Leigh Whitaker

Playing With Yarn- Making self striping yarn

2008-12-19T14:18:00.000-08:00

I haven't been doing much pottery lately. My wheel and kiln were down for a while and now it's very cold in the basement, and I just can't get motivated to get down there.

I've been playing with yarn instead. I learned how to knit maybe 5 years ago, but only knit occasionally.

I decided to try to dye my own self striping sock yarn. I had a bunch of undyed kona superwash fingering from Henry's Attic. I had dyed some long ago and then put it away and essentially forgot about it.

Anyway... After educating myself by reading several online websites I learned that to make self striping sock yarn you have to have a really long loop of yarn. One website I read (here) helpfully suggested that one knit up a few rounds of a sock using the desired number of stitches cast on, marking each new round with a magic marker. Then to unravel the yarn and measure how many inches it takes to make a round.

I did this and found that my socks take appx. 30" of yarn for each round. So to have, say, 3 stripes of one color, 2 stripes of the next color, and 2 stripes of the last color, I'd have to have 90" of the first, then 60" of the second, and 60" of the third. This would require a skein of 210" or about 6 yards. That's a big skein!

I decided to educate myself further and find out how people wind such large skeins. Eunny Knit (link above) describes winding it around two tripods or lamps. I didn't want to do that. KS over at Knitters Review Forums pointed out warping mills to me (e.g. warping mill). These are used by weavers to wind loops of many yards (as many as 20 yards or more!) for their looms, and look like exactly what I want. Unfortunately they are fairly expensive, and I don't have $300 to spend on one.

I decided I could make a makeshift one myself, and proceeded to raid my daughter's tinker toys (actually SuperStructs). Here's what I came up with:

It's gone through a couple of tweaks since this first attempt. Basically it's just a box that rotates around an axle. There's a peg at the top to wrap the yarn around, and a peg at the bottom. You wrap the yarn around and around (as many times as it takes to get half the length of the skein you want) then you loop it over the bottom peg and wrap back up to the top following the path the yarn made on the way down. The cool thing about making it out of tinker toys is that you can change the height, move the pegs around etc... to get pretty close to the length of skein you want.

So far I've managed to make a skein as long as 16 yards with this contraption, which would allow me appx 19 rows of a sock to design stripes with.

I don't think I'd use this for making a warp for a loom (not that I'll ever do that), but for for making some self striping yarn it works like a charm! Here's a picture of some dyed yarn on the toy warping mill, and a picture of the dyed yarn being wound off the mill and into a center pull ball. That went surprisingly quickly and easily.

A picture of my first attempt at self striping yarn is posted at the top of this entry. The colors turned out with a little less contrast than what I had in mind, but I think it's still pretty. The number of rows per color turned out exactly as planned, so that's good.

And this is what happened to the warping mill after I was done with it:

An experimental pot

2008-07-09T08:09:00.001-07:00

My mother wanted a little pot to store plant food in, so I thought I'd experiment a little bit. I tried applying different colored slips to different areas of the pot, instead of applying the colors over the whole pot. I think I kind of like the effect. Hopefully I can improve it in the future!

Video Treasuries

2008-07-03T19:00:00.000-07:00

So... Tim See had a really cool idea for making etsy video treasuries and posting them on youtube. The idea is to try to introduce etsy to new customers by promoting to the broader audience of youtube.

I've been working on a few video treasuries and I'm going to try to post them here.

And here is Tim's original video treasury:

Let's see if that worked...

It did! It did! Yay!

Ink jet transfer of line drawings to clay

2008-06-06T06:19:00.001-07:00

I sometimes do little line drawings in the computer and transfer them to my pots to serve as guidelines for my slip decorations. Cynthia was asking for a quick explanation of how this works.

I'll post a description really quickly and I'll add some pictures later.

Print off your line drawing. I've found that black works probably the best. Here is an example of my flower drawing:

I usually cut out the printout and cut some slits halfway through it and various places if it's needing to go on a very curved surface.
Soak the printout in water for a few seconds and slap it where you want it to go on the pot. I've found the pot needs to be on the wet side of leather hard for it to transfer well. If your pot is dryer than that try spritzing it with water where you are going to transfer the drawing.

Let it sit for a minute or two, then remove the printout. The image should have transferred to the pot. It may be faint, but it should give you enough to carve or decorate using the lines as a guide.

The inkjet transfer should burn off in the kiln, but you might want to test it before doing something important!

Oh, one more tip. If you are applying a lot of transfers, like over the whole pot, try to just do a few at a time, unless you are going to finish your carving or slipping very quickly. I have found that when I do this, my transfers tend to fade fairly quickly, probably because of diffusion of the dye into the clay.

Taking a break for a short while

2008-06-05T15:26:00.000-07:00

I'll be taking a break for a week to do some other things, but I wanted to post a few things that will be going into the kiln after that.

I've got a few custom orders for kitchen utensil pots. Here are a few of those in the works.

Here is a custom honey pot:

I've also been working on some mugs and more pendants. I don't have any pictures of those though.

A friend asked me to make her some pots with a shiny glaze. I tested out a cone 6 pewter glaze and after a couple of trials I finally got the hang of it.

That's it for now!

A cute project for the kids

2008-05-23T13:23:00.001-07:00

Eleanor of Studio Elan posted a great tutorial for these precious angels (http://eleanorhendriks.blogspot.com/search/label/tutorial). My daughter and I had a great time making them, and she decorated hers with underglaze today (be sure to note the nostril holes- LOL). We've glazed her and she'll be going into the kiln tomorrow! Thanks for the awesome tutorial Elan!

Custom Order Mugs- sneak peek

2008-05-23T13:17:00.001-07:00

Here are a set of custom mugs that I have been working on. These have been bisque fired and in these pictures I've started glazing them (they have a glaze on the inside, but not the outside yet). Once these are glazed the colors will be darker and more vibrant. They should be going into the kiln tomorrow!

A firing mishap

2008-05-08T06:19:00.000-07:00

I haven't added much lately, but there are a lot of things I have been working on. Here is a dissappointing result from my last firing. This is a utensil pot that had some problems at the top. So sad! I will be posting some pictures of work in progress later today if I get a chance.

Some very cool stained glass

2008-04-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

I've been chatting with Erin over at colorandlight. She makes some awesome stained glass pieces. She is also a member of the Mad Scientists of Etsy team and you can see the scientific influneces in her work. Very cool!

http://www.colourandlight.ca/

Unloaded the kiln

2008-04-06T10:06:00.000-07:00

Here are some of the items after firing. I'm waiting for a few people to claim which pots they want and then I will be listing these and a few others!

Some stuff I put in the kiln today

2008-04-03T10:08:00.001-07:00

A few honey pots. I've got 5 in the kiln, here are 3 of them:

Some "chili pepper pots". I'm not sure how these are going to turn out. The colors should be black, red, and yellow. Definitely an experiment!
A small "kosher salt" type pot:

There are a few more things in the kiln I didn't take pictures of.

Ready to fire!

2008-03-19T10:10:00.001-07:00

I think I will be firing tomorrow if all goes well!

Been working on decorating

2008-03-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

Here's how the Retro Leaf mug is coming along. I hope the color differences in this show up better once it's fired.

And here's the pitcher all ready to go:

Another Mug:

And here's another mug in the process of being coated with slip. Pretty gross looking right? I will be interested to see how this one turns out!

That's it for now!

Potterybasics Mug Exchange

2008-03-13T12:13:00.000-07:00

Here is a mug I sent out for the PB mug exchange:

Some more stuff coming up...

2008-03-10T06:22:00.001-07:00

Here is another mug and a pitcher. These are all trimmed and ready to be decorated!

Here are some shops from my friends

2008-03-10T04:47:00.000-07:00

Kady is starting a nice little tie-dye shop, Kady's Creations. She doesn't have too much up right now, but I've seen other pictures of her stuff and it's fantastic. She's taking custom orders too, so check it out!

Froggy Bottom Boutique is an up and coming store for knitted items. Yarn takes custom orders too. I'm going to have her make some arm warmers for me, for when I throw! She has already made some precious baby items, like this one:

2008-03-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Here are some things I have been working on this weekend:

Swirly Mug: Here is a mug that has been decorated, scraped, and sanded. The colors will be completely different after the glaze firing, and will be much more vibrant. The final colors should be brown, black, white, and pale yellow. I'm excited to see how this one will turn out. The pattern and colors are an experiment, since I have never tried them before. The next step for this guy is the bisque firing as soon as he is completely dried out.

Retro Leaf Design: This is a greenware mug that has been decorated with slip trailing. This is also a new pattern I am trying out. The slip trailing here will turn out black after glaze firing. I haven't decided yet what colors to add.

The inspiration for this pattern comes from a retro fabric I found online.

Here are a few kosher salt or garlic sized pots that I am working on as custom orders. The one on the top will be predominantly blue and green with accents of black and white. The one on the bottom will be blue and green with some white accents.

Okay, more later. I am tired of fighting with this composition software.

My first blog

2008-03-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

How exciting!

I'm going to be posting about my pottery here. Maybe showing some of my technique and some works in progress.

Oh, and maybe a picture or two of my kids!