"Normal" and "New"

 

Slept in this morning so I'm slow getting in gear.  Have been dealing with emails re: the Seminar Series, reading posts on the groups I belong to, generally ignoring the fact that I am still in my jammies.  

And that's ok, because this appears to be my new 'normal'...

One of the exchanges I had was with someone who just acquired her grandmother's loom and yarn and how much of the yarn is very 'fine'.

I am also facing the prospect of working with 'fine' yarns.  The two shelves in the photo are of the same quality of yarn, extremely fine and much too fine for me and my elderly eyes can cope with as individual threads.

The plan since I brought it home last summer (as in 2019) was to ply the yarns together so that they become thicker.  However, I was dealing with shutting down my business, downsizing and learning a new loom.  And then the pandemic hit.

My coping mechanism was (and still is in large part) to just ignore everything and focus on using up one quality of yarn in my stash.  So I have put on numerous warps of 2/16 cotton, first using up my linen (and then received another weaver's linen stash because SHE was downsizing), then just using the 2/16 for both warp and weft.  

I can still see that fine of a yarn, but this silk?  It's about the thickness of a human hair.  Even more astonishing?  It's actually a 2 ply construction.

Now I could just bundle the threads together and use as one, but it's silk, subject to static electricity and so fine I can't really see individual threads.  So I will be plying it into something I *can* see.

I will steam set the yarn by moving the plyed yarn from the spinning wheel bobbins to the hard plastic spools that Leclerc makes for sectional beaming, then putting them into a pot to steam.  

Last week I dug my slow cooker out to cook the pork loin Doug had found at a really good price, and I realized that if I put the veggie steamer thingee in the bottom I could just place the plastic bobbins in there and let it steam the spools of plyed silk yarn.

As the pandemic gathers strength for a second wave, groups are struggling to find a way to proceed with living, in a safe way.

My idea has been the Zoom seminars, and yesterday I made great progress on those.  I now have commitments from Jan-June.

The guild website maven got an on-line membership page put up late last night so people can sign up if they wish to be on the guild mailing list for updates and be able to sign up for the seminars at the guild membership rate.

This morning, chatting with one of the potential presenters, I mentioned that by running this series, it could become a registry of presenters who can deal with Zoom and give remote seminars.

We are living in the 21st century.  We have technology that was not available for the 1918 pandemic.  We don't need to risk our health in order to have communication and be able to continue to learn.  

Our town is geographically remote and our guild is small.  We can't afford to pay to have 'name' instructors travel to us.  We have the additional challenge of winter weather, which at times will cause winter events to be cancelled because of bad driving conditions.

While Zoom presentations are not ideal, they can be done.  And I have been enjoying myself way too much to stop now!  

It has been great fun to contact people that I either know, know of, or would like to know, and offer them a time slot.  I am really looking forward to 2021 now, and who knows, it might be so much fun that I'll keep going on into 2022.  With six months of 2021 already spoken for, and a long list of folk who might be interested?  This might turn into the new 'normal', especially for groups AND instructors who may live in geographically remote areas.