Jane & co.

Hand-dyed, hand-woven, hand-sewn

Unfortunately not the best photo, but as I don't have access currently to a lighting studio, this will have to do. This is the project I had been working on all of last semester: a hand-dyed, hand-woven, and hand-sewn quilt! It was my first time quilting anything at all, so of course I had to go all out and do it as much from scratch as I could, right? Stitching together all the layers of the quilt sandwich took me a good 3 nights of hand-sewing, stitch by painful stitch (I didn't have a thimble the first night and drew blood after using my finger to redirect the needle upwards enough times), as I found out that quite unexpectedly - although I should have foreseen it - the quilt sandwich was too thick to go through the sewing machine, for one, and, when I tried, it got stuck and threatened to destroy the quilt blocks!

I'm not sure exactly how much yarn I used for this, but I'd hazard a rough estimate at approximately 7000 yds of laceweight & 2000 yds of fingering weight for all the fabric I wove up. Granted, there was a small pile of scraps at the end that were either too small to use, or that I didn't have to use since the block was already large enough. The centre of each block was woven in BFL using my Coccodrillo, and the surrounding strips were woven on Sandy using superwash merino. All the yarn save the undyed parts were dyed using Greener Shades dyes. All the structures required only 2 shafts, and there are 3 blocks of each weave structure in the quilt. It took me a good month or two to finish this in its entirety.

I made the quilt to accompany a book - The Plainest Weave - I made for the same project. I had had the idea since the start of the term, but just writing and rewriting the draft took a while, and I was making changes even as I was printing the first side of the pages.

Once I get better pictures of everything (probably closer to March, when we have our department's Open House and there's better lighting), I will be updating my website. And in the meantime, if anyone is interested in purchasing this & the accompanying book, feel free to send me a message, the only caveat being that I still need everything until March at least.