Fiber Monday

 

In Which I Continue The Pouch

I may only have 500 stitches done on each of the back and sides of the pouch, but! That means something very different for the separate pieces.

On the left is the back of the pouch, on the right is the side gusset

I'm trying to make both pieces at once, since I get so easily distracted. And of course, this is my last month to finish it! And also I still don't know what to do about dye. Yeesh.

Oh and I got distracted by learning how to use a drop spindle. My silk thread is... very lumpy, but for a first try, it's not so bad, if I say so myself. I need to get some wool and see how well I can spin that, since apparently silk is way harder. Wool, then cotton, then linen, then silk again.

Also I still need to figure out my niddy noddy situation.

But that is for After The Ren Faire, I think. Before the Ren Faire I need to figure out dye, a dyepot, a day to do the dying (it'd be preferable to have some non-deluge-related weather for that), and also...

I kinda promised Z I'd make him a pouch for his new notebook for the Ren Faire.

That at least shouldn't be too difficult. I'm going to measure out the space for that using my white Sakura Gelly Roll pen and a pair of black pants that died a noble death (read - wore out at the thighs so badly there's nothing left to patch but wispy threads). If I sew it up correctly, it could be used as-is and all I'd need to do is make a decent strap for it, but if I don't get the seams to perfect, it'll get covered in a quick single crochet outer pouch in ex-sweater lavender.

Speaking of the dearly departed lavender sweater, if anyone who knows me has any sweaters they've ruined or just don't want anymore, I'll happily take them and tear them down to turn into new outfits because I love the act of creative destruction way more than is probably healthy and YouTube is beginning to cotton on to that fact (seriously I've been recommended no less than 5 different Sweater Teardown videos in the last 24 hours)...

Anywho, yes, that picture way up there is of two pieces, each containing 500 single crochet stitches. The short but wide piece is 50 stitches wide, the tall but skinny piece is 15 stitches wide.

My goal is to finish at least the gusset by next week, which if I keep going with a pattern of "One row on the back/flap, then 50 stitches on the gusset", it shouldn't be too hard.

We'll see lol.

Especially if I keep on getting distracted with silk spinning, pocket construction, and the slow progress of a dragon I may give up on (I don't think I'll get it done in time).

I think that'll about cover things for me for today. My attention span is shot to heck and I am ready to go to bed :)

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In which I managed a drawing despite being deep in my Stardew Era again...

So I've been playing Stardew Valley again.

And I've been loving it.

My sleep schedule has not been loving this, though, because I keep staying up til 3 or 4am just trying to do one more run in the desert caves. I'm in the spring of year 2, Kent has arrived, and I won the second egg hunt in a row. I don't know if I'll win anything else lol.

As for art, though, I still managed to pull through and draw something!

"Peachy"; watercolor pencil on paper; 2023
[FOOD, VEGETABLE]

So there we have a lil peach on a lil table with a lil shading and I'm actually pretty pleased with it! I managed to create shading and highlight without making it look shiny (because, of course, peaches are fuzzy, not shiny).

I had a hard time with the shadow underneath (obviously) but I'm otherwise quite pleased with it! Sure, the color is more apricot than peach, but I promise I've seen peaches that yellow before.

At least it's not bubblegum pink, which it very nearly was. I saw the yellow I wanted. I reached for the yellow I wanted. I looked up to watch the cat come into the room for a little box time, and when I looked down at my hand, I'd picked up a very pink pink.

I honestly cannot remember the names of any of the colors I used except that I know I made use of the Peaches & Cream shade for the body of the peach and Magenta for the blush. Everything else was kind of snagged at random. I layered a cool gray with the spring green to bring down the yellow tones in the background, but the light blue of the tablecloth was solo.

I used a round brush for most of the piece, especially the shading and the peach itself. I used a 1/2" square brush for the background, swirling it in circular motions to improve the blending of the gray and green.

This was a fun little piece to do, and if you'd like to make any requests of me, you can do so via Ko-Fi - send me a lil donation with a message telling me what category you'd like me to work from (Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, Food, Dedbert, Location, Geometric, Word), and I'll post a piece based on that category!

For now, I'm going to go eat some homemade teriyaki chicken, watch an Italian dad make lentil soup, and probably sneak in some more Stardew before I go to bed lol.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Talk About Tuesday

In Which I Learned A New Skill!

 Ages and ages ago, I bought a pack of silk mawata and a drop spindle off of the Internet Shopping Monopoly and swore I was going to learn to spin yarn.

Today I was working on the back/flap and gusset sections of the pouch that never ends and saw it sitting across the room. In a moment of impulse, I grabbed them and started setting to work.

They're so pretty, too!

Pulling one mawata from the pile is... not easy. And with my rough hands and fuzzy arms, it means that I now feel like I'm constantly under attack by spiders lol.

First you have to delicately tease one of the layers loose, then you need to find a point near the middle and wiggle your thumbs through, creating a hole. Next, you widen that hole with your thumbs, then your hands, then your wrists, pulling and smoothing until you like the thickness of the hank. Once you like how thick the big ol circle of silk is, you find a weak point and pull until it separates. With a long, wispy piece of silk roving at your side, you now get your drop spindle.

I looped the thin, wispy end of the silk around the hook on mine, holding the hank about 6" from the hook, and then I gave my spindle a, well, spin.

It took a bit for me to figure out how to draw the fibers to the right thickness, how to manage the thread, how to smooth the thread, and all kinds of other things, and I'm sure I still did it wrong, but I'm a little less than halfway through my stack of silk and, well....

I'd say that looks a lot like silk thread to me...

Is it even? No. Is it consistent? NO. Is it thread? Sure looks like it!

I'm... shockingly pleased with this. From some cursory research, apparently I can just... use this? But I'd really rather let it relax itself on a niddy noddy or something.

I do not have a niddy noddy.

I will have to improvise. I have some ideas, one of which is to use my easel, or possibly the tiny picnic table my dad made me. If there are enough leftover pipe bits in the basement I might use some of those. Hell, a long stick with two shorter sticks would do in a pinch.

So that was my Tuesday. I'm planning to do some fun art tomorrow for Thursday's blog, and also to work more on my various fiber projects for next Monday. For now, though, I'm going to go put some soothing lotion on my hands because I've got a hot spot on my left pointer finger (on the right hand side of my first knuckle from the tip) from pulling the hanks for spinning. Today was a blast, though, even with the intermittent downpours.

Actually, I have to talk for a minute about the weather.

We went from a day where the high felt like 94℉/34,4℃ to having the last few days being an ambient temperature of around... 74℉/23,3℃ . Sure, we've had rain every single day, and sure, the power keeps going out around town, but the weather has felt glorious.

If every single summer day could hover between 70-78℉/21,1-25,5℃  I would be very happy.

Especially with lower humidity.

Weather rant over lol.

I'm gonna go take care of that hotspot.

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Fiber Monday

 

In Which I... Didn't do much today...

So I promise, I made progress since last week on my pouch! It's just.... not a ton.

The front panel is now finished, at least.

I even did a border around it to round the bottom corners and even things up.

Sure, it's upside down, but it's done!

The panel itself is 50 stitches across by 80 rows, plus three sides bordered in single crochet with 3sc in each corner and one stitch per stitch or row. This means that the gusset, which will be 10 stitches across, will need to be about... 212 rows? Thereabouts? And the back & flap section will need to be about... 115/120 rows? Plus a button hole? I'll know more later, when I've finished all three parts. Then I'll make some sort of strapping system (probably starting with a pair of 5 stitch wide loops to put belts/straps through)

After all three panels (front, back, gusset) and the loops are finished, I'll stain them brown somehow and then sew on the leaf detail on the flap and sew all three panels & loops together. Hopefully it works.

If it doesn't, I'll make a shoulder strap and it'll be a purse.

One way or another, this will be finished by the end of the coming month. It has to be lol.

There are other projects I'm working on, but they're secondary.

I think that'll do it for tonight!

I hope you're all working on creative things and they're all going well!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Thursday Art Walk

 

In Which Today Was Rough

So after yesterday's ridiculous heat, I was excited that today would be in the 70s instead of the 80s. I was even looking forward to the idea of a rainy day inside, since we were supposed to get thunderstorms (which we did... eventually).

Unfortunately, pretty much as soon as I started to go to bed, someone got into an accident and knocked out power to my block.

At 1:20AM or so.

For seven. Hours.

Seven.

In the first hour or two, we still had internet, so I reported the outage to the power company (which is owned by Spain for some stupid reason... a country over 3200 miles (5150km) away from me.

The linemen are all great, though. They're local folks and they do their best with what they're given.

It's not their fault that the power was out for 7 hours.

Somehow, the freezer stayed 100% cold, though! When I checked after the power came back on, yeah the strawberry cheesecake ice cream was soft, but the lemonade bars were still frozen solid.

I don't do well when there's a crisis going on like the power being out. I prefer to know what's up, and I largely lose the ability to find out what's up when I don't have reliable internet access.

So I had very little idea what was going on, when the power would be back, etc. Especially since when the power first went out after 1, the outage map said it'd be back by 3:45AM...

I texted my folks at 6AM because they were out of town, let them know the fridge would probably be a loss and that the power was still out. Apparently the outage map had updated with a new time, which my dad relayed to me via text: 9AM

Tomorrow.

Uh...

Yeah I just about lost my mind. I don't like power outages - I'm afraid of the dark (my eyes and brain really like making shapes in the shadows...)

He'd misread the listing because his phone still thought it was the 26th. It was due back buy 9am today.

And it came back at 8:22AM.

Which I know.

Because I stayed up the whole night.

I have only slept about 20 minutes so far.  It's uh... It's a low-brain day.

So what did I do during the 7 hours of outage?

The first thing I did was make sure there was a flashlight near me. Then I snagged the book I've been reading - "Everybody Knows" by Jordan Harper.

I read the last two thirds of the book by flashlight light with a cat digging into my lap while my neighbors' generator hummed, distant machinery beeped, the train horn wailed, etc.

I finished the book...

Go read it. It's heavy, it's fast, it's hard-hitting and harder-nosed. Neon noir grit lit at its finest.

Made me set the book down mid-read and cuss at the author (in an "I'm so jealous of how well written this is! How dare you be so masterful!" way) twice.

After the book, I had plenty of time - it was only just past 4 when I was done with the book, so I went down to the kitchen, lit the stove with a lighter, made coffee without cream, and grabbed my sketchbook.

I worked out a little sketch in pencil.

the finished sketch, taken under the light of a Maglight

Once I finished the sketch, I puttered around the house before carrying the sketchpad upstairs and running primary inks with my Pigma Micron brush pen.

I really liked the way the inks looked at this stage and decided not to do colors

With the primary inks done, I set it aside, did some digging around for a non-refrigerated breakfast (pretzels, it turned out). Finally, I gathered a few more things - the sweater I'm frogging into yarn, a pair of shorts I wanted to try repairing, my sewing kit, my yarn ball winder - and brought them down to the living room, where there was more space & light. Then I took another pass at the drawing with the brush pen!

"Power Outage Again!"; ink on watercolor paper; 2023
[DEDBERT]

Once I was done drawing and inking, I set my art aside and took out the sweater, which started coming apart even better. From one section of buttonhole/chest piece and one section of bottom-ribbing, I ended up with three balls of yarn!

Which I then set aside because I was ready for a nap.

I am beat, guys. I'm probably just gonna try to go to sleep.

I hope you all had productive art weeks!

Go Enjoy Something!

FC

Talk About Tuesday

 

In Which Heat And I Are Not Friends

I could not sleep at all last night. Between the heat and how hard it was for me to find my collection of tank tops, I was exhausted. I got up at 4:30AM to go to the bathroom and just... gave up. The sun was rising, the birds were singing, the cat was curious.

I got some coffee and went back to bed. The second time I got up, I went down for a second hefty mug of coffee and curled up on the couch while my head sloshed. It honestly felt like my skull was filled with hot water, I was so tired. Eventually I dozed until around noon, then I got my day started.

Today's temperatures were about the same as yesterday, but we had about 20% more humidity so it really just sucked.

I'm sleepy, I'm annoyed at how little I've done on the crocheted pouch, and I'm creatively washed out. It's hard to write when all you can think about is the way your armpits are sticking to themselves or the way you can feel steam building under your spine where you lay on your bed.

It's hard to draw, too - holding a pencil makes my fingers hot, and frankly, I just can't think of something to draw.

I'll figure it out by the end of tomorrow, but yeesh.

I'm pooped.

And we are not getting relief until Sunday. Our daily highs are 80℉ (26,7℃) and up, power rates just increased by apparently enough to double our bill, and we already had a brownout yesterday so it's just gonna be a really crummy summer, I think.

I hope they don't jack up the water bill, too, because I foresee a plentitude of cool showers in my future.

We'll see what the rest of the week brings, but I'm not going to fight through a heat headache to do art. If I make art, I make art.

Meanwhile, I've just dug up a bunch of old black pants that don't fit me anymore (and won't unless I drop an unreasonable amount of weight - one pair is from middle school, when I was about 13), which I might turn into various projects, I've got a pair of shorts to repair the waistband of, a winter coat in need of a zipper.

I've got work to do, in short, and I don't think this is the week it will happen.

In fact, I think tonight is just going to be for watching videos and relaxing until the glowing hate ball (the sun) rises again.

I'll do my best to keep posting.

Go Enjoy Something (maybe the beach if it's hot where you are, too),

FC

Fiber Monday

In Which Slow Progress Is Still Progress

I am typing this from a room that is only now coming down from about 90℉(32,2℃). It was so hot today. Ironically, the day I hung out at a lake with my family was quite comfy, but today was hot and unpleasant. At least it's not as humid today as it was last week. We didn't use the AC.

Understandably, most of my progress was made at the lake, not at home.

As you can see, it's getting bigger!

Again, this is eventually going to be a pocket that will be dyed more earthy-tones. I've also made several test squares - 10sc x 10 rows - which I'll experiment with using various dye matter. Maybe the winner will be iron, maybe it will be coffee, possibly tea.

Maybe I'll just dip dye each panel of the pocket into tea, then coffee, then iron? Who knows.

All I know is that I want it brown, but I don't have any brown thread.

I have brown yarn, so if I cannot get the pouch to look right, I'll just use that.

But uh...

It's worsted-weight acrylic.

It's uh.

It's gonna be toasty as heck if I do that, and September might not be the month for a hot pocket.

That is an intentional joke.

But seriously, the acrylic is 100% final resort. Too sweaty.

My next closest idea is some wool sock yarn, and that, too, would be overwarm.

I hope this project works out, especially since I'd like to make a couple more of them...

As for tonight, it's finally down to about 78℉(25,5℃) in my room and I desperately want to lay down and vent the body heat I've accrued throughout the day lol.

Go Enjoy Something

FC