weaving in my blood?

I received a " my mom loves me " package from my mama in Germany and with all the goodies she send me a stash of cotton kitchen towels.

At closer inspection they did not look store bought so i got on the phone and called my mom to find out where she got them.

And here is the story:

apparently those towels are about 50-55 years old and hand woven by her mom!

I didn't know my grandma was a weaver! I knew she was a seamstress making clothes for the wealthy people during and after the war. Looks like she also wove a lot. My grandma passed away 15 years ago and my mom told me when they cleaned out the house she had a big floor loom with lots of heddles( my mom thinks at least 8-12) and a bigger (she thinks about a at least 40 inch ) table loom.

I was afraid to ask what they did with it but asked anyway:

i shouldn't have :( , i now will forever have the picture of my dad hacking the looms to bits and burning them in the back yard in my head!!

What a crying shame! those looms where at least 50-60 years old.

The towels are woven with sewing thread thin yarn. Some of them have a very tiny waffle weave pattern ,some are plain weave.

I will have nightmares about this for a while.

But at least i got a little more insight of my love for fiber arts.

Pretty Shuttle

I piddled around with the saw and sander this morning and made this very pretty Stick Shuttle:



of course i immediately put it in my etsy shop :)
It's 16" long and has a bevelled edge so it can be used to beat in the weft too.
I'll make some more in different lengths in the course of this week but should someone want one , let me know and I'll make one for you.
I'll also make some inkle shuttles and I'll experiment with a rag shuttle design.
Fortunately we have oodles and oodles of these beautiful cedar boards left so i wont be running out of material soon.

sock order finished...on to new project

I finally finished this huge sock order i've been working on for several weeks.
This is just half of it...


now i will try to finish the towels on the loom ( i hope my arm will be ok) and i already have picked out another set of towels using hand dyed 8/2 cotton yarn.
i also want to play with the little diy inkle loom i made a couple of weeks ago.
Plus i need to dye some yarn and card some fiber to stock up my store. and i need to wash all these pounds of raw fleece i have stashed away since last year plus i want to spin some too... so much to play with sooo little time...
i guess i start with the towels and get them off the loom first.
i got an appointment at the bone and joint clinic wednesday ,so i'll stress my arm a little the next couple of days and see if it flares up again, if it does i'll see what the bone doc has to say about it...

I've warped my Loom!!

After dreaming all night about warping and weft and yarn and heddles and reeds and....and...and...

i just had to try it today!

and it was really not that bad (what good instructions can do , thank you Deb Chandler !

I went through my yarn stash (which is really huge) and choose the most cheap yarn i could find, since this is just for practice i won't use my good yarn.

I used my warping board i made last year to measure out yarn for dyeing (and used it only once for that ). I just drilled a few more holes here and there and layed out my warp on it.

Eventually i'll have a better one but it works good right now.(notice the book right with it :)

got both warps done:

(notice again the book :)
That was really easy!

Next i sleyed the reed :

a little tedious but that was easy too !! I'm using my spinning wheel orifice hook for that,works great.

and then i threaded the heddles ,again with the orifice hook:
halfway done

finished!! :

that was not bad at all,also a bit tedious but kind of fun. I had a broken string in between but i fixed that plus i had two of the heddles that where crossed but i also fixed that(patts herself on the back )

i think im really going to like this!!!

it's now 10:30 and im going to bed, sooo tired ....

more tomorrow :)

New Adventure

Well, what can i say? It's been a couple of month since my last post (I'm busy!!)

With the holidays and sock knitting i've not had time for anything.

I'm really not even supposed to be here right now but i want everybody to see my new addition (and excuse to buy MORE FIBER ).

After weeks of looking and comparing i bought a Loom!

First i had my heart set on a Ridgid Heddle loom from Kromski but then i decided i wanted something a little more complicated( why? i don't know , i'm just that way ).

Anyway's, i thought a four heddle ,25 inch table loom would be just perfect.

e-bay here i come!

I had about $350-$400 to spend (yes, all sock money (knitted about two dozend since beginning november). and lo and behold there was a loom like that up for auction. i bid and i bid and someone else bid...and bid .. until it went over my budget) and i was crushed.

So.... Ravelry, here i come!

i put a ISO in one of the weavers market places and got an offer the same day! A Shacht 4 heddle ,25 inch loom for $250 plus $50 shipping. Used but in great condition .

Boy, did i pounce on that!!

and here it is:

unasembled:

assembled:

That thing is BIG !!

Now i'm going to have to figure out how to warp it and actually weave on it.

Already ordered books and a DVD, theyre on the way.

So, stay tuned for more, i will really try to update this regularly.

Now, back to sock knitting !!

And so it beginns...

Well, I finally did it,I joined the masses and jumped in the blog pool!

I'm probably not going to be very good at this,at least to start with,but maybe as time goes on I'll get better(hope is eternal ).So if you will bear with me i"ll give it a shot.

Mainly i started this blog to share tips, tricks, links and information on anything i found helpful or might be helpful for someone knitting, spinning, dyeing and fiber preparation .

Also i will use this blog to rant and rave about the cancer monkey riding my back and last but not least to promote my little online shop at http://www.skimpysmom.etsy.com/ where i sell my handmade wares.Well you didn't think i did all this just for selfless reasons ,did you?

So, before we go on I'd like to introduce SKIMPY since i get asked a lot who skimpy is and how in the hell that poor child ended up with a name like that.

Behold "SKIMPY" also known as "SKIMPMAN", "SKIMPERS", SKIMPYDOODLE" and some other names i really don't want to put down here(never know when kids might look in).

I started knitting when i was about 6 years old. My mother ,who is a crafty lady( in more ways than one), also taught me sewing and needlepoint/cross stitching.

I got away from needle arts in my early thirty's, until i got reacquainted with knitting during my radiation treatment for breast cancer (more about this black time in my live later). Starting with scarves(about 25), sweaters(4)i finally got hung up on socks.
Of course that branched out after awhile into dyeing my own yarn into spinning my own yarn into preparing fiber from scratch(fleeces, mostly raw) so i can spin and knit it . Of course that involved a spinning wheel, a drum carder,lots of wool and... nowhere to put it. Our little house started busting out of its seams. Wool,yarn,needles,dyestuff covered every flat surface in the house.One memorable afternoon when my poor suffering husband almost sat on a pair of dpn's we decided its time to get a "STUDIO" for my stuff (not the word my husband used).So we acquired a 12x24 ready made cabin and had it set next to our house. It's a diamond in the rough yet,it still needs to be insulated,wired and piped but...it's my little heaven where i spend most of my time until hubster gets home or it gets too freaking hot in here (no air conditioner yet either)

I got all my "stuff" in here now,except my dye things,since i have no water in here yet.
Speaking of dyeing, i better get to it.More later....