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Holy Cow! Hostway has upgraded their blog software! Woo-Hoo!!! Now I have a customizable template for our blog! Doesn’t sound like much to most of you - but definately a biggie here.
Now if I could just figure out how to modify the “edges” of the blog page. Still not enough freedom with this canned blog software, but at least I did get some additional editing capabilities. YES!
Now of course, I’m wondering what the blog looks like to everyone else…..I have a flatpanel monitor at home, and well, our homepage background color looks great here - but it looks eye-shocking neon green on my pc monitor at work (Susan says her monitor shows the eye-hurting green, too). Yikes!
Terry
I’ve always wanted to attend SOAR (Spin-Off Autumn Retreat), but it IS alot of money and I felt guilty in spending that much on just myself. This year was a little different in that I received a partial scholarship from our local guild. Ok, so our guild is predominately weavers (I’m the rebel spinner of the bunch!) -so I felt obligated to take the one weaving class they offered: Cut Pile Silk with Sara Lamb and Sarah Swett. Wow! To extremely talented fiber artists for instructors! And I had no idea, really, what cut pile silk was…..so off to Park City I went!
This is a three day workshop and boy was it fun. Day 1: spinning silk (and spinning, and spinning!). Day 2: build and warp your loom. This was fun! And we had power tools! Way too cool. Our navajo-style of loom was made using copper pipe (oh Lord! How to get this home in my suitcase without some security person thinking "pipe bomb"!). Day 3: Weaving and tying the silk knots (which are kind of like a lark’s head). Our project is a small bag. There was also a demo on card weaving (to make the bag strap), but I skipped that - heck, I had my brain full with all this new weaving stuff. I will figure out cardweaving with a fellow guild member at a later date!
Here’s a picture of my loom in the suitcase, ready for travel! for those of you who are weavers, you’ll notice that I’ve lowered the heddle bar for ease in shipping.
On the last night (Wednesday night) once all the workshops were done, each workshop group set up a display of what they had learned/done and we got to wander about looking at each group’s work and talking to the participants. It was alot of fun, and I was so impressed at what everyone had done! (More photos on that later if people want to see more…).
I took this photo at the machine knitter’s table. I was suprised at a knitting machine class at SOAR, but what they did is so totally cool that I had to take a photo of their table. They knit up a piece on their machine, remove it and dye the piece in wide bands of color. Then they unravel the piece and re-skein it. This gives you a skein with LONG color runs (ala Noro yarns). Very cool idea:
Next was the table for the goat fibers class. I have to say that I was very pleased to hear that the class participants were very impressed with the Pygora fiber they got to spin and knit up. Of course, I’m highly partial to Pygora fiber!
More on SOAR later if anyone wants to hear more…..
Terry