That’s what this post is. New and old. Knitting and weaving.

First up…

Saturday the Eastern suburbs s’n’b group had an end of year get-together and BBQ. I even managed to persude the beau to come. There was much chatting and laughing and eating and knitting and crocheting. We also had a ‘Chris Cringle’, and this is what the lovely Lisa put together for me:

Luscious soap, choccies, a bracelet of yarn, Christmas napkins, a cute container and sticky toffee tea. I just tried the tea. Mmmm – yum!

The next item in the mixed bag is… weaving tools the beau has made me. It is so good having a man about who likes knocking such things together. I describe something, we go look at pictures on the interwebs, and next thing I have exactly what I need. First there were pick-up sticks (bottom right) then the rag rug shuttle (couldn’t find any Aussie shops that sold them) and finally a cone holder for warping with non-slip rubber base.

Which brings me to the slowly growing stash of denim rag balls. It takes about half an hour to cut up a pair of jeans, so I’m trying to do one pair a day. I have six balls now.

Lastly here’s some new weaving stash: the cotton warp I’ve bought recently. The larger cone is heavier yarn for rag rugs made of old sheets and/or fabric scraps, the smaller cones are thread for weaving tea towels.

Which brings me to the question: what next? Well, the baby blanket made it clear that warping up for tea towels is probably going to take many, many hours. It makes sense that if the warping takes such a long time then I may as well warp up for multiple tea towels – which I can do because these cones contain a lot more thread than the linen ones do.

Now, if I’m going to warp up for several towels of different colours the warp had better match all of them. So instead of plain weave check I’m actually better off using one colour warp and then change the weft colour for each towel.

To make that interesting, I’ll set the heddles up 1,2,3,4 (or maybe 1,2,3,4,3,2,1) so I can play with twill patterns as I did with the sampler scarf.

But not yet, because I’m not going to have enough time between now and, well, mid February to set that up. Instead I have three projects in mind to try: the Denim Rag Rug, the Multicolour Leftovers Blanket, and I’d like to try a doubleweave sampler.