Art Camp

It's amazing how much art you can get done when you commit to spending less time online.  Which is exactly what I'm doing now.  So it feels as though I've been away at art camp.  And as soon as I finish up some business here, I'm headed back to camp!

So ~ this little beauty is my first finished and available-for-sale eco fragment.  Details in the Textile Shop.

The fabric below is a recently eco dyed raw silk jacquard cloth printed with rose leaves and rust.

That skein of hand dyed silk yarn I showed you a week or so ago resulted in the first scarf below.  I hadn't knit in a long time, it's one of those activities that makes my hands ache.

But I really enjoyed the process, sitting outside in the sun, catching the breeze, knitting.  Lovely.  So I started on the second scarf below, and I'm retraining my right hand to throw the yarn differently so my hand is more relaxed.  It's working, and I'm enjoying making this scarf as well.  The black & white yarn is a 2-ply silk that I spun a few years ago, one of my many experiments ~ one ply of carded silk noil fiber into which I hand carded bits of a black and silver nylon novelty knitting yarn, and the other ply is an extremely fine bombyx silk.  Spinning thousands of yards of that stuff for too many years is what finally did my hands in and caused me to ultimately give up spinning.

Anyhoo, I'm back into basic and simple these days, as much as possible.  Part of my continuing personal downsize, I guess.  It used to be nearly impossible for me to simply sit down and knit something and enjoy the process...it was more about finding the right pattern or lace stitch or trying out numerous yarns until I found the right one/s to make whatever I wanted to make.  Now I just want to knit and enjoy the process.

I don't like garter stitch garments, and with straight stockinette stitch the work curls.  Both these scarves are in simple 4x4 seed stitch.  Perfect solution.

And getting back to simple and basic...  A couple of days offline this week convinced me to drop Facebook.  Not only had it become a huge drain on my time despite the fact that I was pretty discriminating about what I chose to follow, but I was finally able to see FB for what it truly is ~ just another corporation that's holding close to a billion people hostage to its whims.  And the truth is, I don't like crowds.

Happy day!