Proto-cloth

 

The pile of yarn grows on my dining room table.

Doug has kindly agreed to turn all those skeins into cones, which will make working with that yarn easier.

In the meantime, I am steadily picking away at the warp on the Megado.

As my health has diminished, my mental faculties have also dulled.  I hate to admit it, but I can no longer multi-task like a boss.  So instead of doing much with the above yarn, I have been weaving towels, trying to clear that warp off the loom and out of my head.  Once I've done that I can begin crunching numbers and working out what needs to happen with this yarn.

The yarn is all for sampling for the Next Big Project.  I have worked with some of the yarn before (the Briggs & Little) so really all I need to do with that is weave it for the wet finishing demos.

The rest is new to me.  The cotton is fairly well known, in part because I've woven with cotton in various formats for many years.  But it is thicker than I usually use and a new brand.  On the face of it, it looks like a really nice quality of cotton.  I had assumed it was mercerized, but upon closer examination, it just seems to be a really good quality of unmercerized cotton.  It has a nice degree of twist and a bit of lustre, which is why at first glance I assumed mercerized.

I have worked with a two ply of cotton and linen before, but again, a different brand.  This yarn also looks like a really nice yarn to weave with.

The white skeins are a wool and silk blend, firmly twisted and the silk is giving the yarn a firmer hand, which would be nice for knitting and should also work well for weaving.  Only wet finishing will determine the best approach.

And so before I go full bore preparing for the NBP, I need to weave some samples and get them into the water and process them some.

All of that is going to require more brain power than I can muster while I am also working on another warp, so hence the drive to get the towel warp off.  Then I can properly focus on the NBP.

These yarns are not the only yarns I will be using for the NBP.  They are just the ones I am not entirely familiar with, or didn't have in my stash and needed to acquire.  I will also be diving into my stash for other yarns.

There are memes around showing a graphic of an iceberg with about 1/10th of the berg visible above the water line and a whole bunch of berg invisible below.  Weaving is a lot like that.  The finished cloth is the culmination of effort that is not visible - unless you already know what goes into the creation of a cloth.

So it is with Big Projects.  Lots of preparation that goes into each one, more than the vast majority of the population will ever understand - unless they have done something similar.

With energy waning, I cannot do such projects by myself anymore.  I am delighted to be working with a team.  My big concern right now is the covid fourth wave.  Will BC get it suppressed in time for my deadline?  

Dunno.  So I work towards the best, preparing myself mentally for everything to come crashing to a halt again.  

Time will tell.