Snowflakes in Red

Every serious crafter knows you'd better have your holiday ducks in a row by the time the leaves start changing, or you'll be caught in a mad panic, come December.

I'm pretty well on top of things this year (it helps that I don't really participate much in exchanging gifts at the holidays) and am just enjoying this cute set of striped towels before I get serious about working on my charity weaving.

Don't you just love 'em?

Little Skulls All in a Row

I decided a while ago that something I need in my life is a set of fancy cloth napkins.  It's all because there was a cool project in a recent issue of Handwoven (Mar/Apr 2014) for some napkins with an allover mini-overshot design, and I really fell in love with them.  Of course I had to change everything about the project to make it more 'me' and thus the skully napkins were born.

For non-weavers, "overshot" is just a type of weaving where you weave a base cloth in plain weave (in this case, grey) while making a design within that fabric with another yarn (in this case, black.) The base cloth holds it all together, while the pattern makes it fancy.

I took this particular design from Bertha Gray Hayes' book of mini overshot designs.  She called this one "Gone With the Wind" but when I look at it, I see stacks and stacks of little skulls, like the catacombs of Paris.