Blue Heron Farm Striped Wool Hat

Lovely subtle striping!

Completed: 2013
Finished Size: 17" diameter

I bought the yarn for this hat at the Vermont Sheep and Wool Festival in 2013. The wool is from sheep raised on the Blue Heron Farm in Grand Isle, VT, and was spun by the Green Mountain Spinnery in Putney.

I think the wool is blue-faced Leicester; I know it is all 100% certified organic, and it comes in beautiful hand-dyed colors.

I got two skeins: one in oatmeal, which is made from a mixture of the wool from their natural white and natural dark brown sheep, and one in aubergine, which is the same oatmeal yarn dyed a light purple.

It is roughly a worsted weight yarn, so I used #7 double-pointed needles. I cast on 72 stitches and worked in k2, p2 rib for about 2 ½". I decreased 6 stitches evenly around once, and then switched to stockinette stitch until the hat was about 8" from the edge. Then I decreased six stitches evenly around in each round until I had 12 stitches left on my needles, and pulled the yarn through the remaining stitches.

At the same time, I incorporated a sort of an hombre color patterning into the hat, which my intended recipient had designed. The entire rib and the first 2" of the stockinette stitch was done in the oatmeal color. From then on, I alternated the oatmeal with the aubergine, like this:

The finished product in use

1 row aubergine
5 rows oatmeal
2 rows aubergine
4 rows oatmeal
3 rows aubergine
3 rows oatmeal
4 rows aubergine
2 rows oatmeal
5 rows aubergine
1 rows oatmeal
All the rest of the top of the hat in aubergine

Keychain Bus Pass Holder

Completed: October 2014
Finished Size: 4-1/8" x 2-1/2"

The finished bus pass holder

I don't have a car, so I travel almost everywhere by public transportation. I had been keeping my bus pass on my keychain in a leather holder that I bought in 1996, and it was raggedy and sorely in need of replacement. I've been playing with tablet weaving recently, so I decided to try making a tablet-woven bus pass holder.

I used 3/2 Pearl Cotton from Halcyon Yarn in ruby (#122), bali (#164), and wintergreen (#181). I only needed one 180-yd mini-cone of each color, and that was way more than enough. Pearl Cotton has a nice shiny texture which seemed like it would be great for sliding in and out of pockets and bags easily, and for not picking up a lot of debris from the street.

Guntram's Egyptian Diagonals #4

For the pattern, I used Egyptian Diagonals #4 from Guntram's Tabletweaving Thingy. Because this pattern was only 28 cards wide, and I needed 40 cards for it to be wide enough to hold my bus pass, I repeated the last two cards on each side six more times each, alternating the two colors every two cards. I replaced Guntram's light gray with the bali, his red with the ruby, and his black with the wintergreen.

Cards set up on the rigid heddle loom

Instead of stringing the entire tablet weaving setup across the room, like it seems most tablet weavers do, and leaving it vulnerable to interference by my cat, I set it up on my rigid heddle loom instead. My small loom doesn't leave much room for the yarn to twist downstream of the tablets, but it is secure and comfortable and easy to stow when necessary.

After setting up the cards on my loom, I wove for five and a half pattern repeats, or about 10", using the bali green for the weft. Since I'm new to tablet weaving, I wanted to make it long enough to give myself plenty of options for where to cut the band in case I messed up.

Finished strap (wrong side)

Finished strap (right side)

After removing it from the loom, I turned it over to check out how the pattern had come out on the reverse side of the weaving, and I have to say that I almost decided to use the reverse side of the weaving as the front, because it was so cool and geometric.

I machine-stitched across the band on either side of the best part of the weaving at 8-1/4" apart. Then I cut across the band just outside of the machine stitching, so I had a little mini section of the band a little bit longer than 8-1/4" long.

I put black binding tape over the two ends of the band, and machine-sewed them down across the band. Then I cut a thin piece of Velcro, about 1/4" wide and 2" long. I sewed the two sides of the Velcro across the ends of the band, on the inside of each end.

Then I folded the piece in half, inside out,  sewed up both side as far towards the edges as possible, and turned it right-side out. And voilà.

Fits two cards with ease, safely secured with a Velcro closure!

I didn't have a great solution for getting it on my key chain, so I just bought a tiny key loop from the hardware store and stuck it through the weaving at the edge of the holder, just underneath the binding tape, and put my keyring through it. It is working so far, although it might not wear very well over the long term. Maybe next time I'll leave space in the weaving to put in an eyelet.

Bayeux Tapestry Panel: The Duke's Ship Lands at Pevensey

Completed: Summer 2012
Dimensions: 24" x 17"

In the spring of 2011 I visited Bayeux, France, and was able to see the Bayeux Tapestry in person at the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux. I walked the 76-yard length of the nine-hundred-year-old Tapestry (actually an embroidery), listening to an MP3 player telling me the story of William the Conqueror as it unfolded before me.

Section of the actual Bayeux Tapestry

Afterwards, I went to the gift store and looked through all the beautiful embroidery kits they had there, kits that would allow me to replicate panels of the tapestry myself. I was really tempted, but ended up not buying one. They seemed like a lot of money--especially given that I thought I probably would never actually complete it.

Several months later,  I was still thinking about the kits. I finally broke down and bought one online from Bayeux Broderie in December. I was going through a difficult time in my life that winter and into the early spring, and it turned out that working on the embroidery helped me, distracted me, and gave me something to look forward to every day.

My finished panel

The kit I chose was a panel showing William's boat landing at Pevensey on the south shore of England. I particularly liked it because it includes part of the border, which is one of the most entertaining parts of the Tapestry, with many little animals and plants and other extra design elements (some of which were supposedly inserted by the seamstresses as cynical statements about the project they were working on).

Detail of my Bayeux Stitch

The kits provided by Bayeux Broderie are very authentic. They include yarn dyed in colors as similar as possible to the six or so  limited colors actually used in the Tapestry. And they include directions for the only two stitches used throughout the entire Tapestry. One is a vine stitch, used for straight lines and outlines, and the other one is the "Bayeux stitch," used for filling in areas of color.

The Bayeux stitch was a challenge, as it required filling in large sections with long horizontal stitches, and then going over the section with evenly-spaced vertical stitches in the same color to tack down the long horizontal stitches, and then going over the same section again with tiny horizontal stitches to tack down the vertical stitches. It's painstaking, but ends up looking very rich and--I think--appropriately medieval.

The whole thing ended up taking me about nine months to finish, working mostly for a couple hours in the evenings. You can find a link to the kit I used here; Bayeux Broderie has kits for many other sections of the Tapestry, large and small.