Weekend Project: Time for a Change

If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.

-- Charles Kettering

So you have probably already noticed my big project for the weekend - I updated my blog layout! Two years seemed long enough for one background - and I've been wanting to change to black text on white background for a while. I am often torn between wildly, colorfully exuberant and clean, simple lines - this background had a little bit of both. ;)

I hope you like it too! :)

I did get a few other things done. Xiaomei came over and we made a skirt together. We drafted the pattern by following instructions from this book:

We picked this simple, elastic-waist, a-line skirt:




The pattern was simple, so I took the opportunity to show her how to do French seams. She was very happy with how it came out! :)

Finally, I got started working on the LAST set of Christmas kitchen towels. Did I mention that this is my very LAST set?

The first step is to measure out 402, 4 yard long lengths of yarn. I lay out a 4 yard long path on my warping board and then follow it over and over again, as I measure out the lengths that I need. Here is the first third:

One of the coolest bits is the "x" that you build in at one end. This "x" is what keeps the threads from getting hopelessly tangled - when you go to put each thread sequentially into the loom, you can always tell unambiguously which thread is next because it is at the top of the cross. Threads can't "jump the line" and get out of order...




It's a pretty ingenious system - of course, women have been weaving for 20,000 years, so we've gotten a lot of the kinks worked out of the system! ;)

This set of towels (by the way, this is my LAST set!) will be in a bright color palette - red, orange, yellow and bright blue.

The "instructions" that come with the kit tell me how many threads to measure out in each color - this chart shows me that I need 28 threads of red (color A), 10 threads of orange (color B), 6 threads of blue (color C), 10 threads of yellow (color D), etc.



And that pretty much warped - oops, I mean "wrapped" - up my weekend.

I hope you had a great weekend and are ready to start a new week! :)