Friday, October 31, 2014

Happy Howl-o-ween! AND MY FAVORITE FASHION FRIDAY

I <3 Halloween!

It has been a favorite holiday for a while and certainly since I learned to truly dress myself.  It is the one day a year that you are allowed to dress any ol' way you want.  I already view most days fair game so it is just another good excuse to dig out some odd and end accessories.

This year Marcel dressed as a very dapper and super smart looking Sherlock Holmes.  Or something close, he needs a pipe!
My costume was a thrifted but handmade dinosaur costume, that really makes quite the lovely vest.  It is cold here, snow on the ground to start the day, so this dino is bundled, pending any ice ages.  I also got to pull out my fancy handknit booties and don a sweet updo to mirror my spikes.

Hope those little trick 'r treaters are ready for us!



HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Monday, October 13, 2014

Ok, so what are we doing?

Woolen Wood as this blog is aptly named also applies to our brand.  We are a husband and wife team creating handmade items from soft and hard fibers.  AB spends time in the basement turning and I spend time in the basement hooking ;)  AB's wood turning skills have developed over his lifetime, but he first learned the skills from his father.  I have lots of art skills and I like to use them all but I have been honing my knitting machine savvy since a fateful workshop in grad school.

We have slowly been building this brand for a while, even while I was still living in St. Louis I was daydreaming of our collaborations and came up with the Woolen Wood name.  It really hasn't been until I got more comfortably settled in Madison that we have collaborated on items (certainly we have the house project always on the list) but it has been a recent thing to pool our talents towards handmade wearables and other functional home wares.  I originally went to AB looking for a good solution to fasten my scarves.  AND he came up with a great solution!  Check below for his wood pins.

Together over the past months, we have been making items to get onto Etsy.  Thus building a bit of a collection.  Recently the opportunity to join in a craft show featuring cozy items presented itself and we were selected to participate.  So on October 25 we will pack up and head to Poynette, WI to be a part of Apple-Palooza at Lapacek's Orchard.  We spent this last week prepping the booth display and trying out our borrowed tent to make sure we could figure it out.

We will use rentals from A la Crate in order to display things in and around, and we think these amazing vintage items will really help our pieces shine!

Here are some preview images from the setup:
Shawl Collars with various dye and felt techniques.  These are perfect for the cooler days coming, you can add distinction to any plain shirt by simply wearing one of these all day long.  (I firmly believe I survived last winter due to my wearing of these styles.)

AB's bowls will be proudly featured on little mini wood pedestals!  We used bowl blanks, elm bases, doilies and white enamel table from A la Crate!

On the left side of the table, we have a small but certainly important container holding the turned wood pins that AB has made.  These pins are the very key to keeping a shawl collar on and allow you to wear it in multiple ways.
There are some felt bags that coordinate with some of the shawl collars and a few quirky and warm head pieces as well.  

Here we have one of our ladies displaying the shawl/pin system.

Overall booth layout should provide good room for browsing, trying on and getting to know us.  We are going to get our logo onto the chalkboard on the right, and use that as a way to get people into the tent.  The chalkboard is the Raggedy Ann chalkboard from A la Crate.

A second table for bowl display and another mannequin named Penny, showing off a different collar style.  The mint green metal folding table and orange folding step ladder are from A la Crate.  

Close ups of these marvelous pins! 


Another bowl closeup... there are some really lovely pieces in here.  AB's turning has amped up and in no time we will have enough wood curls to insulate our garden plants over the winter with!  Double bonus!!




Next weekend we will work on pricing and getting ourselves set up to do money exchange.  But for now, it is back to the knitting machine for me!






Monday, October 6, 2014

Fall off the blog wagon

Whew! Sorry for disappearing for a bit there.  Things have been busy on the work/life front and have prevented my word-smithing for a little while.  I am back and hoping to get back on a two a week track here.

Since last post... it is Fall! We are putting away the shorts and digging out the sweaters.  We have had a cute new couple of arrivals at work and new moms are getting the hang of things.  New dads too! I have learned plenty of new baby rearing tricks by being in such close proximity.  Today I had a good lesson on swaddling.

AB and I are busily prepping for our first ever craft show!  We were able to get into Apple-Palooza with Woolen Wood items to be featured.  On Saturday, October 25th from 9am-6pm Woolen Wood will have a booth at the craft fair!  Come by in order to pick some apples, have some cider, try some pie and shop the shops.


So we've got about two full weeks of prep time left and things are shaping up well.  He's been at the lathe while I've been at the knitting machine down in the basement.  He's made several great bowls and is making a variety of types of pins to hold my felt collars together.  
This is an example of the small knit clutches I am pulling together.  The technique is a process that draws the stitches up from a lower portion of knitting and creates great ruffles.  Felting the wool then works to make the ruffles more pronounced.  I have vintage zippers that work to close the bag and become handles too.

Finished collars and shoulderlets hanging ready for display.  We will refine our booth display this weekend with luck.  We are going to use A La Crate for our display and I am excited to incorporate our items with some awesome vintage pieces.

Here some knit pieces off the machine await the finishing touches.  They will get cleaned up and felted.  Then they will be sewn into bags or prepped for shawl-dom. 

The final phase is to hand sew the labels into the piece.

Don't be fooled by the bag labels, these turned wood bowls are hand made.  But they do require proper seasoning and moisture monitoring.  The shop bags make for a helpful environment to keep the roughed out bowls the proper moisture level.

A couple of cherry bowls, a walnut bowl and a variety of shawl pins waiting to find their forever homes.  Fingers crossed that they pair with my collars and shawls at Apple-Palooza!

A couple newer bowls awaiting final finishing touches on the work table.  Currently not remembering which kind of wood these are...AB can help me out later and I will update!

And  the real star of the show... this wonderfully perfectly spherical walnut bowl!