Summer Sprang

My computer has been getting full, making it difficult to download more photos to share with you. OK, I’ve learned that there are solutions. It was a couple of trips back and forth to the computer store, and that excuse for not blogging is now gone.
I’ve been busy since April. Let’s see. I made a series of shako braids for Norwegian re-enactors. I then worked on lace patterns for gloves for my daughter to wear at her wedding this Summer.
Follow-up to that conference in Barcelona last March, my colleagues and I are working to produce a print version of our presentation to publish in the Proceedings. We decided that we needed better photos, so I made yet another replica of that bonnet in order to photograph the process.

Remade replica bonnet, from the necropolis of Antinoe, 1st century Coptic. The original is in the care of the Hotel Bertrand de Chateauroux.

I finished off a couple of special-order sashes, among them a finger woven sash.

This client wanted quite short fringes.

Back in April, one of the vendors at Fibers Through Time, the woman behind Mary Gavin yarns, gave me two skeins to ‘sprang up’ into something. I created a shawl with this lovely yarn.  Instead of shipping it right off to Mary Gavin, I kept it long enough to wear it to Handweaver’s Guild of America Convergence in Providence, Rhode Island.

The shawl made from Mary Gavin yarn.

The yarn (linen and rayon) has lots of sheen, so the shawl looks spectacular. It was nice and slippery to work with. OK, now I’ll mail the shawl off to Mary Gavin.
While at Convergence I taught two classes, on on finger weaving and one on sprang, and then a PowerPoint presentation on that George Washington sash replica. The students were great, taking on to the techniques like ducks to water. It was also great to meet former students, who showed me what they had done since we last met. And then there was the fashion show. Two of my vests made it through the jury to the runway.

Hand dyed silk cord from Treenway, motif inspired by a Coptic bonnet.

Hand dyed wool sock yarn from Abiquiu Dye Studio, pattern inspired by the ‘Tonto Shirt’ in the collection of the Arizona State Museum

What I had not anticipated is that my vests would be worn by a male model. I’m thinking that the cheers were for his great body more than for my vests. I’m going to have to get a copy of the video.
Most recently I’ve created a pair of sprang gloves to wear at my daughter’s wedding.

Sprang gloves, made using machine embroidery silk.

This pattern was inspired by my visit to the Petrie Museum in London. Gloves are really a tube. You make a rectangle, wide enough for your hand and arm, long enough to satisfy you for the length. Because you’re working in sprang, you get two rectangles for the work of creating one. Then there’s the sewing up … leaving a hole for the thumb. I threaded a silk drawstring through the loops at the fingers. An elastic cord runs through a row near the elbow … that’s where I cut the two gloves apart, making knots to ‘seal off’ the stitches and prevent unravelling. A certain length of thread is required to tie those knots. Guess I need to trim the fringes a bit before the wedding.