Monday Rambles

When I published Magic in the Water, I realized I would need to attend fibre events in order to show people the book in order to sell it.  Since having just one item to sell wasn't going to pay the expenses of renting a booth space never mind travelling to get to the event, I decided to sell yarns as well.  I tried very hard to stock yarns that other vendors did not carry.  Which worked, sort of.  I wound up importing yarns that I thought were special and nice to weave with in hopes that others would be attracted to them, too.

In order to make my yarns even more different, I stocked a lot of hand dyed yarns, some dyed by others, some dyed by myself.

This yarn is one of the ones I imported and dyed myself.  It is a 2/20 silk, quite nice, dip dyed variegated.

After going through not one but two major (and not a few minor) health issues, I decided that now I was in my 60's I needed to stop doing so many things.  It was taking up far too much time, space and budget to order in cases of yarn, skein it off, dye it, attach labels, store it and then schlep it across the country in hopes people would buy.

So for the past week Doug has been turning these skeins into coned yarn.  Because in order to weave with it, it needs to be taken out of skein form into something more efficient.

This is the 3rd bucket he is starting to fill and there are enough skeins for at least two more.  That's a lot of silk scarves coming up!

And once gain the issue of selvedges has raised it's head on one of the chat groups.  If you want to know my thoughts on selvedges click on the label to the right hand side.

But here are a few shots of some of my textiles and their selvedges.  All of them are some sort of twill and none of them have been woven with a floating selvedge or an end feed/delivery shuttle.

It is not necessary to use a floating selvedge to get a 'good' selvedge.  As I've posted before selvedges are not that simple.  While some people may find that they get better results with them than without them, they are not 'necessary'.

As always, if you use them and like them, carry on.  If like me you don't, try to find out why your selvedges are not good and then fix that problem (or problems).