Painted mats

Medieval painted cloths are turning up in my feed quite a bit at the moment. I wanted a little door mat or two for reenactment camping. These are not truly medieval but will serve the purpose and painting them up was a lot more fun than the weeding that I spent the rest of yesterday doing.

Started with a couple of $1 opshop sourced placemats.

Then marked up a grid to paint into pretend medieval tiles. I used a ruler for that part and then drew up the rest by eye.  The paint is cheap acrylic art paint with Jo Sonya textile medium mixed in. My first try at this paint combination.

This is the first one I did. Is ok. I learned how hard it is to paint on such a rough surface. I also decided that I wasn’t happy with the black.

Here is number two. I like this a lot better. I’d like it better still if I hadn’t used the yellow ochre. I am pleased with the terracotta colour I managed to mix up (equal parts red + yellow ochre, plus a tiny bit of black from the paint water). My silly free hand birds amuse me. Cave paintings? I tried to put a tail on one but that looked a bit too demonic so I left that off the others.

More yarn tidying

This is the other lot of “thread waste” bought recently that needed rewinding before I could reasonably do anything with it. That’s a rather sweet price for such nice fibre. Any dye marks were no more than slight colour variation. Barely noticeable.

This cross wound remnant did not unwind easily unless it could rotate along it’s long axis. This set up worked reasonably well:

Until it became clear that I had not managed to stab it quite through the middle.  The last bit was more laborious to unwind, but I managed it without much tangling.

All on the niddy noddy. I’m not very practiced at wielding this. There is one bit where I must have got confused and reversed direction or something. I’ve tried to catch that in the tying up.

Now it’s a fairly neat skein. I might dye it before winding into a ball. Maybe in the next indigo adventure.

Success! Severally

Long time no post. Much due to Flickr changes and new charges. The need to sort out new photo hosting stalled me. I’ve only just figured out that WP will store pictures in-blog! I don’t know what sort of count or size limit yet, but here I am experimenting with the feature.

This below is 385g of Skeinz “Sockmaticion” yarn, in a pleasant charcoal colour, bought cheaply because of some cuts in the skein. It didn’t look too bad and was a good price for a nice soft 4ply wool yarn with 10% possum content. I had hopes of just using my normal swift, possibly after separating the skein into sections. However, there is a lot of yarn here, about 4x as much as my little swift can handle. Also, the skein would not be separated, it seemed to be cross wound over the whole height. Industrial scale! Not domestic.

So I came up with a Macgyvery kind of solution involving two chairs, tilted to make the backs more vertical over the relevant area. See, it really is a LOT of yarn.

The winding off went better than I feared. I stopped the cakes at near 50g or when a cut end turned up, whichever came first, and ended up with this lovely lot:

I call that worth doing, even though the winding did take me several hours. I am confused though as to why Skeinz has made a yarn called “Sockmatician” and then says it isn’t intended as sock yarn?