Nurtured by Love

Blogging about music, family life, the outdoors, unschooling and everything else

for more than a quarter century

Category: Fibre arts

  • Spinning

    Spinning

    I bought a little spinning wheel. It’s about the size of an SLR camera and weighs a fraction as much. It came from a Kickstarter campaign I backed. I paid about $50 and like my other favourite Kickstarter reward, it delivered not just on time but early! It runs off DC power with a tiny […]

  • Temari

    I’d never heard of them until a couple of weeks ago when a booklet of college extension courses and workshops showed up and mentioned a weekend class teaching this “beautiful Japanese art of decorative embroidered thread balls.” I was curious, so I made a short stop at the University of Google and was entranced. True to […]

  • Shibori

    Inspired by the introduction to shibori that Fiona got at her homeschoolers’ art class, I began sewing and tying a couple of dozen squares of cotton fabric to do my own experiment with the technique. I started this in July of 2012 and then set it aside, about two-thirds completed. I recently dug it out, […]

  • Fall bits

    Where has October gone? Where has my blogging mojo gone? My additional teaching load, and all the juggling of travel and activities by Noah and Sophie, is taking a toll. Fall was amazing until the rain finally caught up with us. The leaves were a good two weeks later to start turning, and then when […]

  • Shibori

    I’ve decided that the time has come to make a quilt. I made quilts for each of my children, around the time they graduated to big beds of their own. Erin got my first quilt ever: appliquéd jungle animals in the main squares. Noah was given a community quilt by a host of my friends, […]

  • Festivus Owls

    Fiona’s sick. Getting better today, but we decided we needed to bail on running the taxi service for all those teenagers going to Corazón rehearsal in Nelson. Instead we had an unexpected day at home together. And thanks to my shameless scouring of Etsy for craft ideas, we decided to make some felted owls. This […]

  • Brioche knitting

    Simple two-colour brioche (top) and Hosta leaf pattern (bottom) I had never heard of brioche knitting, but the first couple of examples I saw looked so nifty that I had to figure it out. I started trying to learn while beginning a very simple project while Fiona and I were away at Fort Steele. I […]

  • Tie-dye, family reunion edition

    Noah’s, Evie’s and my shirts. The sunshine and clear skies have been made to order for our reunion time. Sophie risked using a “dangerous colour combination” on her shirt: dark green, purple and yellow. It looked like a moldy cabbage when tied up, but turned out beautifully!   A classic spiral by Fiona.

  • Part way to a squillion

    Many of the SVI students and parents took up knitting squares for the Knit-a-Squillion project. We ended up with a few dozen, some still needing completion. We’ll continue to work away at this into the fall and then arrange to mail them off.

  • Needle bouquet

    This makes me happy. 

  • Knit a squillion

    We found out about the Knit-a-squillion challenge yesterday and Sophie, Fiona and I are nearing completion of our first three squares. The challenge is to contribute knitted or crocheted 8″ (-ish) squares to as aid for AIDS orphans in South Africa. Between July 11 2011 and the same time next year KasCare hopes to procure […]

  • The dress II

    Sophie has set to work with the fabric for her dress. After tracing pattern pieces the other afternoon she had to wait for me to get out of town and purchase thread. Fortunately Erin’s departure for Calgary was well-timed, the five hour round trip to the bus station taking me through a town with a […]

  • Genesis of a cardinal

    Some readers were interested in more details about how we’re making these birds. We’re less than a week into this experiment with needle felting and are totally self-taught, but for what it’s worth, here’s how we’re doing it. We start with a hunk of fleece about 12 – 14″ (30 – 35 cm) long. We’re […]

  • More avian friends

    Today’s birdies are a red-breasted nuthatch, more than a little on the obese side, and a tree swallow. We didn’t have these colours available to us in wool roving, so we dissected several bits of multicoloured wool yarn to get what we needed, then carded them together with related colours to get what we needed. […]

  • Felted birds

      Sophie and I have been needle-felting today. We decided these guys might make nice Christmas tree decorations for next year. We still need to buy some little beads or bead-end push pins for eyes, and some pipe cleaners for feet, but we’re pretty pleased so far. They’re all winter birds we see around here […]