Tag Archives: spinning

in progress weaving; the bottom has woven weft in varying blue colors, the top has unwoven warp that is white. a fluff of white is shown on the left.

Kite Fest!

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This quilt was for a local art project in my town! It’s the first time I’ve ever made something to be shown publicly. The project gave us fabric printed with original prints from our local historic flour mill to make a quilt with 🙂 The prompt was “a day in our town”, and this year I went to our Kite Festival for the first time so I wanted to depict that. I loved seeing community members having a great time in the sun, and there were so many colorful and beautiful kites in the sky. I even had a go at flying a kite for the first time in a long time, and it went okay! 🙂

This year I wanted to make a project that incorporated my handspun, handwoven, and quilting, and this seemed like a great opportunity. I wove my handspun silk as the background and incorporated the flour mill fabrics as appliqued kites on top. Then I added borders and used free motion quilting to introduce just a few more wavy lines in there.

I had bought some silk fiber this summer to try spinning, and I had originally intended to make a sort of abstract sky or ocean project, but this quilt was the perfect place for it! The silk was a joy to spin, so smooth and gentle and easy. I understand why it’s not recommended for beginners, but aspects of it were easier than spinning wool, I was never worried about staple length and my single rarely snapped or flew out of my hand. I used a silk roving/top and hankies; I love the fluffy and irregular texture from the hankies but that shine from the roving is just unbeatable. I ended up buying more silk and I’m spinning it up to do a comparative dye project next year. As I wove the background, I got a bit nervous about running out so I spun up some more blue from a tencel/merino blend I had, incorporating some white mint and gray yak/silk to boost my supplies. I spun these blends as a single to be used as a single, which was my first time doing that. It was strange to not ply the singles after I’d spun them, but I really like the fluffy look this yarn brings to the finished piece.

a hank of blue handspun silk yarn
Original blue silk 2-ply yarn
close up of blue fiber being spun onto a spinning wheel bobbin
additional blue on the wheel

Then it was time to weave! I used a thin cotton warp I already had in my stock (I only used supplies I already had for this project; my only cost was registering for the project :)). I looked in Carol Strickler’s book for some wavy, flowy patterns that reminded me of faraway clouds and air movements, and really like the undulation of #8. I played around with the repeated rows and the length of the floats, but all the sky is based on #8. I used a satin-ish pattern for the green hill at the bottom to make it very weft faced and kind of bury the white warp underneath. I used some unspun mint fiber to create the fluffy clouds at the top, along with some long floats in the body of the piece.

in progress weaving; the bottom has woven weft in varying blue colors, the top has unwoven warp that is white. a fluff of white is shown on the left.
bottom: woven sky; top: unwoven cotton warp; left: fluff of mint fiber; bottom left: Carol Strickler’s book

Once I finished the weaving, I moved on to playing with kite shapes and cutting them out of the flour mill fabric. I wanted to capture the different sizes and shapes that I saw at Kite Fest, and I cut a whole variety to place onto the quilt. I appliqued them with my machine, and then attached the double border. I was originally intending to just have the blue border, but it needed something additional and I really like the second border.

a long panel, mainly blue with vague stripes, and a dark green bottom
blue background with applique kites on a sewing machine bed

Pictures of the back of the panel after applique below. I do not always tuck in my ends! I also figured there was no need since I’d be quilting it and securing everything afterwards. On the right you can see the warp faced back of the hill.

handwoven fabric with some stitches in green and fluffy bits of fiber sticking out
handwoven fabric, bottom is white with spots of green and the top is stripes of blue and white. some yarn is sticking out

I pieced together the backing with my scraps from the flour mill fabric and supplemented with some floral fabric from my stash. I used cotton backing and basted with safety pins.

on the left, a bunch of floral fabrics with a measuring tape. a cat on the right looks towards the camera
my friendly helper assisting in measuring the backing; original flour mill fabric in the center under the measuring tape

I doodled a lot of ideas for the quilting, but in the end I wanted to keep the attention on the waves in the weaving and keep the quilting simple. I went with flowy undulating lines and used the same gray-ish thread I used throughout the entire construction and applique processes.

blue quilt with small applique shapes. bordered with light blue and gray
finished kites 🙂

Project completed October 2026.

Random Project Dump :)

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Handspun 🙂 mostly wool, with the occasional silk/wool blend. I find handspinning, whether at the wheel or on the spindle, very meditative and calming. There’s a rhythm, and a sense of creation and accomplishment. It is a wonderful thing to keep my restless hands busy with.
Frosting decorations on cookies! Having a single line of design and multiple repeats was EXACTLY THE SAME as quilting 🙂
Needle felted bat pin
Needle felted beetle pin
Strap for my choir binder so my hand doesn’t have to do so much work to hold it open. Backstrap loom, handspun wool blend
I put together an embroidery kit for a friend, it was so fun to plan an entire project and *not* have to do it 🙂
Embroidered gay and trans pride bolo tie pendant 🙂 I made this for an event at the Capitol
I do visible mending on my clothes, so I decided to do an embroidered/woven patch inspired by my work in twill 🙂
Embroidered bear aware patch
My first ever project on my loom was a twill sampler, which is now a bag strap
Learning about twill textures: over 3, under 1; under 3, over 1; over 2, under 2

Simply Spinnin’

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Late 2023 I was in a yarn store with a friend, and they had “learn to spin” kits with a drop spindle on a table display. She gestured to me and said “look, you could learn how to spin!” and I said, immediately, “I DON’T NEED ANOTHER CRAFT!!!!”

Yeah so I have four spindles, a spinning wheel, and I’ve completed whole projects with my handspun yarn ❤

Spinning yarn is simply… simple. It’s putting twist in some strands of fiber, and holding that twist “energy” in the yarn. And it’s ancient. We’ve been spinning as long as there have been nets to hold and trap things, clothes to wear, and bags to weave. I find spinning with the spindle to be the ultimate, original fidget spinner (literally), and with a bonus that I’ve created something! It’s a great hand activity for podcasts and audio media.

Twist (left) travels up to the fiber (right)

I find the color blending is like doing watercolor “wet on wet” – you can have plans, but the medium itself executes the plan and introduces beautiful randomness that I couldn’t have made myself. This is especially true when doing a two-ply yarn – I spin one long string and (systematically) fold it in half, not knowing what the middle is going to look like at all!

Plus, I can make a lot of different textures – wiry, fluffy, thick, thin, varied, consistent… just a lot of experimentation and fun.

Fluffy yarn from my early spinning days

I plied this yarn a bunch of times to make a strap for a bag 🙂 It was some leftover fiber from my Tetons Extravaganza and it was just so colorful and green/flowery that I wanted to use it in a different way.

And then I got crazy and started adding beads!! 🙂 So shiny and fun. It was kind of annoying putting all the beads on the thread, but super worth it.

Plying setup with three normal plies and beads!

And of course, making things with the yarn I make. 🙂 crochet, weaving, I have even spun yarn thin enough to embroider with.

I’m figuring out how to walk around my house and spin, and my next data metric is figuring out how much yarn I can get from a given weight of fiber – which is a test of consistency, and makes the final fabric more even and less lumpy.

Main inspirations and resources:

Mixed Media Extravaganza

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So I’ve collected a lot of skills 🙂 and after picking up a “summer” quilting kit from the Grand Tetons last year, I wanted to expand that project into a Whole Big Thing. The kit references the possibility of doing the same scene but with different fabrics for different seasons, but I wanted to do a full panorama with different peaks, depicting as much as I could of the Teton Range. I used some tracing paper to plan out panels for each of the four seasons, scaled so they’d match up with the quilted panel. My main reference photo is from Willow Flats Overlook when I visited in 2023. The perspective of the quilt is a bit different, but I kind of… made it work.

Main reference photo from Willow Flats Overlook
Plans! The tracing paper rolls out into the whole panorama but having individual pieces was better while I worked.

I started off with the applique quilting kit and added some free motion quilting for details. It was really fun to work on things on a smaller canvas and be able to do details without getting overwhelmed. I also added some hand embroidery for the flowers because I wanted them to pop out 🙂

My first instinct for the next panel was to use crochet, using some funky colorwork and textured stitches. I spun up yarn for each of the different sections: sky, lake, mountains of various white and gray mixes, and autumn-y colors for the sagebrush.

a yarn I called “Autumn” 🙂
fiber blends I made at a workshop
I added some weird bumpy parts and extra stitches in the foreground to mimic the fluffy sagebrush 🙂
I struggled with getting enough contrast between the gray of the mountains and the blue of the sky, so I took a black and white picture and spun up some darker blue that I could blend into the existing sky.

After I had summer and autumn, I struggled with what to do next. I knew I wanted an embroidery panel and a woven panel, but I wasn’t sure which should be spring and which should be winter. I talked it over with a friend and we decided that the crochet shouldn’t be next to the weaving, since they have similar textures and detail resolution. So winter was embroidery! I started by needle felting the background sky and foreground, to automatically add texture that I didn’t need to stitch. I spun some thin yarns of cream/white and rock gray, which was a fun challenge to spin thin enough and consistently enough that I could use it with a normal sized needle. I also thought some beads would be fun for the shininess of the snow 🙂

Winter embroidery in progress

I was planning to do the winter foreground details with embroidery, but I realized I wanted to incorporate paint into this project, so I used acrylic paint to add trees, bushes, and rocks. It was difficult to paint onto the felted surface because the brush strokes pick up fibers from the felt, but it was doable.

Then I needed a tapestry weaving for spring. Just like with the crochet, I only used yarns I’ve spun, and spun up a few more just for this. I had four different mountain-y layers that I wanted to represent, so I spun four different grays with graduated levels of light gray. In hindsight, I made WAY TOO MUCH, but it was fun. And now I have more mountain gray for later.

I took a weaving class where we were able to take the loom home for a week, and capitalized on this moment to (a) finish this project, and (b) see if this type of loom is useful for tapestry weaving (that’s not its primary use). It was a successful proof of concept for using this type of loom for tapestry, but I think I’m going to pursue purchasing a different kind of loom for some more flexibility and growth potential.

upside down on the loom! I wove the sky first because I knew it would be a solid weaving instead of doing a bunch of color changes… and weaving upside down made me less stressed about getting it perfect
this is the first time I saw all four panels together, they’re pinned to a mini ironing board 🙂

I used some extra fiber to needle felt over the seams between the panels, and then did a border to secure everything together.

My main challenge in finishing this up was getting the crochet to sit the way I wanted it to. I ended up gluing it to some stiff scrap fabric to stabilize it, which went well…. Until I started sewing the fabric frame on. Hot glue and sewing machine needle is not a good pair. 🙂 But I took my time, learned my lesson, and got it done.

Spring! My favorite part to make was the field in the foreground, I improvised all of the color changes and just had a good time
Summer 🙂 so glad I bought this and kicked off this project. I really like the wavy lake quilting with variegated thread
Autumn! I really enjoyed spinning all this yarn, and I have a lot left over for future projects. I’m pretty happy with the shading on Mt. Moran (on the right) and the weird bumpy texture of the sagebrush in the foreground
Winter! I really like the contrast between the line-y-ness of the embroidery and the fuzzy needle felting, and I proved to myself that I can spin yarn to embroider with
🙂 finished

Project completed October 2024