Many classes use all the colors of the rainbow (and more!), but in the Spinners’ Color Lab with Deb Jones, students made rainbows of their own, in roving and yarn. Mixing a certain number of “starter colors” into hundreds of other colors kept the rainbows coming. Deb reported 200 skeins of yarn (more than 5,000 grams) and 1,300 grams of roving were dyed in two days. Students worked as partners dyeing solids, gradients, speckles and more. After the dyeing and drying, students spun the singles into one-of-a-kind yarns that might look like keepsakes, but are sure to be used in other fiber works. We hope to see those on a return visit! Happiness is being surrounded by color! Although there […]
Sharing Sievers and Washington Island
Sievers and Washington Island have recently been mentioned in several media formats, starting with this book, Small-Town Wisconsin. The book covers towns and villiages with populations of under 5,000 and twenty of the fifty places featured have a population of under 1,000. In the introduction, the author writes, “This book features fifty examples of destinations with something significant in their character that defines and enriches their location.” We were pleasantly surprised to see Sievers as the featured story for the piece about Washington Island. The 195-page book has lots of interesting stories and many color photos. We have this book for sale in our shop at $27.95. If you would like a copy, please use our Contact Us page to […]
Wonderful and better
It was a wonderful week of Rigid Heddle Weaving with Deb Jones and the only thing that could have made the week better was to have an Open Quilt Studio at the same time…so we did! Some of the weavers were beginners and some had previous rigid heddle experience, so there were intermediate-level techniques and project ideas, including weft-faced weaves. Beginners started with scarves, then made a sampler, then had time for at least one more project. The instructor, Deb Jones, first came to Sievers as a student in Franie Philps’ Intermediate Spinning class in 1991. She continued to take spinning-related classes with Deb Menz as well as weaving, marbling, papermaking, feltmaking and coiled basketry. In 1999, less than a […]
Of spinning and dyeing
Since 2017, we’ve kept a Sievers calendar close by, writing in the names of students and teachers who we haven’t seen for some time that happen to stop in for a visit. Generally, we have several entries each week and during July and August, it can be several each day. We love re-connecting in this way and keeping this record has been so much fun, we wish we would have thought of it years earlier! Just a couple weeks ago, a former student stopped in while biking on the Island. She’d taken one class here in 1987, spinning with Franie Philps. Since our first year, Sievers has offered spinning and Franie was the instructor from 1982-1999. For one of her […]
Wonderfully woolly
A class specifically to study the wool of different sheep breeds and their characteristics as they apply to spinning (and more) made for a wonderful woolly week. As always, instructor Deb Jones brought a wide variety of wools and other fibers for use in class. Some of the spikiest of tools are used for carding, combing and blending the softest of wools. Putting the fibers to work, the spinners had their wheels in motion, interspersed occasionally with faraway looks, contemplating which blends to combine next. Swooning over all the wools and yarns from class! Cindy R. shared her “Sievers Story” with us: “What a wonderful experience. The bunk house was fun and the class was out of this world. Deb […]
Taking the plunge
It is an Island tradition for some to run down the rocks from the top of Schoolhouse Beach and dive into the clear, cold water. You can imagine how invigorating and refreshing that would be. This year, Sievers “took the plunge” on a new class, Rigid Heddle Weaving. We wonder now why we waited so long. When Deb Jones offered this class for our 2019 season, we knew immediately that it was the right time with the right instructor. Like Schoolhouse Beach, this new class was invigorating and refreshing! Everyone started with a simple scarf. Learning to warp the loom and seeing their scarves take shape on the loom happened in only a couple of hours. The scarves on the […]
Straw into gold
Well, maybe not technically spinning straw into gold, but the students in Deb Jones’ Beginning Spinning and Rainbow Dyeing class took simple wool fibers and turned them into something equally precious to a beginning spinner, their own handspun and hand-dyed yarns. By the end of the first afternoon, these beginners were spinners! You can see more photos from the class as Deb has posted them on The Fiber Garden Facebook page. Her next stop, along with other Sievers teachers (Nancy Frantz and Mary Germain), students and friends is the Wisconsin Sheep & Wool Festival from September 7-10. Spinning is one of the classes that’s been offered at Sievers each year since the start. One of those first classes in 1979 is shown in the black and white photo. Dyeing was added later, using […]
Happiness is…
…a colorful quilt. ….being inspired by nature. …warm woolens. …wildlife in the backyard. …watching clouds and sunsets (especially the ones on Washington Island). As promised last time, the Open Quilt Studio “challenge quilt” border fabrics were on before class was over. Everyone likes…a colorful quilt. In Susan Hoffmann’s Landscape ‘Painting’ with Fabric class, students worked with the same set of fabrics. Although they all started with the same theme, there were as many variations as students, each person creating a unique woodland scene and …being inspired by nature. The Spinning Art Yarns class taught by Deb Jones used a variety of fibers and combined them into special and fanciful yarns by using the drum carders, picker, spinning wheels and plying in order to have some one-of-a-kind…warm […]
