Girls in new balloon hats play with hula hoops

I like the new location! It’s flat! No pond! People who carry hoops to outdoor gigs will understand–no hauling hoops back up the hill when people drop them. No worrying about hoops rolling into the pond. (It only happened once, but I had to wait two hours for the hoop to drift within reach of the edge of the pond.)

Girls work on multiple hoops, and the big hoop, at Art in the Park

Herman Park drew a good crowd. Incidentally, it is the site of my first “professional” gig, when I took hoops to the BRAC Celebration party (Seymour Johnson AFB was NOT closed…) in 2005. Lots of people hooped then, and the organizers gave me one of the unclaimed door prizes for working so hard to help people have fun.

People playing with hoops at Art in the Park, Goldsboro NC

Plans are afoot to move sponsorship to Goldsboro Parks & Rec, and then repeat this event every first Sunday throughout the summer. We’re already booked for June, but plan on being there in July and following. Stop by!

Boys hooping at Art in the Park

Look at the Parks and Rec summer camp schedule, too, to see if hooping becomes a part of the program! Too soon to tell if this will be a hoop-making workshop, or simply hoops to play with in the course of the day’s activities.

First, I selected all the tans and browns on hand, sorting out the grays that are stored in the same box. I didn’t want to mix gray in with this color story. I did this step in the evening, but I couldn’t continue in artificial light. When the sun lit up the living room through the sky light the next day, I could make more refined color decisions.

I had a much bigger selection than I realized and decided to make two rugs from this selection effort, rather than just one. It will be interesting to see how different the two rugs look when I’m done. They may look like a matched set, or they turn out to be unrelated.

Accent colors will be added to the basic beige-to-brown shading

After I’d sorted the browns from light to dark, I added a pile of accent colors, using color suggestions from a collection of magazines, paint chips, color books, and my own intuition to guide my selections. Color wheels, per se, rarely suggest enough variation to give really useful guidance in textiles.

The accent colors get sorted by shade, and then checked using glasses with red lenses.  Red lenses take the “color” out of the world, leaving only the light and dark shades of gray scale.  It’s the same as taking a black and white picture, only easier to flip in and out of as I move fiber from one pile to another.

Sorted fiber, shot in gray scale, to help identify the lights and darks

Now that I’m looking at the picture, I may move the peach ball in the lower left corner into shade #2.  It’s a bit dark in both the gray scale and in the colored image to stay in shade #1.

Same image as above, showing shades 1-3, displayed in color

The next step in creating a rug is to tie up large balls of each shade, so that when I’m knitting, I don’t have to stop and think about what color comes next. I’ll do this when I’m talking on the phone, or watching a movie on TV. It doesn’t take the same amount of attention and thought as making the selections.

The photo below is a stack of fiber in the “November” colorway, which is all the colors of the late fall landscape after the leaves have fallen. I can’t do anything very interesting with a random assortment of colors, even if they do play well with each other.

Pile of mixed fabrics in the November color story

This photo shows what happens when I sort the individual fabrics by shade, light to dark. Dark browns and charcoal in the lower right, pale fawn and fog above. (The camera I used for blog illustration isn’t very good at capturing subtle differences.) I’m still not sure what I’m going to weave from this palette. Pretty sure I’ll add accents from a different part of the color wheel. Burgundy wants to be here, for sure.

November color story, sorted into eight shades

When I have shades separated, I can start to think about design. You can’t see it in this picture, but the stacks are different heights.  This tells me volume–some stripes will be wider than others.

This fiber isn’t committed to any particular rug yet.  It’s simply part of the process of making all rugs:  to have a pretty clear idea of how much of each shade and color story is on hand when I’m ready to cut weft.

Beautiful bad news--thunderstorms roll into hoop gig at North Hills Mall

The hoops and I went to a fund raiser for the Lymphoma Leukemia Society on Saturday in North Raleigh.  The forecast called for a chance of thunderstorms.  When I first set up, the day was clear and hot, but before long, the sky turned briefly beautiful–towering clouds catching the sunlight–and then dark.

Hoops wait out a thunderstorm blowing through North Hills Mall

It poured. The white cylinders at the legs of my tent are 80# of tent weights (an 80# sack of concrete poured into a 10′ length of 3″ PVC pipe, cut into four pieces). The tent weights held for a while, but when I saw the wind really pick up, I had to run out to the tent to hold it down in the middle. Way too many nice cars around the site to risk having the tent blow away.

With limited exposure, water won’t hurt hoops, but they’re not as much fun to use when they’re wet. We hooped for a while after the first rain storm passed, but when a second wave of clouds started to gather, I packed up and headed east to my gig at Art in the Park. I made it ahead of the rain.

Sheets drying on the line

Color. Nothing but color. (And a Chihuahua.)

Purple & pink sheets drying in the breeze

Basting a pillowcase across a long fringe on a rag rug

My work as a collector of used textiles (and sewing machines, for that matter) gives me a huge stack of pillowcases. I basted one across each end of this rug (the one used in the header shot for the website) and tossed the rug in the washing machine (cold). Line dry.

Yank out the basting stitches, and the fringe came out perfect!

Unretouched, uncombed fringe after being washed in a pillowcase

Sometimes, however, the colors just jump out of the laundry basket and hit me in the eye.

A new color story appears in a pile of recycled clothing

I found these garments the other day. As I carried them out of the truck, I thought, “Darn, but those colors go well together!” I photographed them outside to capture the best sense of the color.

Of course, the six or seven or eight different shades in the picture above will turn into 60 or 70 or 80 by the time I’m done adding all the blendy bits.  Freddie Moran says, and I expect Jinny Beyer would agree, “10 colors don’t work.  100 do.”  I’ve used that as a guide since my first or second rug.

Stay tuned.  I need a name for this one.

I did all the math, I thought, and bought 50 spools of 8/4 carpet warp, at 800 yards per spool. Jean Vollrath had given me a rack that would hold 340 cones, so I thought I had the cone-management problem solved and didn’t pursue any other solution. She had never used this rack. It was built to hold an 800-yard warp used in “continuous” rag rug weaving, with each cone providing one of the threads on the loom. (An 800-yard warp would cost approximately $2000 to buy, and I didn’t want to make that financial commitment at this point.)

I set up my spools, threaded the tensioner (also a gift from Jean, who is preparing to move and therefore cleaning out some of the weaving equipment she now knows she will not use), and set to work.

First attempt: 20 spools on a 340-spool warp rack

Well, we don’t know that anyone ever did use this rack. What I discovered is that the spools gently bounced themselves off the dowels. It took 1.5 hours to wind on 100 yards from this rack, given how many times I had to stop and chase cones around the room, and start over. I suspect this section of warp will be horribly twisted, too–it wasn’t happy when I sleyed it through the reed.

Had I known I needed a different solution, I would have found one ahead of time, but I didn’t. I looked around the house for something that would hold 18-20 cones (2 extra on the selvage sections) and came upon an old clothes drying rack that I don’t use ever since I bought a big metal one. It would hold at least 16 cones, and I could make do with something for the other two.  I pried the staples out of the dowel ends and knocked the supports off so I could slip the cones onto the dowels.

Second attempt: drying rack holding warp cones

The rack, plus two plastic coffee cans with holes in their plastic lids, held 18 spools for 13 sections, +-100 rotations per section (counting to one hundred 13 times is its own problem!).

On the very last section, the rack collapsed, breaking in two more places. I had to jury rig a system using the parts that still worked, and it took as long to warp the last section as it did the first. (The intermediate 13 sections took about 15 minutes each.)

Now, the question is, how long will a 100 yard warp last? I have that long to find another solution.

I was just getting started this morning when I accidentally knocked my ergo cutter off the work table. I heard it hit the floor just a bit behind me and marked the spot in my mind, while I finished the cut I was making with my electric cutting wheel.

When I turned around, I couldn’t see the cutter anywhere. I looked. I moved stuff. I got down on my hands and knees. I knew it was flying when it left the table, but this room isn’t too big and I had just tidied up. It couldn’t have gone too far.

I started to get angry about a disrupted day; the electric cutter is fine, as far as it goes, but some work is simply easier with the manual razor wheel. Things tend to come and go in my life: they’ll get lost for a while and then turn up when they’re ready. I lost my main car key on October 17th last year after I dislocated my finder and it’s still gone; the handknit sock that disappeared some where around that time just turned up yesterday, in an otherwise empty knitting bag. I can’t say I was surprised. But I had plans, and I wanted to achieve them, and I needed that cutter.

I went into the living room where I keep the flashlight by the front door, so I could better look under the furniture.

Wiley works on the missing Ergocutter

Wiley has only been with us for a week, and we’re still learning each other’s inclinations and habits. He buries all the rawhides in the house. I’m going to have to be differently careful now.

dateline April 14, 2012

A year since the tornado.

Hooping the big hoop at Clydefest 2012

Great weather this year, great crowd. The daddies who bring their children to Clydefest are more likely to hoop than at any other event I do. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, except for the little girl who was inconsolable when she had to leave her stuffed frogs behind. Even a frog balloon didn’t help. She wanted her bean bag frogs.

Friends trying big hoops at Clydefest 2012

We hooped on the infield this year, which made it easier to keep track of who wanted to hoop and who was just walking by. A few bursts of wind destroyed one tent and two umbrellas.

John the Balloon man had a long line, as usual, and this year, the Bouncing Bulldogs from Durham performed their magic with jump ropes!