Spring has Sprung
May 7th, 2012 | 
Author: Spring has finally Sprung. We have been enjoying this much needed sunshine and warmth. The fruit trees are all in blossom, the potatoes are just poking through the ground, the garlic is 10″ high. Ooo-la-la, how I love gardening !
New Yarn! Organic 2/8 Cotton.
We are so pleased to announce that we have organic cotton. It’s extremely high quality, spun in Germany and a great alternative if you’re looking for a way to continue enjoying your craft with a lighter impact on the environment. Check out these 25 beautiful colours! Our cotton comes in 100 gram cones @ $10.00 per cone and each cone has 710 yds. It is certified organic by GOTS (Global Organic Textiles Standard). New Patterns coming soon!
Patterns
We’ve also added a new pattern to our scarves section of the store. Bet you can’t guess who that glamorous starlet is!
This scarf is a Twill on four shafts using our 7 Gauge Bambu yarn and will make 2 scarves.
Like our other patterns we’ve put together several colour way options for you or you can pick your own favourite colours.
Anything and everything is possible.
Spinner’s Corner
Calling all Spinners! Colour Control in Spinning is being offered again September 28 & 29! Gather round the circle and learn how to surround yourself with magnificently blended colours all through the winter. Cheryl Huseby-Wiebe is back! She’s here to share her extensive knowledge and love of colour with all of us spinners who would like to improve our multi-coloured spinning techniques. She’ll help us make the beautiful images that we see in our brains come to life in our skeins.
After Cheryl’s last class - Know Your Fibre, Know Your Wheel, Charlotte got seriously to work. During the class she had her first taste of spinning with Louet’s Mohair and promptly ordered three bags full of White, Honey and Black. She’s combining the Black and Honey to make an exquisite golden grey. The yarn is such a treat to spin and knit. It’s so smooth and that sheen! Divine! Look at this! Can you even believe it? Charlotte is so cool. (She wrote this.)
Workshops
There is one spot left in our Oct 11 - 15th Double Weave workshop. If you missed this one last year because it filled up so fast, now’s your chance! This is such a fascinating weave structure and not as hard as you might think. You will be so impressed with yourself after taking this workshop because you’ll be able to do horizontal joins, weave fabrics that are double width with staggering layers, create double faced fabrics on 4 and 8 shafts, stuff pockets and learn to control colour in 2 block Double Weave. The architectural possibilities of this weave structure will blow your mind wide open and leave you seriously jazzed about all the project ideas zinging around your brain.
We have also had a cancellation in our To Twill or Not to Twill workshop (of course To Twill is the answer) on July 16 - 20th. Another exciting course, this is an excellent 3rd workshop for anyone who has taken Jane’s Colour & Design and her Pushing the Boundaries of Plainweave workshops.
Give us a call or drop us an email anytime to reserve your special spot!
Student’s Corner
The greatest reward a teacher can receive is seeing the wonderful results of a student’s hard work. A few years ago, Jennifer Barrett walked into the studio to return some soccer gear (when I was a soccer mom). Little did she know when she wandered around completely intrigued by the looms that she would be turning out her own beautiful work just a couple of years later. Jennifer took a beginners weaving course through our local guild and then came to JST for Colour and Design and then Pushing the Boundaries of Plainweave. She is one of those students who goes home and takes one of the ideas and completely designs her own project. The Repp sample struck her fancy and below is her final creation. She used her sketching skills from the Colour and Design workshop and overlayed them with the Repp ideas and voila….her very own design beautifully executed. WOWEE! This Cotton Repp Bathmat Is Stunning!
It is woven in 4/8 cotton sett at 36 e.p.i. and she used our Mop Cotton and 2/8 cotton for the weft. The colours are Peacock, Pale Limette, Medium Blue and Turquoise. We are working up her pattern and will have it in the pattern section very soon.
HelpLine
Jane has added a great discussion about Colour in Lace Weaving on the Helpline. Our Helpline is constantly growing and is full of useful information. It’s really quit exciting to build this resource! If you don’t find your question answered there, just send us an email!
Posted in 
February Newsletter
Workshop Updates
Wicker With Nature’s Bounty Basketry course with Joan Carrigan on May 24 & 25 has three spots available.
Our only weaving workshop that has any space left is Jane’s Colour & Design, July 30 - August 3. There are three spots left.
Happy New Year!!
A New Year Brings New Life!
Happy New Year Everyone! I hope you can forgive us for not sending out our Usual Festive Holiday Greeting…..we had great plans, but alas, our computer had major health issues and was sent to MacHospital the week before Christmas! You can imagine our distress.
As they say, better late than never….Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Break a Leg, Eat, Drink and be Merry….May all your New Year’s Resolutions last more than 3 weeks but most importantly we wish you all Health and Happiness for 2012 and always.
Delicious News!
You know …, dreams really do come true. For as long as I have dreamed about having my weaving school (decades) I have also dreamed about finding a way to marry my other 2 passions to the business, growing food and making delicious meals.
As many of you know we have a pretty big garden and grow heaps of awesome food to feed our family and guests and now JST has taken the next step and brought on board the lovely, delightful and talented chef Rosemary Harbrecht. Rosemary trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, owned her first bakery called “Rosemary’s” near Berkely, CA and then owned the Brulee Bakery in Calgary, Alberta. She has co-authored cookbooks, taken cooking tours to France and Tuscany and is now the pastry chef for the renowned Hastings House on Salt Spring Island. Rosemary helps complete the circle. She loves cooking and gardening….coffee and chocolate……. and other such essentials! Can you believe our luck? New retreats are on the horizon bringing cooking, weaving and gardening together.
One Spot Left!
Know Your Fibre, Know Your Wheel. There’s room for one last person in Cheryl Huseby-Wiebe’s spinning workshop January 21st & 22nd.
If you want to have more control over your wheel and understand the difference between many animal fibres, this workshop is for you! For more information go to the link above.
Workshop Updates:
Everything is full until Colour Control in Spinning May 10th & 11th with Cheryl Huseby-Wiebe and we still have spots available in Joan Carrigan’s Wicker with Nature’s Bounty workshop May 24th & 25th. For more information on these two workshops, please click on the links.
And Now for Something Completely Different! We had to leave you with a laugh!
Two Dogs Dining in a Busy Restaurant!
Tags:
December Newsletter
And the winner is ….
We know you’ve been waiting with bated breath all week to find out who our Grand Prize Winner is!
The lucky person who gets to spend 5 days immersed in weaving, eating great food, drinking good wine, and laughing with a bunch of other wonderful folks….. nestled here in the woods …
is VALERIE DZIAK!!!
Congratulations
We’ll be seeing her soon!
It was so much fun doing this contest, that once we’d picked our grand prize winner, we just couldn’t stop. We decided we had to add two more prizes. Claire Simons was our lovely 2nd place winner of a $100 gift certificate and Judy Sloan won the third place Namaste bag! Congratulations to everyone and thank you all so much for the enthusiastic participation!
On the Workshop Front:
There are only 3 spots left for Cheryl Huseby-Wiebe’s Know Your Fibre, Know Your Wheel 2 day workshop, January 21 and 22. We’re really excited to have Cheryl back again. Her previous dying workshops were a resounding success and now she’s ready to bring her 30+ years of enthusiasm and expertise to help us understand our wheels and favourite fibres.
If you have been spinning for a while and don’t really understand your wheel or how to tweak it, then this workshop is for you. And, if you think protein fibres just come from four legged animals, then there is another reason to sign up! You will be spinning a variety of wools and luxurious fibres like cashmere and fine mohair, but you will also be spinning man made protein fibres like latte, corn fibre and soy silk.
For more information click here.
Jane’s workshops for the year are almost full. For retreats earlier in the year - Colour & Design still has 2 spots open. February 6-10. And we have one spot left in the B&B. For more information, click here.
This workshop lays an exceptional foundation for newer weavers and advanced weavers, especially if designing your own fabrics is your goal or if you struggle with colour and sett decisions.
Holiday Shopping is Easy!
Are you wondering what to get your friend to celebrate their successful stash reduction?
Is your husband still puzzled by your favourite colours after 30 years of marriage?
Does he do all his shopping after dinner on December 24?
If you’ve answered yes to one (or more) of these skill testing questions, then have him call us! We know exactly what you need and what colour it should be - a bright green Gift Certificate! It goes with everything! You can’t go wrong with this one.
For the younger ones in your lives you may want to consider the merits of the Harrisville Educational, Enriching and Entertaining Easy Weaver, Lap and Potholder Looms. They will provide your young friend with an engaging, creative experience where they can learn a useful skill, apply mechanical ability and make a fun project all in one!
For these and hundreds of other titles please click here!
Win a 2012 Workshop Contest Almost Over!
Well folks,
there are just 3 days left (including today) for your chance to win a free retreat with accommodation here at JST. Remember you just have to spend a mere $100 (on yarn that you need anyway ;^) to get your name in our pretty little ballot box!
We will be drawing the winning name on Wednesday at 5pm!
We’ll let the winner know immediately, and put their name in the December Newsletter due next week!
November Newsletter
Win a Free Retreat!
Someone will get an early Christmas present!
For every $100 you spend in the month of November, before tax and shipping, you get your name put in for a big draw and the prize is a 5 day retreat with B&B at your choice of an available JST workshop in 2012. If you order $200, we’ll put your name in twice! Order $300 and you get it in there 3 times! Order $400 … you get the idea.
The draw will take place on December 1st and we’ll notify the lucky person right away. We will announce the winner in the December newsletter.
Some people just take off after our workshops! And you could be one of these happy ladies!
Sample Cards!
Jane Stafford Textiles has a beautiful sample card for each one of our yarn lines. The full set of 15 cards has over 500 six inch yarn samples for you to fondle and drool over. The yarns are presented in an analogous colour arrangement which makes colour choices easy. Each card also lists yds/lb, put up and Jane’s sett recommendations for that yarn. The set of cards alone is a stunning sight, not to mention all of the creative imaginings they will inspire. Each card is $3.00 and the entire set is $35.00
Each sample card set now comes with Jane’s Master Sett Chart, chock full of essential sett recommendations for many exciting projects.
2012 Retreats and Workshops are filling up pretty darned fast! Check them out here!
Know Your Fibre, Know Your Wheel with Cheryl Huseby Wiebe.
In January we are so lucky to have Cheryl Huseby Wiebe teaching her new workshop Know Your Fibre, Know Your Wheel. Cheryl has been spinning for over 30 years. Her spinning and dyeing knowledge are immense. She has accumulated her knowledge by taking spinning workshops with practically every well known spinning teach on the planet, however, what makes Cheryl so special is her ability to share her knowledge so graciously and competently.
Cheryl is also known for her precision dyeing. She has been dyeing for Treenway Silks for over 10 years and was featured in the book: The Yarn Lover’s Guide to Hand Dyeing by Linda La Belle.
If you know how to spin but haven’t had a chance to really understand your wheel or to fully appreciate the difference between all kinds of fibres, this workshop is for you! The workshop runs January 21 and 22. For more information click here.
Perfect Fall Project
Isn’t this a great photo? Claire Simon of Salt Spring Island sent this in last week.
These towels were woven in our boucle cotton at 12 epi, 12 ppi. 5 cones will make you 6 towels. We have the pattern up on the store with 3 different colour combinations but Claire picked her own for this batch of towels. She used Cayenne, Gold, Orange, Turmeric and Rust.
It just makes you want to run out and get a clothesline.
The Delectable Sari
Last week in Vancouver I presented the Delectable Sari workshop designed for the Maiwa Symposium and based on my observations while travelling in India. Twelve great weavers gathered together for four days at the Maiwa Loft on Granville Island. Look at all those beautiful Sari colours on the table. The entire workshop used just two yarns: 2/16 cotton for the warp and 2/30 silk for the weft. We looked at supplementary warp, double weave, cramming & denting, inlay and iridescence. It was wonderful!
Group and Bulk Orders
For all yarn orders over $300 we offer a 10% discount and for yarn orders over $500 we offer a 10% discount plus free shipping. So why not gather a few of your weaving friends and put your orders together. You will save save save.
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October Newsletter
The JST Schedule is Here!
The moment you’ve all been waiting for! What everyone has been calling about! It’s here, the time is now!
Working on the 2012 schedule has been exciting. In addition to all our weaving workshops we are thrilled to have Cheryl Huseby Wiebe teaching two spinning workshops and Joan Carrigan teaching a basketry workshop for us this year.
Look at these happy faces! This could be you! Check out our full
WORKSHOP AND RETREAT SCHEDULE for 2012!
Helpline
Jane’s Helpline is filling up with some very exciting and useful information. Our newest addition is Jane’s Canvas Chart. Jane has spent her life sampling and testing yarns on their own and in different combinations for her workshops and production lines. She knows everyone doesn’t have time to sample to this extent so she is sharing the knowledge gained from that testing with everyone.
Fabulous Contributions
We are so lucky that our customers are also our good friends and friends share. We wanted to show off what some of you have been up to. The works below are absolutely beautiful!
This cashmere stole was woven by Salt Spring weaver, Barney Guthrie. Barney does beautiful work in silk, weaves tartan in fine merino and just blew us away with his stole below. The hand and drape were just amazing. Barney used 5 cones of our 2/28 cashmere to create this piece.
Some of these pieces are the result of a retreat here at JST. Below is Linda Knowles’ Double Weave scarf in Zephyr that she made after taking our Double Weave workshop in August.
Jeanette Newton used Zephyr for her dented stole in sage and teal after taking our Pushing the Boundaries of Awesome Weave aka Plain Weave workshop in May:
We have more projects to share with you in our next newsletter, but we’re keeping it short this time so you can concentrate on the retreats!
However, some light entertainment that you might find fun can be found below:
If you’re really serious about weaving, every detail counts.
If you don’t believe us (you should), check this out.
(Thanks to Ingrid Servold for sending us the link!)
We also wanted to share news about a new DVD called Blue Alchemy, Stories of Indigo produced by Mary Lance. It can be purchased through Maiwa in Vancouver.
I am off to Vancouver next week to teach my new workshop, the Delectable Sari for the Maiwa Symposium. I’ll be back with more stories for the next newsletter in a couple of weeks. Until then, happy weaving,
Jane
September Newsletter
EXTRA EXTRA! Read all about it!
Workshops for Beginners and those who need Refreshing!
Here is your chance to spend a day or three learning some great weaving basics.
On Salt Spring
In October, we’ve got three consecutive 1 day workshops: Honing Your Basic Weaving Skills; Project Planning 101 and Warping with Sticky Threads.
You can pick one, two or take all three.
WHERE: Jane Stafford Textiles Studio, 142 Richard Flack Rd., Salt Spring Island
TIME: 9-4
COST: $100.00/day Includes HST (yum yum!), lunch, coffee, tea and goodies.
TO REGISTER: PLEASE CALL JANE STAFFORD @ 250 537-9468
or email jane@janestaffordtextiles.com
October 5: Honing Your Basic Weaving Skills. Do you dread dressing your loom? Do you have trouble with tension and selvedges? Then come spend a day and learn to take control! Become a dominatrix in yor own studio! We will cover warping back-to-front, selvedges, bobbin-winding techniques, shuttle-throwing, proper posture and other exciting tidbits.
October 6: Project Planning 101 Is the mathematics of weaving contributing to our alcohol consumption? Come detox with Jane. We will look at warp and weft calculations, planning yardage requirements, configuring warp ends for a given draft and basic draft reading. Don’t be scared …. we’ll simplify the process.
October 7: Warping with Sticky Threads (aka tyeing one on!). This seminar has had great reviews from weavers who have had difficulty dressing their looms with sticky yarns such as mohair or highly textured yarns. We will review basic warping techniques and then Jane will demonstrate dressing a loom with a 100% Brushed Mohair warp and provide all the weaving techniques she has learned after weaving thousands of Mohair Blankets. Weaving with these yarns is very easy and enjoyable when you know the tricks. Each participant will receive a step-by-step instruction sheet with illustrations.
In Vancouver!
Jane will be bringing Honing Your Basic Weaving Skills to Vancouver! For all you Lower Mainland weavers you don’t have to take the ferry to learn how to make a great warp, dress a great loom, have great selvedges and tension, etc.
WHEN: SATURDAY OCTOBER 22
WHERE: Kanata Co-operative Community Building, 7155 Blake Street, Vancouver
TIME: 9-4
COST: $100.00 Includes HST (yum yum!), lunch, coffee, tea and goodies.
TO REGISTER: PLEASE CALL JANE STAFFORD @ 250 537-9468
or email jane@janestaffordtextiles.com
Click link for a Map to Kanata Co-Operative.
Remember, we are always here to help :^)
Our Helpline is growing with useful information and tips. Ask your questions directly on the Helpline or in just email us here in the studio. We will post all answers on the helpline anonymously for everyone to see and benefit from. It may take a day or two to answer your questions, we thank you for your patience!
Maybe someone you know would like to be on our mailing list. Please consider forwarding this newsletter.
June Newsletter
Big Exciting News!
Cashmere!
You just have to feel this to believe it! Softer than a cloud.
I love working with finer yarns more than any yarn and I have always wanted to stock Cashmere ~ so I have finally taken the plunge. After all - that’s what my line of credit is for, isn’t it :^) We have done all the sett testing, made our colour selection, decided on cone size and have just unpacked the boxes today. It is very easy to weave between 18 and 24 EPI depending on plain weave or twill.
18 beautiful Colours
It will sell for $32.00/50gr cone with 715 yds on a cone. You can make one 8″x72″ scarf with a cone. All we have to do now is photograph every colour and get it up on the store. If you can’t wait till next week, tell us which row and colour you are interested in and we’ll get it off to you.
Patterns will be coming soon!
New Patterns
A Good Graphic Goes a Long Way
For all you weavers that have taken Jane’s Colour & Design Workshop, you will be familiar with the way she teaches you to interpret the same graphic design in different colour combinations and yarns. Here is an excellent example of this idea. Linda Knowles from Vancouver took a pattern from a scarf woven by Kate McKibbon (that was on display in the studio). Linda changed the block pattern just a smidge and interpreted it with 2 different yarns. Linda’s scarf is woven with a 12 gauge Bambu warp and a Zephyr weft. She then took the same block profile and interpreted it in 2/8 cotton and boucle for her tea towel.
By overlaying different colour and texture onto the block profile, you would never know it was the same pattern. So beautifully done Linda and thank you for sharing your designs with us.
There are also 32 more patterns in our online store. You’ll find Tea Towels, Scarves, Blankets and Placemats made from 2/8 Cotton, Cotton Boucle, Mercerized Cotton, Bambu and Chenille. They are an excellent source of inspiration and learning!
Retreats at JST
Our second Pushing the Boundaries of Plainweave workshop for the year has finished. We had such a fun and exuberant group. We added warping, winding on and threading demonstrations and used many exciting plainweave techniques including cramming and denting, weft and warp faced structure, tufted weft, clasped weft and cording. They were challenged to work with linen (it’s not as scary as you think!), as well as 8/8 cotton, cottolin, mercerized cotton and 2/8 cotton. The weather was beautiful, the food was delicious and the conversation fascinating. We were sad to see everyone go!
“Hello Jane,
You are awesome as a teacher, weaver, hostess, etc., etc.,etc., as the King of Siam would have said! I have to tell you that I really enjoyed the recent workshop, and many many thanks to you for it. You have inspired me to go and explore the possibilities of my four shaft loom, and to look for awesome colour and fibre combinations.
The first day after the workshop, I went to the Buchart Gardens with my daughter-in-law, and we were blown away, not only with the flowers but with the colours and colour combinations offered by the flowers, trees and the layouts of the different sections of the gardens. Now I can see a cloth called “Buchart Quarry Greens” or “Buchart Pinks”, and so on. I got carried away with photographing everything, often in close-up, to look for the colours including the zingers! And Janet Phillips’ book; what possibilities! I now need to live well past 100!
Please thank Charlotte for her lovely lunches and presence and Grant for the wonderful dinners. I enjoyed also the relaxing though sometimes invigorating discussions over too much wine! So, again very many thanks for a great time, I am now one of your fans/supporters/admirers!
I wish you a wonderful summer, and all success with your courses,
Cheers, Ian”
Nature by Numbers
We are constantly sent fabulous information from our weavers. This one came from Diane McAuliffe in Seattle and we just had to pass it on.
It is a wonderful link (click on the title) to a fascinating visual of the correlation between mathematics and nature. As weavers, we are always using many of these formulas to help us design beautiful graphics in our textiles. It really is worth watching. Thanks Diane!
Remember, we are always here to help :^)
Our Helpline is an excellent resource for all your weaving questions. You can ask your questions directly on the Helpline or in a regular old email to Jane. We will post all answers on the helpline anonymously for everyone to see and benefit from. It may take a day or two to answer your questions, we thank you for your patience!
Maybe someone you know would like to be on our mailing list. Please consider forwarding this newsletter.
Spring Inspiration
Inspiring Weavers
You met these two beautiful, brilliant women over 2 years ago on our blog in September 2008. Jane and Susan have been weaving with Pam and Josie since forever and they always bring their latest projects to show us.
They’ll both turn 91 this year! Every once in a while they arrive at the same time and we all marvel at their continued liveliness. Both are still weaving prolifically. Josie, on the left is wearing her latest turned twill spring scarf (with her sample still attached) in 7 gauge bamboo. Pam, on the right, has been exploring collapse weave using Colcolastic and various reds, pinks and oranges also in 7 gauge bambu. As you can see, both scarves are as lovely as their creators.
Pam’s scarf has 109 threads of 7 gauge bamboo and is threaded to a point twill. The majority of her scarf is woven in plainweave using 7 gauge bambu but every 2 inches she weaves 2 repeats of waffle weave using Colcolastic. When the scarf comes off the loom and is washed, the Colcolastic assisted by the waffle weave structure draws in, collapsing the scarf.
Josie’s scarf as well as a variation woven by Michelle Moore in our wool/silk blend Zephyr are now up on our store site. Check them out! We’ve offered beautiful spring colourways for them, but you can always substitute your own colours!
Stay tuned for more wonderful weaving to come from these two Grande Dames!
We had just finished up this Newsletter when who walks in the door? GP (Granny Pam)! GP was here to show us her latest rendition of a collapsed scarf done in Snow Pea, Apache Blue and Chagall Blue 7 gauge bambu. While she was here, she told me that she had wished she had started weaving earlier in life and I laughed and told her she had said that to me when she was 70 and first learning to weave. She said “Well if I had, I would have been where I’m at now, then!” GP told us she could hardly wait to finish weaving this scarf and get it into the water. She loves weaving at this stage in her life because she doesn’t have to stop and make dinner for anybody, she can do whatever she wants and weave whatever she wants. Her best quote today was “Tell all your 70 year olds to keep weaving!” If you were to say that last statement with a strong Jersey accent (as in Channel Islands) you would get the picture.
Every year in the spring before show season we order tons of books ….
everything we think you might want to see at our shows. At the end of show season we come back to the studio and start to listen to our little books whining. They whisper things like - ‘why does amazon do this to us?’ and we say - ‘there there pet, someone will look at you one day’. So … , to help our books out, we are offering a 20% sale hoping that our little books will go to good homes. You can think of them as rescue books if that will help.
Just a few of our hundreds of lonely books:
Retreats at JST
Our first Pushing the Boundaries of Plainweave course is already over. The gals explored cramming and denting, cording, clasped weft, they discovered that warp and weft faced fabrics don’t have to be hard if you don’t want them to be. They looked at supplementary warps, tufted wefts and more! Jane used many of the beautiful fabrics she brought back from India as examples of just how far you can push the boundaries of plainweave. They are phenomenal.
Up Next!
We have another Plainweave workshop at the end of May which is full. Then it’s Twills on Four June 27 - July 1 that has openings for 2 lucky people. Let us know if you’d like to join us for a fascinating exploration of Twills. We weave a large Twill Gamp, Shadow Weave, Colour and Weave techniques like Pin-Wheel, Boundweave, and combining Twills with other structures like Basketweave.
Jane will be teaching at the Hand Weavers, Spinners & Dyers Conference in Calgary, June 7, 8, 9 & 10. We are not taking a booth this year because Jane’s youngest son Daniel graduates from grade 12 on that weekend.
Check out our Retreat Schedule for openings in our other workshops throughout the year. There are very few spots left, so be sure to let us know if you’re interested.
Helpline
Our Helpline content is growing, but it needs your questions to really grow. You can ask your questions on the Helpline or in a regular old email to Jane. We will however, post all answers on the helpline. Your questions can be anonymous so don’t be shy. Sometimes it takes a few days to answer your questions so please be patient.
Remember, we are always here to help :^)
Maybe someone you know would like to be on our mailing list. Please consider forwarding this newsletter.