Keeping Secrets

Back at the end of October, I was contacted by a friend who wanted to give his partner a special gift for her birthday. Because I adore them both, I decided to make this a priority weave. I mean, he gave me carte blanche for the design, and ample info on color choices. This was set up to be a dream collaboration! I just needed to have it completed and in his hands before her birthday before Christmas.

There were a lot of messages and photos shared to make sure I was getting this right. I put together a few photos of fibers in the right color ranges

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The colors were approved and I started playing with different patterns for the stripes. I made some changes to the final, but this is the pattern I created just for Lynn’s shawl. I wanted each color stripe to be a different pattern.

Here’s some images of the shawl in progress:

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This really did weave up beautifully. The purples, light olive and taupe were all tencel. The dark spruce was rayon, and the entire weft of chocolate brown is a soft and durable rayon/flax blend. The colors are all so shiny and give a look of silk. The rayon/flax brown shows off the patterns so well and does not have the sheen, which helps with creating a truly magical soft texture to the entire piece.

Here’s the finished piece! The photo on the dress form was the last I took before carefully boxing it up. The close ups were taken by Lynn when she received it.

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There’s one more thing I want to share about this project. The only appropriately sized box I had available to ship the gift box in was from Chewy. Now, I know that Lynn and Andy have three dogs. Getting a box from Chewy probably wouldn’t be given a second thought, so I needed to be sure that if Lynn opened the box she wouldn’t spoil the surprise. So I left this note on top:

Andy may have made sure she saw that before spiriting the gift away from her until the next week. I know that when I saw the post on Facebook, I could not have been more delighted to be part of this surprise. Thank you Andy, for helping me create something special for Lynn.

So, a few take-aways:

• I LOVE conspiring with folks to make surprises. I -do- take some commissions.
• I can keep a secret!!! Wow. Was that hard to do. I have wanted to share this and the story for nearly 2 months!
• I need photos of people wearing my shawls and scarves.