It’s June! And here’s what we’ve been up to. And what’s coming this month. Happy Weaving!
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Tag: HelpLine
JST April Newsletter
It’s Alive! It’s Live! It’s JST’s New Look.
The picture above is what we’re so excited about. It’s our newly launched website. We have been working on a very special project for some time now and we are happy to say that the web face of JST has received a facelift.
Although we loved our old site, time isn’t kind to websites, and technology just keeps marching on. We thought it was important to stay with the times and provide our customers and friends with a mobile device optimized website since so many of us are using these types of devices now. You will notice that the website will look different depending on whether you are using a smart-phone, tablet, or computer. This is completely normal and is why we redesigned our site in the first place.
We would love to hear what you like about our new site, and if you find any errors or omissions, do let us know.
Now on to the next thing – our online store! If you experience any troubles ordering, please just let us know and we’ll be happy to take your order either via email or over the phone.
JST Helpline Update
Sometimes even the helpline needs a little help. We are in the process of working on our Helpline so we can better serve weavers with questions, but at the moment, the Helpline is under construction. Thank you for your patience.
Silk, Silk, Silk
Just a little note for all of you silk weavers and lovers out there about our 2/20 Bombyx. This silk produces a lusciously soft fabric. We recommend that when winding your warp that you wind it with two ends in your hand at a time. This will reduce the number of interlacements going through your lease sticks, and make winding on much easier. If you can’t buy two skeins – no problem! Just wind your single skein into two balls. Easy peasy.
Have you worked with this new linen? We would love to see a picture of your project. Drop us a line at jane@janestaffordtextiles.com or find us and share with us on Facebook.
Presenting 40/2 Linen in 17 Colours
A few months ago we decided to bring in some new linen to the shop to mix it up a bit and offer an even smaller gauge of linen for those finer projects. Overwhelmingly, people seem to love this new line. We have just finished making up our new linen sample cards as well. You can get to the this new line in our shop by clicking here, and sample cards can be purchased by clicking here.
Cuddles on Sale
We have a small quantity of our hand-dyed Cuddles Alpaca blend on sale and we just wanted to let those of you who would like to try this yarn, or those of you who love this yarn. Why? Because we are not going to be dying any further batches of Cuddles. Cuddles is a wool/alpaca bulky, cushy yarn and we even have a knitting pattern for a cute little hat that we’ll throw in for you when you pick up a skein or two. The pattern uses only one Skein. It’s also lovely for the odd shot of texture in your weaving. Here’s the link to the store….
Rosemary’s Recipe Corner
One of the first things that burst forth in the spring is the old fashioned staple Rhubarb. As at home in many homestead gardens as in our kitchen, Rosemary has given us her delicious recipe for Rhubarb Muffins.
2.5 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 egg
1 1/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup buttermilk
2 cups chopped rhubarb
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 cup vegetable oil
Topping (set aside)
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tbsp melted butter
1/2 tsp cinnamon
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and prepare your muffin tins.
Mix all the wet ingredients, including the sugar together in a bowl. Next, mix the dry ingredients together so they are well distributed. Incorporate the wet ingredients.
Add chopped rhubarb to mixture. In a separate bowl, mix your melted butter and sugar for the topping. Add batter to your tins, sprinkle with topping and bake for about 20 minutes. Then grab your butter, sit back, and enjoy!
Show and Tell
We’ve been playing with a pattern lately here at the shop and we’ve seen a few student interpretations of the pattern. Here is Claudia Cocco’s version of our Alpaca shawl. It’s a pattern that uses denting to produce some really stunning results. This shawl is made with the Alpaca Tweed and our hand-dyed bouclé. Thanks Claudia for allowing us to show this lovely shawl off!
Copyright © 2016 Jane Stafford Textiles, All rights reserved.
January 2015 Newsletter
The First Newsletter of 2015!
The New Year has brought a flurry of change and activity to JST. As we begin to prepare for the first Colour and Design workshop, we want to pause and update you on some of the upcoming events and recent changes.
Now is a Great Time to Shop in Canada!
The exchange rate is currently at 20% in favour of our friends from the US! All the prices on JST’s online store are shown in Canadian $, so imagine taking 20% off with no tax!
Price Changes at JST
This is something that we have avoided doing at JST the last couple years, but our frequent shoppers will notice that we have made a few adjustments this January, not too many but they were definitely necessary.
Honing Your Basic Weaving Skills, May 29th 9am-4:30pm, JST on Salt Spring, $110 inc. lunch
Do you dread dressing your loom? Do you have trouble with tension and selvedges? Then come spend a day and learn to take control! Become a dominatrix in your own studio! Warping back-to-front, selvedges, bobbin-winding techniques, shuttle-throwing, proper posture and other tidbits are just some of the things we will cover.
Fibreswest
It’s almost that time of year again! On March 13 and 14, 2015, from 9:30 am to 5pm, Fibreswest will be in full swing at the Cloverdale Exhibition Hall. JST will be hosting a fabulous booth, overflowing with magnificent colours (see the picture below from last year!). Among other items, our own hand-dyed hotline of Alpaca, Silk, and Mohair will be for sale, so please come have a look. We are looking forward to meeting friends, old and new! On Saturday afternoon, Jane will be giving a mini-lecture on her source of inspiration guides her colour selection.
Pinterest and Instagram: Join the Fun!
JST has joined both the Pinterest and Instagram online communities! Do swing by our new pages and see the gorgeous new photos uploaded weekly. We appreciate the time you take to send us comments and feedback as the sites are developed.
Greatest Hits from Jane’s Help Line
The site that just keeps on growing as weavers ask questions … is now an extensive database available for free to weavers everywhere! Without yarn sales at JST the site could not exist, so please consider supporting us the way we support you. The helpline gets more than 200 visitors each day!
The topics below receive the greatest number of hits:
1) Designing Your Cloth
2) Planning Projects
3) Thoughts on Good Selvedges
Weaving for Diabetes
This is a fascinating story that was passed onto JST by a fellow weavers in Powell River. We now share it with you! To see the full article visit Weavers Turn Silk into Diabetes Test Strips.
Don’t forget that we offer FREE SHIPPING on orders over $200.
Group Discounts
If you buy $500 or more of yarn we’ll pay for your shipping costs and take off 10%. So why not band together with all your guild members or weaver friends and do group orders. You’ll save, save, save.
Mailing List
We want to expand our mailing list. If you like getting the Old Ladies with String Digest, even if you’re a young lady or a gentleman, please spread the word.
Hope this finds you well. Keep your chin up, Spring is just around the corner!
Spring has Sprung
Spring has finally Sprung. We have been enjoying this much needed sunshine and warmth. The fruit trees are all in blossom, the potatoes are just poking through the ground, the garlic is 10″ high. Ooo-la-la, how I love gardening !
New Yarn! Organic 2/8 Cotton.
We are so pleased to announce that we have organic cotton. It’s extremely high quality, spun in Germany and a great alternative if you’re looking for a way to continue enjoying your craft with a lighter impact on the environment. Our cotton comes in 100 gram cones @ $10.00 per cone and each cone has 710 yds. It is certified organic by GOTS (Global Organic Textiles Standard). New Patterns coming soon!
Patterns
We’ve also added a new pattern to our scarves section of the store. Bet you can’t guess who that glamorous starlet is!
This scarf is a Twill on four shafts using our 7 Gauge Bambu yarn and will make 2 scarves.
Like our other patterns we’ve put together several colour way options for you or you can pick your own favourite colours.
Anything and everything is possible.
Spinner’s Corner
Calling all Spinners! Colour Control in Spinning is being offered again September 28 & 29! Gather round the circle and learn how to surround yourself with magnificently blended colours all through the winter. Cheryl Huseby-Wiebe is back! She’s here to share her extensive knowledge and love of colour with all of us spinners who would like to improve our multi-coloured spinning techniques. She’ll help us make the beautiful images that we see in our brains come to life in our skeins.
After Cheryl’s last class – Know Your Fibre, Know Your Wheel, Charlotte got seriously to work. During the class she had her first taste of spinning with Louet’s Mohair and promptly ordered three bags full of White, Honey and Black. She’s combining the Black and Honey to make an exquisite golden grey. The yarn is such a treat to spin and knit. It’s so smooth and that sheen! Divine! Look at this! Can you even believe it? Charlotte is so cool. (She wrote this.)
Workshops
There is one spot left in our Oct 11 – 15th Double Weave workshop. If you missed this one last year because it filled up so fast, now’s your chance! This is such a fascinating weave structure and not as hard as you might think. You will be so impressed with yourself after taking this workshop because you’ll be able to do horizontal joins, weave fabrics that are double width with staggering layers, create double faced fabrics on 4 and 8 shafts, stuff pockets and learn to control colour in 2 block Double Weave. The architectural possibilities of this weave structure will blow your mind wide open and leave you seriously jazzed about all the project ideas zinging around your brain.
We have also had a cancellation in our To Twill or Not to Twill workshop (of course To Twill is the answer) on July 16 – 20th. Another exciting course, this is an excellent 3rd workshop for anyone who has taken Jane’s Colour & Design and her Pushing the Boundaries of Plainweave workshops.
Give us a call or drop us an email anytime to reserve your special spot!
Student’s Corner
The greatest reward a teacher can receive is seeing the wonderful results of a student’s hard work. A few years ago, Jennifer Barrett walked into the studio to return some soccer gear (when I was a soccer mom). Little did she know when she wandered around completely intrigued by the looms that she would be turning out her own beautiful work just a couple of years later. Jennifer took a beginners weaving course through our local guild and then came to JST for Colour and Design and then Pushing the Boundaries of Plainweave. She is one of those students who goes home and takes one of the ideas and completely designs her own project. The Repp sample struck her fancy and below is her final creation. She used her sketching skills from the Colour and Design workshop and overlayed them with the Repp ideas and voila….her very own design beautifully executed. WOWEE! This Cotton Repp Bathmat Is Stunning!
It is woven in 4/8 cotton sett at 36 e.p.i. and she used our Mop Cotton and 2/8 cotton for the weft. The colours are Peacock, Pale Limette, Medium Blue and Turquoise. We are working up her pattern and will have it in the pattern section very soon.
HelpLine
Jane has added a great discussion about Colour in Lace Weaving on the Helpline. Our Helpline is constantly growing and is full of useful information. It’s really quit exciting to build this resource! If you don’t find your question answered there, just send us an email!
October Newsletter
The JST Schedule is Here!
The moment you’ve all been waiting for! What everyone has been calling about! It’s here, the time is now!
Working on the 2012 schedule has been exciting. In addition to all our weaving workshops we are thrilled to have Cheryl Huseby Wiebe teaching two spinning workshops and Joan Carrigan teaching a basketry workshop for us this year.
Check out our full
WORKSHOP AND RETREAT SCHEDULE for 2012!
Helpline
Jane’s Helpline is filling up with some very exciting and useful information. Our newest addition is Jane’s Canvas Chart. Jane has spent her life sampling and testing yarns on their own and in different combinations for her workshops and production lines. She knows everyone doesn’t have time to sample to this extent so she is sharing the knowledge gained from that testing with everyone.
Fabulous Contributions
We are so lucky that our customers are also our good friends and friends share. We wanted to show off what some of you have been up to.
This cashmere stole was woven by Salt Spring weaver, Barney Guthrie. Barney does beautiful work in silk, weaves tartan in fine merino and just blew us away with his stole below. The hand and drape were just amazing. Barney used 5 cones of our 2/28 cashmere to create this piece.
Some of these pieces are the result of a retreat here at JST. Below is Linda Knowles’ Double Weave scarf in Zephyr that she made after taking our Double Weave workshop in August.
Jeanette Newton used Zephyr for her dented stole in sage and teal after taking our Pushing the Boundaries of Awesome Weave aka Plain Weave workshop in May:
We have more projects to share with you in our next newsletter, but we’re keeping it short this time so you can concentrate on the retreats!
However, some light entertainment that you might find fun can be found below:
If you’re really serious about weaving, every detail counts.
If you don’t believe us (you should), check this out.
(Thanks to Ingrid Servold for sending us the link!)
We also wanted to share news about a new DVD called Blue Alchemy, Stories of Indigo produced by Mary Lance. It can be purchased through Maiwa in Vancouver.
I am off to Vancouver next week to teach my new workshop, the Delectable Sari for the Maiwa Symposium. I’ll be back with more stories for the next newsletter in a couple of weeks. Until then, happy weaving,
Jane
September Newsletter
June Newsletter
Big Exciting News!
Cashmere!
You just have to feel this to believe it! Softer than a cloud.
I love working with finer yarns more than any yarn and I have always wanted to stock Cashmere ~ so I have finally taken the plunge. After all – that’s what my line of credit is for, isn’t it :^) We have done all the sett testing, made our colour selection, decided on cone size and have just unpacked the boxes today. It is very easy to weave between 18 and 24 EPI depending on plain weave or twill.
It will sell for $32.00/50gr cone with 715 yds on a cone. You can make one 8″x72″ scarf with a cone. All we have to do now is photograph every colour and get it up on the store. If you can’t wait till next week, tell us which row and colour you are interested in and we’ll get it off to you.
Patterns will be coming soon!
Spring Inspiration
Inspiring Weavers
You met these two beautiful, brilliant women over 2 years ago on our blog in September 2008. Jane and Susan have been weaving with Pam and Josie since forever and they always bring their latest projects to show us.
They’ll both turn 91 this year! Every once in a while they arrive at the same time and we all marvel at their continued liveliness. Both are still weaving prolifically. Josie, on the left is wearing her latest turned twill spring scarf (with her sample still attached) in 7 gauge bamboo. Pam, on the right, has been exploring collapse weave using Colcolastic and various reds, pinks and oranges also in 7 gauge bambu. As you can see, both scarves are as lovely as their creators.
Pam’s scarf has 109 threads of 7 gauge bamboo and is threaded to a point twill. The majority of her scarf is woven in plainweave using 7 gauge bambu but every 2 inches she weaves 2 repeats of waffle weave using Colcolastic. When the scarf comes off the loom and is washed, the Colcolastic assisted by the waffle weave structure draws in, collapsing the scarf.
Josie’s scarf as well as a variation woven by Michelle Moore in our wool/silk blend Zephyr are now up on our store site. Check them out! We’ve offered beautiful spring colourways for them, but you can always substitute your own colours!
Stay tuned for more wonderful weaving to come from these two Grande Dames!
We had just finished up this Newsletter when who walks in the door? GP (Granny Pam)! GP was here to show us her latest rendition of a collapsed scarf done in Snow Pea, Apache Blue and Chagall Blue 7 gauge bambu. While she was here, she told me that she had wished she had started weaving earlier in life and I laughed and told her she had said that to me when she was 70 and first learning to weave. She said “Well if I had, I would have been where I’m at now, then!” GP told us she could hardly wait to finish weaving this scarf and get it into the water. She loves weaving at this stage in her life because she doesn’t have to stop and make dinner for anybody, she can do whatever she wants and weave whatever she wants. Her best quote today was “Tell all your 70 year olds to keep weaving!” If you were to say that last statement with a strong Jersey accent (as in Channel Islands) you would get the picture.
Every year in the spring before show season we order tons of books ….
everything we think you might want to see at our shows. At the end of show season we come back to the studio and start to listen to our little books whining. They whisper things like – ‘why does amazon do this to us?’ and we say – ‘there there pet, someone will look at you one day’. So … to help our books out, we are offering a 20% sale hoping that our little books will go to good homes. You can think of them as rescue books if that will help.
Retreats at JST
Our first Pushing the Boundaries of Plainweave course is already over. The gals explored cramming and denting, cording, clasped weft, they discovered that warp and weft faced fabrics don’t have to be hard if you don’t want them to be. They looked at supplementary warps, tufted wefts and more! Jane used many of the beautiful fabrics she brought back from India as examples of just how far you can push the boundaries of plainweave. They are phenomenal.
Up Next!
We have another Plainweave workshop at the end of May which is full. Then it’s Twills on Four June 27 – July 1 that has openings for 2 lucky people. Let us know if you’d like to join us for a fascinating exploration of Twills. We weave a large Twill Gamp, Shadow Weave, Colour and Weave techniques like Pin-Wheel, Boundweave, and combining Twills with other structures like Basketweave.
Jane will be teaching at the Hand Weavers, Spinners & Dyers Conference in Calgary, June 7, 8, 9 & 10. We are not taking a booth this year because Jane’s youngest son Daniel graduates from grade 12 on that weekend.
Check out our Retreat Schedule for openings in our other workshops throughout the year. There are very few spots left, so be sure to let us know if you’re interested.
Helpline
Our Helpline content is growing, but it needs your questions to really grow. You can ask your questions on the Helpline or in a regular old email to Jane. We will however, post all answers on the helpline. Your questions can be anonymous so don’t be shy. Sometimes it takes a few days to answer your questions so please be patient.
Remember, we are always here to help :^)
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