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completed weaving of the penelope skyphos from chiusi:
the header is tablet-woven linen, with the linen weft for the band used as the warp for the rest of the piece on a warp-weighted loom, which you can see in the photos below (there is also a previous post with more process photos here). the reverse is a negative mirror image of the front, since I wove this as double-weave pickup rather than tapestry:
additional details below the cut:
the bottom and side borders of the finished piece are tablet-woven with a mixture of linen and mercerized cotton. the sides are a classic meander motif, while the bottom border includes the "X" square from the skyphos itself. the bottom border was woven directly onto the piece using the remainder of the warp beneath penelope's feet (tablet draft for anyone interested—I designed it to be twist-neutral and everything). the side borders are sewn on because I didn't set up the side borders when I started the project, but ellen harlizius-klück previously executed a stunning version here that has the side borders woven in, as well as a really helpful video on this technique.
I was originally planning to leave part of the black warp threads unwoven to serve as penelope's warp, the way I did a few years ago with the amasis painter vase:
but I couldn't figure out how to execute it well in this version, especially since I was doing double-weave and not tapestry. perhaps next time! overall, this was a complicated and fun project as a first warp-weighted loom piece. I learned a lot of important lessons—chief among them being to actually calculate warp lengths instead of eyeballing them and to increase the loom weights on the warps for better tension. unfortunately, I also learned I want to build a large warp-weighted loom (the one I have now was made by jennifer marcus at fiber paintings studio and it is lovely, but I would like to weave larger pieces.)
the original pot also features telemachus standing over a grieving penelope (I had room only for his spear), perhaps a reference to the scene in book 1 when he reprimands his mother and orders her back upstairs:
Odysseus was not the only one
who did not come back home again from Troy.
Many were lost. Go in and do your work.
Stick to the loom and distaff. Tell your slaves
to do their chores as well. It is for men
to talk, especially me. I am the master.
οὐ γὰρ Ὀδυσσεὺς οἶος ἀπώλεσε νόστιμον ἦμαρ
ἐν Τροίῃ, πολλοὶ δὲ καὶ ἄλλοι φῶτες ὄλοντο.
ἀλλ᾽ εἰς οἶκον ἰοῦσα τὰ σ᾽ αὐτῆς ἔργα κόμιζε,
ἱστόν τ᾽ ἠλακάτην τε, καὶ ἀμφιπόλοισι κέλευε
ἔργον ἐποίχεσθαι: μῦθος δ᾽ ἄνδρεσσι μελήσει
πᾶσι, μάλιστα δ᾽ ἐμοί: τοῦ γὰρ κράτος ἔστ᾽ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ.
Od. 1.354–359. Emily Wilson translation.
my plan is to eventually create a larger version of this piece that includes telemachus and the meta aspect of unwoven warp threads. it would also be interesting to figure out if I can weave a different image on the back of the cloth, since the reverse of the pot itself depicts eurycleia recognizing odysseus as she washes his feet.
I bought a new set of dice at a convention the other day, and of course they needed their own little dice bag. I happened to have some fitting colors of floof in my fiber stash, so I threw them together on the blending board and dizzed them off to hopefully get a relatively smooth and blended yarn.
My first attempt at a bag was turning out too large for a single set of dice, but I luckily had spun enough that I could just start again from the other end and make a bag of the appropriate size first - and now I still have enough left over to finish the bigger bag too :) (for a later time)
I'm counting this as "make a material for your primary craft" for the @2026-fiber-arts-bingo (I'm not sure what my primary craft is these days between spinning, knitting, and crochet...)
So way back when I first started blending up heather swatches I said I was going to make a guide out of all of them and I meant it!! I've spent the last few weeks photographing, color correcting, editing, and creating little color cards for each of the 99 color swatches. (I thought there were 100, I was wrong) Plus some color wheels and diagrams. It's a ton of work but has been very fun for me :) I plan to write up a little blog about the process of creating the heathers too, which is less fun for me. But I did take plenty of pictures as I worked so hopefully I can let the images do most of the talking.
I'm almost done with all the image editing which is great and exciting since that's the bulk of the project. I have a ton of other blog topics and experiments I want to run off and do, but I'm making sure I finish this first!
^Here are a couple of the color cards since I know they're hard to see in the screenshot. And don't worry, there will be a key letting you know which dye each color abbreviation refers to :^)
Archaeologists uncovered a 1,000-year-old Viking textile production center near Aarhus, revealing large-scale cloth making and trade.
The site sits near Søften in eastern Jutland, about 10 kilometers north of modern Aarhus. Excavations by the Moesgaard Museum show a planned production area instead of a normal farming village. The settlement covered at least 100,000 square meters. Most of the work focused on making textiles, though other forms of handwork also took place there.
Researchers found an area where flax was prepared before workers turned the plant into linen. They also uncovered 82 pit houses, small sunken buildings linked with Viking workshops. Many held spindle whorls and loom weights, showing cloth production took place on a large scale.
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206 posts in the first week of July!! Usually I queue about 50 per week so this is a massive increase in beautiful spinning content (mostly thanks to tour de fleece!!)
Also, I have a question for tumblr's spinning community at large
what do you consider to be the "main" tumblr spinning tag?
As I've been going through and photographing my heather samples and thinking about what projects they inspire me to create, I've realized they're more useful to me as loose fluffs of fiber I can trial new colors out of. And since I haven't had time to process much of my alpaca fleece, I'm finding I don't have anything exciting to spin for tour de fleece anymore!
So instead of spinning, I'll focus on the entire process of turning this alpaca fleece into yarn. Starting tdf with the lengthy process of combing it into clean, fluffy, spinable fiber and hopefully ending it with some actual spinning!
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I've been working hard on all my fiber projects to get my spinning wheel free and wool ready to spin in time for tour de fleece.
I've got all my cmyk (+ tints/shades), rby, and cmy/rby combos blended! I'm still in the process of photographing and making color wheels out of all of them, so they aren't free to be spun yet. There are exactly 100 of them now ;_; Lots of work ahead
Made a makeshift lazy kate so I could triple ply my leicester longwool. I am soo happy to be done with this fiber, it was a real pain to work with post spinning. (Lots of snagging on itself and any time a thread broke a huuuge section ahead and behind it completely lost its twist)
I've got a ton of it now, and not a huge idea of what to do with it. It's too itchy to touch the skin, so it might just be for weaving belts.
And the alpaca... I've washed and scoured most of it (there is so much), and started prepping some of the finer fiber. But oh my goodness is there a lot of dirt. It is very very slow work trying to get the dirt out of the finer fiber, which has collected the most by far. It's also fairly delicate, so I have to do most of the work by hand before I run it through my (possibly not fiber appropriate) hair combs.
^some locks post washing & scouring (if you can believe it) and how it looks after processing
Behold my Bee Dress, as photographed on my trip to Italy. It was a happy coincidence that my dress this year thematically aligned with my vacation plans!!!
"With genetic test results back from U.C. Davis Laboratories of toe-hair samples from each side of his body, I am excited to share that this sheep
🌟 IS INDEED a CHIMERA 🌟
His black mouflon side is a genetically different individual from his black gray side. The lab ran the test twice just to be sure!
Oh but wait, THERE IS MORE!
He is ALSO a she!
The black mouflon side is male.
The black gray side is female!
What I can tell you beyond these test results, is that this beautiful creature successfully bred four solid patterned ewes this winter that produced a total of 9 lambs, of which all were either solid pattern or mouflon pattern; 5 rams and 4 ewes. "
If anyone has experience working with alpaca fiber I'd love some advice! Do we think alpaca would make a good sweater by itself, or would it be best to blend it with some wool for elasticity? I'm pretty sure I'll have enough of the soft baby alpaca-ish fiber to make a sweater from that alone, but I also have some polwarth I could blend it with if needed. I've only worked with a much rougher and less crimpy form of alpaca before, and it relaxed so far that I'd worry about it stretching out of shape if I ever knit it into something.
I definitely recommend blending or holding it with something, Alpaca loves to grow, especially in a sweater where you’ve got gravity encouraging its desire to stretch.
I would sample different proportions of blending the alpaca and polwarth and knit some extra large swatches, and then dry those swatches as they hang to see what kind of stretch you might expect.
If anyone has experience working with alpaca fiber I'd love some advice! Do we think alpaca would make a good sweater by itself, or would it be best to blend it with some wool for elasticity? I'm pretty sure I'll have enough of the soft baby alpaca-ish fiber to make a sweater from that alone, but I also have some polwarth I could blend it with if needed. I've only worked with a much rougher and less crimpy form of alpaca before, and it relaxed so far that I'd worry about it stretching out of shape if I ever knit it into something.
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