Door is done

The project that has occupied much of my energy for the last couple months and sapped most of my energy over the past few weeks is finally done. Last finishing touches done Saturday and delivered five or six hours before it was to be sold off at the auction. I haven't heard whether it sold or how much it sold for, but it's out of my hands and I am so glad.

Lots of pictures because I took them and gosh darn, this took forever so I want to show it off. Few more weaving shots:

ground/leaves fabric
Weft ball getting ready to weave meadow fabric

Beginning of meadow fabric. The weft was wound and dyed so that the colors would pool in certain places like patches of flowers. Unfortunately in between winding the weft and laying it out for dyeing I forgot how I was planning on doing it and made a slight miscalculation which resulted in the "there" and "back" being dyed differently so I ended up cutting the weft yarn into lengths the width of the fabric and placing each piece in individually. It worked out well though it was a little more time consuming.

Close-ups of the panels in place. The white stuff at the edges is silicon...the excess was removed later. I got in over my head with this project. The woodworking should have been within my ability but it would have taken me a lot more time and would not have been done as expertly without Dave's lifesaving help. Routing out the panels took me a lot longer than expected. Dave stepped in and helped me clean up the edges and instructed me on the fine points of staining. He took charge of the reassembly and did a magnificent job with the molding, even managing to compensate for a couple of my slips of the router in the corners.

Here's Dave reflected in the glass framed by his fine work.

Sara was very helpful too.

The door!

Another view. The reflections in the glass make photographing the fabric difficult but they make the fabric look a lot more interesting. If I'd had more time, I would have etched the glass also to give it another dimension, but alas, no time.

Close-up of one of the stained glass panels. This is derived from an assymmetrical log cabin quilting block. I like the way the stained glass turned out and I'm proud of myself for finishing it so darn fast, especially since I haven't done stained glass in years, but my main conclusion from this foray into cold glass is that I really don't like it. Give me melting hot glass anytime over cutting and grinding glass with little speckles of glass flying around and microscopic glass grains cutting my hands. I much prefer burns.

Meanwhile, while Dave was doing the molding and polyurethane on the door, I tried to make myself useful by staining the spinning wheel parts for the new spinning wheels we recently got for the Craft Center. Here's five Ashford Kiwis in pieces.

And now that I'm done with the door project, I'm taking some time out for myself. Finished spinning up this merino tencel yarn that I started during a demo for the Studio Artists Gallery and started knitting a shawl from Victorian Lace Today just because sometimes it's nice to follow a pattern without thinking about it. Of course I'll probably run out of yarn soon and hopefully will be able to find the rest of the roving I dyed to finish up the shawl. Ehh, it's something to do.