April Spools

Today is April Spools Day.  Or as some people have been saying, March 32nd.

I have never been a fan of April Fools Day.  So many of the pranks were mean spirited, meant to bait people and then 'haha, it was just a *joke*!  Can't you take a *joke*?' kind of mocking way.

This year especially the joke is unnecessary as we are in the midst of a pandemic and people are very sick, everywhere.

So I am going to go with April Spools Day - I think it was Meg in NZ who started it a few years ago - and focus instead on the next warp in the queue.

The current warp is probably going to come off the loom today.  As the warp diminished at the back of the loom and cloth grew at the front, I started working on the next warp.  With stash busting as my current goal (seems like forever!) I am getting hard pressed to come up with yarn in sufficient quantities in colours that will play well together.  Not to mention different from what has already been woven.

With spring still not quite here, but promising to arrive sometime, I dug through the pastels to see if I had enough of them to make a warp.  A kind of encouragement of spring.

The blues are a bit on the darker end of the value scale, but should play well enough with the rest.

The weft will be the darker beige on the pirns.  Because that is what I am actually working on using up - the rest of the 2/16 cotton wound onto pirns - so that I can send them to the person who bought the pirn winder.  And get rid of more stuff...

My original thought was to blend the colours into a fruit salad mix, then weave in a fancy twill of some sort.  When I started looking at options, however, it occurred to me that with this many hues with not all of them the same value, that was going to look really really 'busy'.

Instead I worked up a twill block design I found in Ars Textrina (Pat Hilts translation of an old German weaving manuscript) and will go with that.  It is quite a large motif and the blocks of solid beige/weft should bring visual cohesiveness to the cloth.  The areas of more-or-less solid beige will provide resting places for the eye to light upon.  I'm hoping the rest will be like a field of wild flowers.

Once I've used up the yarn on pirns, there are other projects simmering on the back burners.

Doug has taken on the role of Person Who Leaves the House when necessary.  That allows me to stay in and work on my projects.  He is very safety conscious and takes care to disinfect things and follows all the guidelines. 

We are Safe at Home.