Fridays, Eh!

Mom's tubular scarf, roughly 110cm long. I didn't "close" the two ends because I wanted this to function more as a tube rather than two layers, but I'll see how Mom wears it and might saw them shut later. The color is truer in the close up, though it's actually darker and bluer in real life.

Cashmere doesn't full as much as wool when I weave with them, but with more yarns per cm2, (or should it be cm3?) Ben's scarf fulled like a dream, so I washed Mom's even more vigorously. It looked like a net when I finished knitting, but now it has a matted, slightly "been around the block" look and texture I love. Hope she likes it, too, but if not, it's mine.

I also finished the Brazilian cotton collar for me. I could have gotten two to four more rows from the one ball, but I had enough of cotton/dye dust I quit. I've been going to sleep at night with dusty, powdery taste/texture in my mouth even after gargling, and 13 or 14 more balls of this cannot be healthy. The finished collar and what was left of the ball, I put in a laundry net and through one warm regular and two rinse cycles. (I wet-finish cotton and cottolin with hot regular wash, but today, it was warm on a whim.) This is them fresh out of the washing machine.

I have to wait until they dry to decide, but I'm happy to turn the remaining balls into skeins and treat them similarly before I knit/weave with them. This yarn feels nice, stretches like nobody's business, and the colors are exactly those I love, and I would definitely like to use them. I wished I could show you the gray accurately; it's delicate and solid and beautiful. The closest I can think of, (and swallow that drink before you read on,) is cement powder. It is beautiful.

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These days when I sell my weaving directly, I often don't put my label on the piece but put it in a calico bag with my label on it. (I never put labels on baby pieces but that's another story.) I spend quite a lot of time trying to make the A- ad B-sides of the weaving look different, and I don't want to dictate which side is which. In communicating with a customer who bought a piece in the recent sale, I learned a stranger complimented her on my piece, and wondered if this is the right move. Ben reckons I should put on the tiny label on regardless of the size of the piece.

Of course in the most general marketing term it's a no-brainer to have the labels on, just in case that stranger, or anyone, wants to know who made it. The other side of the coin is, I try hard to establish a one-to-one relationship with my customers/wearer as it is they who I want to please, and in that vein, I don't care if a tiny label brings, or not, one more visitor to the blog. So far all my online sale pieces have gone to friends and friends of friends, so it's unlikely to boost my sale. Then there's that adage, you can't sell textiles on the Internet. Am I being stubborn?

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Maria told me my blue linen dress is ready for fitting. I'll see if I can go tomorrow. But I'm filled with excitement and trepidation, because I know the feel of her fabric, (dreamy,) but also the shape of the dress; I know how it's supposed to fit, or I have a mental picture of how it looks on a variety of relatively normally shaped humans. I am not not one. I keep thinking of this drawing I did. And boy, I miss proper life/figure drawing classes.

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Yesterday turned out to be pretty productive and I'm hoping today will, too, although it's already 1PM. There are squillion things I should have done in the last month, while I really really want to do a few things not on that list.