Tag: Design

  • Makers Monday – Progress Report on the Chakra Wall

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    The Chakra Wall is coming into focus. I\’ve been hanging the ojos (which means \”eye\” in Spanish) from a specific central spot and coming out of it to the right as though expanding from that origin point.

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    This is the wall I\’m using. It\’s late in the year here, when I took this shot; November is mostly rain and getting cold. It seemed like a good day to start the project so I came out and swept down the spiderwebs.

    Seattle actually has something called, \”Spider Season.\” I\’m not sure if this is a scientific thing or just something the locals say, but man. Those little girls like to weave themselves some web.

    My husband, who is not an arachnophobe like me, Dear Reader, told me that most spiders we see are female. The males are smaller and don\’t live nearly as long. I like referring to them as \”she,\” because it makes them less terrifying.

    The reason that\’s relevant is down on the bottom right of the image are some cardboard boxes used for landscaping (you put them down as weed barrier and put dirt on top of them); we have a truly epic-sized black spider living there. So brushing down the spiders with a broom is a life skill here – particularly if you want to create an art project outside in their demesnes.

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    I set the ojos down so I could see the ones I had completed so far. The ones on the bottom with the reds are for the Root Chakra. I have one orange one for Sacral, one with yellows (more goldenrod, really) for Solar Plexus, and a green one for Heart.

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    I originally wanted them to go up, but realized that physics is a thing. The porch only goes to the right just past the glass doors, and I\’m not great with heights. So for now, I\’m going out as far as I can reach from the ground, and later as I finish more ojos I\’ll involve the husband to help me with the ladder and a hammer.

    Next up are the next three chakras: Throat (light blue); Third Eye (indigos), and Crown (violets, white, and silver).

    Keep Making, my friends!

  • Makers Monday – Ojos de Dios and the Chakras – What Is a Chakra?

    Makers Monday – Ojos de Dios and the Chakras – What Is a Chakra?

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    I thought I\’d take a moment and discuss Chakras, so this project makes a little more sense.

    Chakras are an ancient concept from India that were developed 1500 to 500 BCE (Before Current Era). They are conceived as wheels, and are seen to be located in the human body. In general, there are seven chakras in the body:

    • The Root Chakra  – grounding, connection to the earth
    • The Sacral Chakra – primal relationships, sexuality, creativity
    • The Solar Plexus Chakra – will, intent, personal power
    • The Heart Chakra – relationships, love, friendship
    • The Throat Chakra – speaking our truth
    • The Third Eye Chakra – clear sight, vision, intuition
    • The Crown Chakra – connection to the divine, collective consciousness

    The seven chakras have all sorts of things that are representative – sounds, colors, concepts, etc. For our purposes, the colors are the most relevant:

    • The Root Chakra – reds
    • The Sacral Chakra – oranges
    • The Solar Plexus Chakra – yellows
    • The Heart Chakra – greens
    • The Throat Chakra – light blues
    • The Third Eye Chakra – indigos
    • The Crown Chakra – violets, whites, silvers

    I\’ll show you next week how some of these are coming together in practice, and how they look on the wall with each other.

  • Makers Monday – Ojos de Dios and the Chakras

    Makers Monday – Ojos de Dios and the Chakras

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    I\’ve talked about ojos de Dios, or eyes of G*d, before. I enjoy making them, because they\’re relatively simple to weave and they adapt to many different uses. They can be made for prayers and spells, protection, to commemorate new projects or milestones, and for art.

    I had a dream recently, where I saw a series of ojos on the side of the house. When I woke up, it was as though I could still see it. It felt so vivid and real, I walked outside to look.

    I had to laugh. The place where I\’d seen them has two big windows right in the middle of it.

    Hmm.

    But there\’s a large wall on the back of my house that would totally work…

    And thus, a project was born.

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    I thought I\’d share some progress pictures. It feels so good to start making things again. I look back and my pictures and it\’s not that I haven\’t made things; but I\’ve definitely felt stuck for a long while. It\’s been so fun working on a larger project that will take some time to complete.

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    This one is for the Throat Chakra, also called the Fifth Chakra. It\’s about using our voice and finding our power.

    I picked a luminous black filament with blues and pinks for the center. It\’s not coming through very well on the camera, but it\’s eye-catching.

    I also varied the weave; that part toward the edges by wrapping around the arm of the ojo without weaving across. This presented more of a gap in the weaving.

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    I forgot to weave the hangar like I normally do, since I didn\’t want to use the center black yarn. It\’s too springy and also a very thin filament, not robust for hanging in weather.

    I tied the last two yarns to make the hangar, which is something I don\’t usually do but I like how it came out. I used an overhand knot at the end to make it hangable.

    Next Monday, come back and I\’ll share the wall and the beginning of the Chakra wall.

    Cheers!

    ~Noony

  • The Flora and Fauna Report – Progress This Week

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    The idea of the Flora and Fauna Report came from Julia Cameron\’s book, The Artist\’s Way. She describes getting letters from a relative that she described as a \’flora and fauna report,\’ because they were about all the goings on in and out of her life. I loved the idea, because all it asks of us is to show up as we are. Kind of like meditation. 🙂

    Today is a very cold and clear, sunny day in the Pacific Northwest. I am working on a chakra ojos de dios project, which I\’ll be sharing more about in subsequent posts; but today, I wanted to share a little of our goings on.

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    The cell booster is up! Man, that was an ordeal. We needed this part, and that part, and the other part; we thought we had everything and needed… two bolts.

    That\’s it. Two little bolts. No big deal, unless you don\’t have it, and then it\’s a big deal.

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    I added two more ojos to the project (the ones on the right); the lower one is for Voice and the upper right is for Third Eye.

    I\’ll have more in a series on this project, so stay tuned!

  • A Is For… The A to Z Challenge, of Course!

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    Welcome to the A to Z Challenge! I\’m getting started a little later than I intended, as I\’m writing this on the 2nd of April, but I figure, leap, and the net will appear.

    This image is from a series that I did a while back as an inspiration deck. I used the seven chakra colors plus brown. It was a fun project to think about, to come up with images that represented the color to me if not the chakra itself.

    This month, for the A to Z Challenge, I will walk through my studio as I see it, not necessarily as I would show it to a visitor. I\’m naturally a right-brained thinker, but since I have to live and work in the left-dominated neurotypical world I\’ve learned to adapt. This month, I decided to try something different, and just post what I felt called to post for myself.

    This blog, if you haven\’t visited before, came about because I realized that I seem to have a learning difference in translating things from 2D to 3D. I\’m hyperverbal (and thus a novelist), but I wasn\’t always that way. I\’ve always been a storyteller, but being raised in an abusive household I learned to hide my natural mode and survive as a left-brained thinker. I got very good at it, to the point that I now make a living in an analytical field and have an MBA in Finance.

    In 2016, with the American election and the kickoff of what we now know is a strong Christofascist movement in our country, I started to feel seriously overwhelmed by everything. I didn\’t realize at the time what was happening. The writing was the first to go, then the knitting, design work, and eventually, my weaving. I have done a few pieces here and there but nothing approaching my previous \”normal.\”

    It\’s been a journey but I\’m finding myself closer to my \”old me\” than I\’ve been in a long while, and I decided to take the opportunity of the A to Z challenge to challenge myself – to write, to show up at the keyboard daily, and to think about things that make me passionate.

    And today, that\’s craft: Knoontime Knitting: One Writer\’s Journey Into 3-D. We changed it when we did a blog redesign, to \”Where We Let the Squirrels Play,\” and that fits too. Ultimately, it\’s a philosophical discussion about craft as practice and a showcase, for myself if no one else, of what I did really do. A witnessing of my own process; midwifing my own creativity.

    I hope you\’ll join me, and that herein you will find some small inspiration for your own art, whatever that is.

    Welcome.

    Here are the rest of the images from the series:

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  • Knitting Notes For Saturday

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    I realized that I hadn\’t been posting about the projects I\’m working on, so I took some pictures last evening to get caught up. A few years ago, I started a course on Craftsy called \”Wee Ones,\” by Susan B. Anderson; making little stuffed elephant toys, and then set it aside. I picked it up a few weeks ago and finished this little guy.

    Nadya was sitting next to me and wanted to see too.

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    Maybe not THAT close…

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    She decided to sniff it a couple times.

    The eyes are made with some antique buttons from my grandmother\’s button collection.

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    Here\’s a close-up. It\’s a cute little design.

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    And in other news, I decided to try making a koi fish. Susan B. Anderson has a little fish pattern and I used this to adapt the pattern and make it bigger.

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    This will be the face. I stuffed it too much at first and then realized I\’m not making a sock, I\’m making a fish, and it needs to be flatter.

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    This end will be the tail. It\’s made in similar fashion to socks.

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    The tail is made on two needles, but still knitting in the round. I\’ll post pics when it\’s done.

    I\’m thinking I\’m going to try another one with a lace pattern to simulate scale. And also one with overlaid fins. We\’ll see; still playing around with it.

  • Friday Night Musings

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    I was chatting with a friend online this evening and shared a picture of my pin loom weaving box and realized I hadn\’t shared it on here. I haven\’t shared much on here recently at all, really.

    As we collectively learn to navigate our catastrophically changed reality with COVID, it\’s important I think to realize the collective stress we are under. It\’s attractive to fantasize about all the \”things\” we\’ll get done in this new in-between-time, but the reality is that stress seeps into everything like poison into a creek. Particularly for us here in the States, that new reality is horrific: as of this writing, over 150,000 dead and 5 million infected.

    I find it hard to focus. I am, though, keeping up with crafts. Oddly, I haven\’t been pin loom weaving this month but knitting – I\’ll post some pics of that at another time. What I wanted to share for now is a glimpse into my pin loom weaving because it\’s something I can do when my body is too stressed, my hands too sore from stress, and my brain unable to count for lace repeats.

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    As I shared the pics with my friend today, I remembered that I\’d started weaving for a purse to replace one that my mother crocheted. It\’s a project bag and it got so ratty and falling apart but I didn\’t want to get rid of it. It wasn\’t out of a pleasant sentimentality, since my mother was a horrible child abuser, but I still held onto it out of emotional attachment. I finally decided that\’s goofy, I don\’t want to drag around such negativity with me – particularly with my art.

    And thus the idea for a knitting bag was born. The weavies are done, and next up is to sew the pieces together.

    On the rigid heddle weaving front, we\’re getting ready to start our weavealong in the Yarnworker School of Rigid Heddle Weaving. (If you\’re a weaver, why not join us? More info here.) I\’m so excited because I\’m experimenting with some endangered wool called Churro. I\’ll post pics of that at another time. But I was noodling about my weaving tonight and recalled reading about Morse code weaving in the Inventive Weaving on a Little Loom by Syne Mitchell. I decided to look it up again and there\’s a Morse code translator! Check it out, here.

    I thought it might be fun to try weaving a poem, and I even have one picked out to play with. I\’ll keep noodling it and if it comes about, I\’ll share pictures with you.

    What are you up to these days, Dear Reader?

  • Make Something Monday – and I Cleaned Out a Bin!

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    Yesterday, I got a wild hair to rummage in my craft storage bins for some yarn that I bought waaaay back when I first started to knit.  I put it away, thinking I\’d make a sleeveless sweater or something for the holidays.

    Only, I\’d bought four skeins, which isn\’t enough for a sweater.

    And so it\’s languished in the bin for ~cof~ years ~cof~.  I also got some very difficult, fussy eyelash yarn of an eye-catching red.  I tried mixing it with this gorgeous stuff and it looked awful.  Rather than looking like a fur border, it looked like, well, a mess.

    I\’m not sure what magical alchemy happened yesterday.  Mercury is retrograde; maybe it\’s that.  No clue.  But in I walked to my office, let my fingers do the walking through my binventory (I made up a word!!), and voila – new project glee.

    Only one problem.  What the eff do I make, if not the sweater I\’d been procrastinating?

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    The yarn is a lovely, skooshie Plymouth 24k in a red and gold, complete with gold flecks.  I could do a rectangular shawl with thin tassels, (once I learn how to spell tassels ~fail~).  I could do a necklace or beads.

    Hmm.  That\’s actually not a bad idea.  I have four balls of it; I could use three for a triangle shawl and the one remaining ball for some jewelry.

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    I started with a garter stitch border and then started yarn over increases three stitches in on each side.  When I had enough of an edge to make the point strong, I started two yarn overs in the center.  I\’m going to do Little Arrowhead Lace from Barbara Walker\’s Volume I, and then in the center, I think I\’ll do budding branch once I have enough on either side of the center spine.

    Oh.  As I\’m writing this, there are really two centers, one on either side of the spine.  Hmm.  I can do buds, but have them mirror each other.  Facing center, or facing out?  I\’ll noodle on that, but I\’m thinking facing center.

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    I got pretty far yesterday.

    And I did not allow Kolya to eat the yarn.  Or chew on the needles.  Or steal the project bag so he could gnaw on the plastic.

    Right.  I decided to be a textile artist in a house full of cats.  Brilliant.

    What are you making this Monday?

  • Work In Progress Wednesday

    Work In Progress Wednesday

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    I looked at the ratty holder I\’ve been using for my transit card the other day and got embarrassed.  It\’s falling apart!  The leather\’s all rubbed off on the corners and it was built to hold a cell phone that I haven\’t had for two phones now.

    I\’m a knitter.

    This should be a solvable problem, yes?

    Ergo, I\’m making a small knit pouch wallet for my transit card.  I decided to try the woven stitch, but it curls a lot at the bottom.  I may add an edge of seed stitch or do the whole thing in seed stitch, we\’ll see.  I\’m still farting around with the swatch.

    But I\’m having fun designing again!  That\’s almost better news than the fact that I\’m knitting.

    What about you, Dear Reader?  What\’s your Work In Progress for Wednesday?

  • Make Something Monday – The Jewel Scarf

    Make Something Monday – The Jewel Scarf

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    The Jewel Scarf is done.  It\’s nice and soft.   I\’m not sure what I\’m going to work on next; maybe a top-down sweater.  For now, here are some more views:

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    I like long scarves, but I think this will fit well on the person for whom I designed it.
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    It actually drapes well, which is nice.  I haven\’t blocked it yet; this is just off the needles.  But I like the flow of the fabric even without blocking.

    What about you, Dear Reader? What are you making?

     

  • Stash Sunday – Becoming

    Stash Sunday – Becoming

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    It\’s coming together.  Slowly.

    2015 has been a difficult year as regards output.  Most of the work has been internal; journaling and the like.  When Rachel was in town in October, we bought this yarn and I started farting around with some lace patterns, and realized I needed to drawn it out in a chart because the swatch was decidedly not cooperating.  As in, sticking out its tongue at me and going \”Nya-nya-nya.\”

    I finally finished the first of the two skeins yesterday.  If this were a scarf for myself, it would be way too short – one, I\’m five-eight; two, I like loooong scarves.

    But it\’s not for me; it\’s for Rachel.

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    She\’s a similar height to Leticia (my dressmaker\’s form).  This length comes right about to her hips, which is actually where Rachel prefers her scarves because she is using them more for an accessory, given that she lives in the desert; whereas I, living in Chicago, am looking for warmth and the ability to wrap it around my head and my neck several times.  So yay, it fits!

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    Here\’s a view around back, and there\’s plenty of room for the second skein to make it a full length scarf for her.  I\’d like it if it could be longer, but the third skein is a different color (and only one skein of that color, so it\’s probably going to be made into an Amazeball or a truffle; I haven\’t decided yet.)

    An Amazeball: I came up with this a couple days ago when my bud and I were sharing hard-won kudos with working out.  I thought, we need some kind of trophy or something that we can mail around in our group of friends, and whoever gets it gets to take a picture of themselves with it, and gets to decide to wins it next.  But we need something, and I figured a ball of yarn (not a ball of unmade yarn, but a knitted ball) would be a cool trophy.  A truffle, if you recall, is a creature from our Persis Chronicles that\’s a cross between an aardvark and a cocker spaniel.  I think I\’ll modify an elephant pattern and make a small one; only problem is, I think I need more yarn than I have for this project, which is why the Amazeball.

    Glad you asked?

    What about you, Dear Reader?  How long do you like your scarves?

     

     

  • Tuesday Tips: Keeping Notes

    Tuesday Tips: Keeping Notes

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    I just realized something as I was looking at my design notes for the lace wrap I\’m making.  My notes go back to about 2010.  That\’s like five years, sports fans!  Cool!  So, I figured I\’d share some reasons why I think Keeping Notes is the Thing To Do:

    1. Keep track of your current project. This way, if you have to set it aside and you forget about it for a month or ~cof~ year, you\’ll remember what you were doing.
    2. Keep notes of stuff you are planning that you might make someday.  In other words, it doesn\’t have to be the Notebook of Things I Will Make.  It becomes a NOTEbook.  Of notes.
    3. I found a list of gifts I wanted to make from 2011.  I haven\’t made everything on there, and the ideas are good ones, so why not crib from that for the 2016 gift planning list?
    4. You can use it for the 2016 Gift Planning List.  (See how I did that?)
    5. Pro-tip: if you get yourself a pad with grids on it, then you can use it for regular notes, in words, but also for design concepts if you\’re learning how to use charts (which I am).  In fact, that picture up there ^^^ is my vereh first real chart.  (My vereh first unreal chart is actually page one of the notebook, but I couldn\’t figure out charting, so there you go.)
    6. Number six in my list of five things:  the point of number 5 is that this is a work in progress.  Keeping notes, and reminding yourself that they\’re notes and notes by their nature are informal, reminds us that we are learning, always developing, and that it\’s not important to get it right the first time.  It\’s just important to show up with yarn, needles, a pad of paper and a writing implement.

    Happy making!