Fangorn Forest

Have you ever done something that is so incredibly representative of YOU, that it just kind of falls together?

I made Fangorn Forest up years ago, as a colorway to be on fiber, and I mostly pulled from areas of Champoeg State park near my house in Oregon, and a little bit just from my head.  I had 2 variations of it, maybe even 3, but ultimately they were all very similar.  Dark, rich greens, deep browns, and pops of golden leaves, as the trees waned.

I've made clothes for my babies with it, I even dyed it for a hap blanket for Linden (THE neverending hap blanket from 100% handspun).

I knew, just knew, that I had to do a Fangorn Forest baby wrap for us.  My first ring sling was "Betula" by girasol, which was greens and browns, and I loved it to pieces, but ultimately I wanted darker greens, richer shades.

Every step just kind of fell into place.

As far as the yarn went, the only problem came up when I was dyeing the browns.  For some reason the water at our short term rental was really reacting with the brown dyes, even trying to filter the water first.  I dyed the fiber at our Oregon house, and had spun it before moving, but the cotton for warp I didn't dye until after the move.  Our water was rusty and silty hard well water, and left an orange gold tint on everything we tried to clean.  Yuck.  The problem with the brown though, was that after rinsing, the color was more of an olive green, which was fine, but I still needed to achieve brown!   I ended up overdyeing parts of it in orange and it was perfect.  Mixing orange with the dye at the beginning didn't seem to work, but overdye did.  Since moving to our big house, brown sets fine by manufacturer instructions, thank goodness!

I had a vision of stripes in semisolid browns, for tree trunks, with more speckled greens (leaves, with light peeking through) in between.  I had a feeling the targhee would overpower that look a bit, and it has, but it's so unique and deep and interesting.  I can't wait to see how the rest of the project unfolds!

Little by little, we settle

It's been a hectic month or so.  Weaving, just trying to move in and find places and spaces and TIME for everything.  The time is the hardest part.  I started back in my fitness routines, I've been doing p90x3 again since the beginning of January, and that is physically *exhausting*.  I'm really glad I'm doing it though.  7 weeks in now and the strength is starting to be noticeable.


I've made it a goal for the year to branch out my weaving.  The regulations passed on slings and wraps and whether I will continue remains to be seen - I'd love to, but can I make enough to justify testing?  It's hard to know yet.  If not, I'm not going to "quit" weaving though, I'll just continue on doing other things, and that's ok.  My first goal was to learn about band weaving.  I bought an inkle loom and am starting to bond with it.


The biggest thing though will be ramping up my production, basically to test as many structures and yarns as possible before the actual lab testing, and to see if my production can sustain enough income to be worth testing.  Year of testing, 2017.  It's a bit nervewracking to think of that way.

Currently, I'm testing this hand dyed (not by me) in 10/2 unmercerized georgia ringspun.  It's lovely and soft but it has given me FITS!  It's fuzzy, which is causing the small shed to be even more unstable, threads want to stick, and it breaks easily.  So slow going.  I'm sending this out as a tester for feedback, but I might have ruled this one out of my arsenal just by sheer annoyance of working with it.