First! A while ago when Daughter #1 started horse back riding lessons, her teacher and I were talking about saddle pads. She showed me a lovely woven one that she would like to have duplicated. Then we got talking about saddle pads in general. She told me about the different kinds of saddle pads on the market and I told her about a friend who made saddle pads by locker hooking and so the conversation went.
Next! So as you know I have been working with pins looms for the last year and I have been having a blast with them. I started out with a 2" x 6" Weavette and started making bookmarks with dog wool that I spun from my wolf/husky dog. Then I bought a 4"x 6" Weavette and have been weaving my Madder project for my level 3 challenge on that. Then I bought a 6"x6" Hazel Rose loom and loved it but found it quite different from the Weavette. It is fun too and I am working on a baby blanket for our foster child in Brazil. At the same time I bought a Tri loom and a diamond loom as a kit with the intention of making a blanket for a twin bed on that at some point in the future. Then we did the tri-loom workshop and I bought two tri looms. One is a three foot and the other is a seven foot. I have done my practice piece that I started in class on the three foot loom and now am working on the seven foot loom and will hopefully have enough yarn for a blanket or throw.
Put all that together and I have come up with the great idea that I can make saddle pads using a Weavette made to specific dimensions on a homemade pin loom. I just have to take the 7' tri loom pattern and make a rectangular loom that will work with rug warp and rovings with a slight twist to them.
If I want colour in the rovings then I need to know how to dye the rovings so that they don't felt too much. (A little felting wouldn't hurt I don't think.) And so back to yesterday.
A while ago I got a phone call from a lady here in town who said she had some bags of wool for me if I was interested. I, being dubious because of being given wool before which turned out to be nasty moth infested messes that basically ended in the dump, was not sure what to say. To be polite I told her I would come and take a look at it. In the end I discovered that she had 7 (get that? 7) bags of carded batts from Carstairs mill in Alberta that she had picked up at and auction and didn't know what to do with it. She GAVE it all too me..... SCORE!!!!
I am tearing this fibre into strips and dyeing it to see if I can use it for my saddle pads. The first batch that I dyed, I used my hunk dyeing method where I combined three colours to get a varigated look. This is it....
Today I will dye some more but I will use one colour as I want my saddle pads to be sensible! (I know... it's not like me to do anything sensibly!!!) I am looking at green and black for the pattern.... we shall see.
Meanwhile here is my bowl finished.
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