Woven!

So yeah... um... sometimes I craft!  But mostly I'm going to grad school.  And mostly the folks who read this blog follow me on facebook, so I'm mostly just posting these pictures so I can share them elsewhere.

But a big warm "Hi" and a hug to anyone who is actually reading this.  I kinda miss blogging and I wish I still had time to do it.  =)

 So this is a scarf that I made from some alpaca I bought at Oregon Flock and Fiber... years ago!  The main color way is called "October" and being an October gal... I just had to have it. I also had some slightly heavier alpaca in a simple brown that I used for a few stripes... just to give the scarf a bit of character.

Once again I think I wove it too loosely.  It's a lace-weight yarn and I'm using a 10 dpi heddle.  I really need to figure that out.  I'm sure there's a chart somewhere. 

But it's drapey and pretty and hopefully I'll find an occasion to wear it soon.

 And here is the scarf I made back when I took that weaving class... I don't think I ever posted pictures of the finished product.

It's wrinkled because I wore it quite a lot over the winter... love the colors, I think it turned out well.

Playing with colors: Red

Here is the next quilt in my series playing with color and value. For this one I divided my fabrics into lights and darks, and further divided them into light lights & medium lights, and dark darks & medium darks. One stripe is alternating light light/medium light fabrics, and the next stripe alternates between dark dark and medium dark.

I used straight line quilting in the dark rows, and wavy lines in the lighter rows.  Kind of a darker reds = serious & steady,  lighter pinks = playful kind of thing.

I think this was a much more successful project than the blue quilt.  I do like the way I've given some organization to the colors, but still kept the individual strips somewhat random in size and distribution. 

So far, the lesson learned with these first two quilts is what happens when you randomly distribute high and low value colors (your eyes kind of bounce around the entire quilt), and what happens when you organize them (eye movement is more focused).  In these two examples, I definitely prefer the more organized approach.  But I do think this is something I want to keep playing with.