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!

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!

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!

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.

Please Share our newletter with someone you know.

Follow us on Facebook,  Ravelry and JST’s Help Line

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

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!

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.

As so many of you know, I (Jane) love to teach and  I try to teach skills that will help weavers develop their own design sensibility, encourage them to try out their ideas and most of all become independent thinkers and problem solvers.  I love to work all this out with tea towels, simply because they are a small and inexpensive way to  experiment without the financial stress of expensive yarns.  If you have an idea that you might like to try but you’re going to weave it in silk or cashmere, you get pretty darned stressed out about getting it right. However, if you have an idea and you make a warp with 2/8 cotton and things go wrong, you’ve really only blown around $10.00.  A small price to pay for a great deal of learning.

Learning what not to do, is just as important as learning what you should do. And so……….I encourage tea towels.

Once you have a successful towel you can look at it as a design sketch for a blanket or a placemat or a piece of yardage.  A stripe in it could become a scarf…….the possibilities are endless and tea towels make wonderful gifts.

We had the tea towel wall in my studio which  became the tea towel corner, which has recently  had a 2nd layer added to it.  I have over 200 tea towels now and they have all been woven by my students who have taken the Colour and Design workshop or Twills on 4.  Students in these workshops often do exchanges between themselves to share what they have learned and sometimes I get lucky and get one for the wall.

Recent additions to the wall include these 5 stunning towels……..

Several of them came from the 2010  “Twills on 4″ groups who had to create their own twill threadings during the workshop………they took their threadings home and interpreted them in these towels……..pretty darn awesome.

Thank You to Marianne, Jennifer, Karen, Sasha and Linda for helping our towel wall grow!  and thank you to all the weavers who have contributed to the wall for many many years.

Big Announcement!  JST is on Facebook!!!!!!!!  Haven’t you been waiting your whole life for this to happen?   Come be our friend, we’d love to keep you up to date.

This weekend JST is off to the Vancouver Island Weaver’s Retreat at the Grand Hotel in Nanaimo!  The Vendors are open to the public, so come check us out!

Over to you, Charlotte (my roving reporter):

I’d never been to a fibre show before so I thought I’d tell you all about my experience.  On March 17 Jane and I went to Fibres West in Abbotsford and man, we had a blast.  Maggie from down the road came to help us get ready.  We work really well together, even when things get tough:

It took the three of us a full day to get the books, yarn, shuttles, winders, bobbins and what not all packed up into Jane’s trusty minivan.

Our first stop was to Maiwa on Granville Island to see Charllotte, Sophena, Dani and Tim.  It was the first time Jane had seen everyone since she left India.  It was so lovely to visit the beautiful Maiwa loft and for me to meet the wonderful team behind the Maiwa Foundation.

After some coffee, seeing more photos of India and planning Jane’s next Miawa Workshop, we headed over to Abbotsford to unload and set up the booth.

It was great that we were able to get into the trade building at 2:30 because it took over 5 hours to get it all unloaded and displayed beautifully.

I got to see so many of you that I’ve only met on the phone or through email.  It was such a treat to make the connection between everyone’s smiling faces and sweet voices!

One evening a whole bunch of us went to a fabulous restaurant in Ft. Langley.  Thanks Christa for inviting us!  And many thanks to Brenda of Penelope Fibre Arts for putting in all of her time and effort to organize the event!  It was such a great weekend!