

Museum Quality Rug #10

I'm only a couple of weeks late with this. We did finish Rug #10 at the County Museum and it came out looking fine. We left the fringe long enough that we could experiment with making a twisted or plied fringe.

And we still have enough of our sectional warp left for another rug - stay tuned.

Museum Quality Rug #10

We've started working on the 10th Museum Quality Rug at the Museum. This one is a also a single fabric rug (which is very easy), but with a zig-zag twill pattern (which requires more mental presence than we usually have on any given Thursday morning). Please feel free to drop by and lend a hand (or a neuron).

Celebrate Aiken 1835

Last Saturday was such a huge buzz. Of course there was the official opening ceremony and all with hundreds of folks standing around in the cold, but by the time I got back to my loom, there were folks stacked three deep gawking at the overshot pattern on the loom (see previous post) - what a rush! For the next four hours, without a single minutes break, I was ON! It was amazing - I was so ready for a bathroom break and a beer (not necessarily in that order) by the time 5:00 came around.... It was great! And a huge shout out to Mary at the Museum for providing me with the perfect "period appropriate" shirt to wear for the day - thank you so much for all that you do.