New artwork

I managed to weave this six foot long overshot scarf during the month of February. The warp is thin cotton and the weft is silk, with lots of colors from different dyepots I’ve played with over the years, as well as some commercially dyed yarns from Treenway Silks. Some of the silk is from an order that our guild placed with a group helping a Colombian mountain community set up a silk industry back in the 1990s. That silk is handspun, and I just have a little bit of it left. I usually use it in tapestry because I like the textures that the unevenness of the handspun gives. I started with a overshot pattern that was published by Interweave Press, then, because I just can’t follow a recipe, I decided to take the theme of sunset turning into night, then sunrise. I’m going to do another one that will be similar.

This upcycled book really took a long time, but once I latched on to the idea of using field peas and an illustration from a seed catalog and handmade paper, it all came together. I scanned the illustration, printed it on a laser printer, and transferred it with gel medium onto handmade paper. The pages are handmade paper, some abaca/corn husks/whatever and some cotton/recycled office paper. I painted the inside covers with acrylic paint, enclosed the field pea “seeds” with mica windows, and bound it with a longstitch binding. The field peas are “Whippoorwill,” an heirloom variety that I first bought on a trip to Monticello and have been saving from year to year.