Messing Around

 

Today I got towel #6 (of 21, estimated) woven.  Tomorrow I will weave one more, then cut off and re-tie.  

I have an appointment with the eye doctor tomorrow afternoon, and depending on how tiring I find that, I could maybe cut/serge the towels, then re-tie the warp, ready to go again on Saturday.

The design started with a block design from Ars Textrina that I then messed around with, changing the tie-up and treadling from star to rose, worked out how many repeats I needed for a towel width, then how many repeats for the length.  Finally I adjusted the hems to make the towels as long as I would like them to be to make a towel the length I wanted to end up with.

I'm not sure what colours I will use up on this warp.  The current warp will get four dark value blue-red, then the next colour will be rose.  Of which I still have way too much.  The last 7 will likely be some of the beiges I have left - lots of small tubes that really need using up.  And maybe blue?  To be determined.  The challenge with the beige yarns is the dye lot differences and try to not have any in a towel.

In terms of the shingles, I have made progress, but seem to be stalled.  I am working hard to remind myself that healing will take as long as it takes.  And hope that I get some positive news tomorrow.

I'm getting weary of eye drops every two hours, especially now that I'm feeling well enough to weave.  I have to juggle my weaving sessions in between the eye drops.  Mostly I remain really tired and dealing with nerve pain, not just from my back but now the nerve pain from the shingles.  And no one can say if that will ever clear up or it will stay.  Oh joy.

I try to read for a few minutes each day.  I'm thoroughly enjoying Finlay's book Fabric.  It's a bit of a travelogue, but also a story of grieving (her parents died just as she was beginning to think about writing this book) and her journey around the world to do research on the various fabrics and the cultures that produced them is just the story I needed to hear right now.

She doesn't always describe the technology in the way I would as a weaver, but I remind myself her target audience is the 'lay person', not practitioners of the crafts she is sharing.  And so I glide over those, nodding I understand enough about the craft to agree, even if I wouldn't write about the techniques quite in that way.

We have also been enjoying the sunshine of this 'false' spring.  I am pretty sure that winter will come at least once more.  But in the meantime, the sun is very welcome.