Vacation Bowl

Since it is a bit rainy and dreary here today here on vacation I thought I would take the opportunity to report in on the bowl making session with my friend Margaret on Wednesday.  First off I must say that it is always wonderful to get together with an old friend one has not seen in something like 30 years.  We were amazed now we just sort of picked off where we left off.   She brought a lovely array of her own bowls for me to look at and wow..she is really good at making them and picking out wonderful fabrics to make them out of.  We had a great time figuring out what fabrics to use on the bowl we were going to make.   Since we both love batiks, we chose one of the green fabrics from the jelly roll medley I purchased and a wonderful fall batik.  Don't know why my machine chose NOW to act up but we had a few technical difficulties.  Maybe may machine is like me, it doesn't travel well - HA!   

If you go back to my blog entry about making these bowls  http://newenglandfiberarts.com/node/100  you will see that one takes narrow strips of fabric and wraps them about rope and then sews the rope, using a zig zag stitch, in a circle, after wrapping.  First thing Margaret told me was that I was wrapping the fabric in the wrong direction .....I should be wrapping it from left to right ...no wonder I was having a difficult time ending the bowls!!!  She showed me that when you reach the end of the bowl IF you have wrapped in left to right, you simply do the last wrap until you no long see the rope and then pull the tail of the fabric strip UNDER the bowl and finish sewing it.  Since I had wrapped the fabric in the other direction, there was no way I could do this because the fabric strip ended up on top....DAMN!  No problem she says, there is this quick fix that I figured out when my end of the bowl cut off ends up looking a  bit ratty...cool!. She simply snipped a piece of that ending fabric, held it over the end, pulled it tight and zig-zagged in in place.  You then have 2 tails which need to be trimmed.  This requires a nice sharp pair of scissors and one snips right along the zig-zag replicating the line of the zig zag and WAHLAH...a perfect ending and we all know how much everyone likes a perfect ending.   I made a larger basket this morning and got a chance to try the perfect ending all by myself....LOVE IT!  You might be wondering what is the difference between a basket and a bowl????  Baskets have handles on them.  Well, the rain has stopped and the sun is trying to come out so time to find another fun activity to do in the area.  Two more days and we will be headed home...BOOOO!