Necessary Tasks

 

Since November I have woven rather a lot of tea towels.  With no craft fairs and little other opportunity to sell much, as each warp was woven, wet finished, hemmed and final press given, the stacks were simply put on another shelf and ignored.

Doug has begun tagging them now, which means my work table is tied up with that task.  Which means processing the warp I finished weaving yesterday has to wait until he is done.

However, I did rough sley the place mat warp and, if I un-bury the Leclerc Fanny, I can be dressing that loom today while Doug continues with the tagging.

But my heart is not on weaving place mats right now.  

I tend to work in series and like to complete each one before I move on to something else.  However, since I have a second loom, the transition from one to the other isn't as great as if I only had the one loom.

Because my mind is on track for a particular quality of cloth, it is somewhat jarring to switch from one to the other.

It didn't used to be.  Time was I could blithely switch from one to the other without too much thought.  I don't know if it is the ordinary process of aging or the chemo/stress brain that is making flexibility more difficult, but I find myself being very one track about things.

In the evening I can more easily shift from hemming to spinning, but am finding myself reluctant to switch from Megado to Fanny then back again for just one warp.

I have managed to do a few other tasks that are necessary.  My tax receipts are sorted and just need to make an appointment with my accountant to go over a few things.  I continue to read through a manuscript that was sent to me.  I would have printed it out so I could read it sitting in my recliner in the window but it was 300+ pages, so I read it in smaller chunks sitting at the desktop.  (I don't much like reading a book on my ipad - personal preference!)  Several bins of yarn have been pulled for future warps and I continue to 'edit' them, sometimes changing my mind entirely about what I am going to do.  But I have the next one ready to go into the Megado as soon as Doug is done.

I continue to work on the Power Point presentations.  The latest one is on design considerations, which I'm finding particularly challenging.  Again, I will be focusing on principles, on theory, on concepts.  I have touched on some of these in one presentation already, but everything is connected so the principles drift into and out of other themes.  Everything about creating a textile is dependent upon multiple factors.

The sifting of potential Sunday Seminar speakers for 2022 has begun.  I'm just trying to clear a few things off my desk before I start working on those again.  

Speaking of selling tea towels, I expect I'll begin posting more of the towels to ko-fi, and I've added a ko-fi tip jar link to this blog.  Thank you to all who have bought (a) coffee(s).  It helps to pay for things like studio insurance, postage, parts to repair equipment,  Zoom, and who knows, maybe even a trip to a conference one of these days.

Now that vaccines are being rolled out, I have been toying with another trip to Cape Breton area, see if I can get my research 'paper' and access to the textile collection at Louisborg.  But that will have to wait, maybe until 2022.  And I will no doubt wear a mask while travelling because who knows what state the pandemic will be in.  Trudeau is saying September for full vaccination, but if so, that feels too soon for me to be traveling from one side of the country to another, even if Air Canada and WestJet are flying into Sydney, NS again.  

And once again we face the time change this weekend.  I had hoped that BC would stay on standard time, or next best, join Yukon on Daylight Savings.  It makes little sense for people living in the north to bother with the seasonal change when we wake up in the dark, go home from work in the dark for a chunk of the year, or have daylight well before waking and well after bedtime.  Far enough north and it is 24/7 dark or daylight, winter/summer.  So why bother to change at all???

Well, no matter.  Bottom line is I need to get to the studio, dig out the Leclerc, start setting up that last place mat warp (of this quality of cloth).  I'm looking forward to the next towel warp which will be mostly turquoise with a little emerald green, a couple of variegated ends of blue/green, to be woven off with the black cotton flake.  I think they will be pretty.  And that should empty another section of shelf.

Onwards!