Hills and Valleys

 

Today I finished threading the next warp.  It is a fairly simple twill block design but I took extra care with it because my eyes still don't work well yet.

The news from the eye doctor was not...great.  After five weeks of aggressive treatment, my left eye is still displaying signs of the shingles infection.  Instead of reducing treatment, I carry on, same as the last two weeks.  It really puts a crimp in your schedule when nearly every hour on the hour from the time you wake up until bedtime, you have to deal with putting drops in your eyes.

A fairly minor routine in the large scheme of things and it could be much much worse, but on top of the previous two years of isolation, the shenanigans that have been happening here and elsewhere leading to huge buckets of uncertainty, it's just one more irritation on top of a whole lot of 'interesting' things going on in the world.

Every time I begin to get annoyed, I try to remember to pull myself back and count my blessings - I have universal health care and the only thing I'm paying for are the drops in my eyes and the antiviral tablets.  I have confidence in my eye doctor and appreciate that she is taking such good care of me.

But it makes things difficult when your left eye is dilated 24/7, you are constantly dripping more chemicals into your eye which then makes your eye(s) water (because sometimes your right eye joins in, in sympathy?)  It's hard to see clearly, difficult to see fine details, even to read if the font isn't very big.

However, all that aside, I did manage to weave that last warp off and get this one set up.  All that's left is to sley and tie on, and I may still manage that after a break (and my next set of meds...)

One of the challenges with the Megado is how the heddles are put onto the shafts.  The loom is so tightly engineered there is very little room to reach into the middle of the pack to put more heddles on, but we did that as we set up the loom.  It came with a decent number of heddles but I do sometimes weave tied weaves so I wanted more heddles on shafts 1-4.  I also work with fairly fine threads, so I wanted more heddles on the rest of the shafts.

So Doug and I wrestled an 'extra' 100 onto the front shafts and an 'extra' 50 onto the rest.

What I didn't count on was the system for keeping the heddles on the shafts, which tends to fail at times.  The first time I had an issue with heddles falling off I didn't notice and tried to weave.  The loom simply wouldn't open a shed and it wasn't until I did a walk around I spotted the problem.  A bunch of heddles had fallen off the top of the shaft of several shafts, and then, because I hadn't noticed, they'd gotten all tangled up.  In the end it was just faster and less annoying to cut all of those heddles off the loom.  I made note of what had happened, figured I'd remember for next time.  But then I didn't weave on the loom for a couple of months and when I went to set it up again, I forgot and again, a bunch of heddles fell off, tangled and I cut them off.

Which was really annoying because TexSolv heddles are not cheap.

Over the course of the 2+ years I've had the loom, it happened often enough that I ran out of heddles on three shafts for various projects and rather than try to wrestle more heddles onto the loom, I simply tied repair heddles on the shafts where I needed them.  Hence the orange and blue in that forest of white.

But heddles kept coming off, one or two here or there and as hard as I could think, I couldn't think of a solution that would work and not interfere with the movement of the shafts.

Until the last warp.  I had tried a few different things and none of them had been effective, but this time I figured I had a solution.  It wasn't pretty and I wasn't happy with it but I was even less happy with losing more heddles with nearly every warp I put on the loom.

When I go back down I'll take a much closer look, but a quick glance at it as I finished threading indicates that it apparently worked.  At least for this warp.  I will know if it's a true fix if I can do 6 or 7 warps in a row without having further heddle losses.

Yesterday I was talking about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the person I was talking to was very upset and worried.  I told them that I'd seen reports of the Russian people holding huge protests against the invasion - in Russia - and that we couldn't lose hope that things would get quickly resolved.  

As human beings we can sink into despair, or we can try to find hope.  We can sink down in defeat or we can keep trying.

I have been remembering the fridge magnet I bought shortly after my first angioplasty - supposedly a quote from Winston Churchill:  When you are going through hell...keep going.

Keep trying.  Keep rising up.  Keep thinking up something else to solve a problem.  

Or the other quote that comes in handy at times: Don't let the bastards grind you down.