Beginning Again

This afternoon I went to Jennifer's where I met with her, Karin and her g/son Anthony to make lace. I had cut the teeny, tiny green thread off, wound bobbins and even started the red bookmark this morning and immediately ran afoul of the pattern. Since I had successfully done a couple of repeats of this pattern in the teeny, tiny threads, I was totally perplexed why it wasn't working in the 'fat' 2/20 red.

Finally I just bundled everything up and took it to Jennifer's where I undid everything I'd done and started over. Only to bungle it again. And again. And yet again! I mean, I've heard of Sudden Onset Alzheimer's - just never expected it to happen overnight!

It was a day for going backwards as at one point all four of us were unweaving our lace instead of weaving it. At which point it got funny and we had a good laugh and kibitz'd for a good hour until I finally "got" the pattern and started making forward progress, Jennifer unwove Anthony's spider, and Karin had unwoven what she'd done to the point where forward progress was going to be possible.

Sides aching, we called it quits, set dates for out next get together (late in November) and left.

All three of us have busy schedules but we make sure to have dates for at least two lace days coming up before we leave.

Community is important. If it weren't for this commitment to each other I think that Jennifer and I at least, would not make nearly as much lace as the little bit we do accomplish. Karin is much more dedicated to working on her lace in between our lace days.

We've known each other since 1995 when I taught a couple of classes at the local arts centre. (yes, I taught them both how to do lace which made it particularly funny when I was so completely stunned and Jennifer had to show me how to work the bookmark today.)

The internet community is also important to me. But I have come to realize how much time it takes out of my day. I have used my participation on the various chat groups I belong to as an excuse to not do other things that I ought to be doing. It's an expenditure of time that I have needed to rethink for a long time. While I was feeling so ill the last few years I didn't think - I just logged on and tried to answer what questions I could. When it was difficult to weave, or for that matter, even think about my own issues, it was satisfying to be able to extend a helping hand to others.

But I have neglected my own issues for too long. It's time to focus on myself for a time. My journey toward good health is not over yet and I have a busy time coming up. When I look at my calendar I see the following:

Oct. 21 drive 13 hours to Seattle
Oct. 22 fly to ABQ to teach a 2 day workshop, a one day workshop, give the guild program.
Oct. 27 fly back to Seattle
Oct. 28-30 Seattle Weaver's Guild sale (try to catch up with Syne for a meeting)
Oct. 31 drive 13 hours home
Nov. 4 set up for local craft fair
Nov. 5-6 craft fair
rest of Nov work on samples for ebook (if given approval for the concept)
Dec. 6 load van for trip to Vancouver (9 hour drive)
Dec. 7 drive to Vancouver
Dec. 8 set up for One of a Kind Vancouver craft fair
Dec. 9-12 show opens from 10 am-10 pm each day except Sunday - pack out begins at 5 pm
Dec. 13 drive 9 hours home
Dec. 14 unload van, do banking etc.

Then in January I will leave here on Jan 7 or 8 for N. Carolina
Jan 9-15 John C. Campbell Folk School
A short visit to Durham NC
Jan 21-23 Sarasota, FL
visit with friends near Tampa
Jan 28-30 Orlando, FL
Jan 31 fly home

In between these things I have to fit in visits to the doctor - given I get in to see the specialist any time soon, plus any tests that may be required.

And of course continue to weave the samples for the book, not to mention writing the text.

In addition to all of the above, there are my volunteer efforts for the local guild, the possibility of a private student in November, and oh, yes, keeping the house relatively tidy. I'll never win a good housekeeping award, but someone has to stay on top of the worst of the messes. :}

So instead of mindlessly logging on to the internet and reading the chat groups, I have made a resolution (an Old Year's resolution?) to pay more attention to what I need to do instead of things that help me procrastinate about them.

And then, when I have my surgery, hopefully early in the spring (I've set aside Feb-June because I don't know when that date is, yet) and I can't weave and don't feel much like doing anything else, I'll be more active in the internet weaving community again. :)

In the meantime I'll continue to share my fibre-y adventures via the blog and I will always answer emails as best I can. I won't be gone, just being quiet. Mostly.

(In honour of my commitment to do the things I need to do I started transcribing WeaveCast 53 today. I don't know that I will get it finished before I leave, but at least I started!)

In Search of Clarity

I think that if you click on the picture you can just make out option #2 (at bottom) and option #3 (at top).

I confess I'm not actually loving this warp. Perhaps it's the colour combination which I mentioned previously isn't amongst my favourites.

But right now, making something I personally love to bits isn't a priority.

Now that pain levels are manageable and my time of confinement nearly over (5 more sleeps til I see the surgeon) I have been thinking through possibilities for the future.

Since my teaching dates in May got cancelled - a mixed blessing because I realize now I probably would not have fared well doing a long airplane journey, hefting heavy bags through huge airports, then spending two days on my feet - it also means I have no guaranteed income for the month of May. :(

And since I'm self-employed and our household relies on me bringing in a certain amount of income, well, I've had to do some serious thinking about my business and where I might go with it.

Doug is pretty desperate to retire, but he's got less than 2 years until he's 65 so I keep reminding him about the extended medical benefits he gets as a full time employee with Home Depot and how badly we need them. Especially now that I'm facing weeks, possibly months, of physio-therapy. If we run out of physio benefits, we will have to pay for it out of our own pockets so it would be really handy if he still had a regular paycheque out of which to pay them.

And because the studio in no way brings in enough money to cover that on top of whatever else the studio pays for - utilities, van lease, etc.

So what I have I deduced so far? Well it's been a process of elimination.

Number one on the list is to finish dyeing the yarn that needs to be dyed in order to sell it and then not do that anymore. Part of the reason is because I have more medical procedures coming up and lifting huge containers of water and wet yarn isn't something I should really be doing long term. Since I don't consider myself a particularly skilled dyer I won't mind giving that up.

Number two on the list is to discontinue making any more kits. It seems that no matter how well I try to explain things, someone somewhere misunderstands and then complains that my kits are 'no good'. So I just won't bother with them any more. (I do still have yarn left to make the colour gamp kits although I have removed them from my Art Fire store. If you really want one or two email me - preferably before I use that yarn up making placemats.)

So what will I do? I mentioned around the new year that I'd been talking with a publisher about writing an e-book. Since my recuperation is going to take some weeks/months, it seems like now might be a really good time to start working on the manuscript.

I have other (volunteer) committments that have been ignored for a rather long time, foremost among them transcribing the WeaveCast podcasts. I'd hoped to be able to work on those while I wasn't able to weave but since I couldn't tolerate having my foot down until this week, well, that didn't happen. However since it's going to take a while to get up to speed, instead of watching daytime dreck tv I will be working on the transcriptions.

Stash reduction will continue to be a priority. If this warp doesn't use up the last of the extremely fine linen I will put on one more tea towel warp in order to use it up.

And then I need to start working on inventory for the fall sales which begin in September. For far too long I've not had the mental wherewithall to really dig into my creative well for new designs. Working with the rayon chenille and the Diversified Plain Weave I will have at least one new scarf design for the fall sales.

As far as teaching goes, I'm going to leave that on idle for the time being. I have another surgery scheduled sometime around next February. Surgery that will once again prevent me from weaving for about 6 weeks - or doing much of anything else for that matter. So until that's done and I - hopefully - have a clean bill of health, I think that trying to find a whole lot of teaching dates doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

So what does that leave me? Pretty much in Neutral. And worrying about where my income is going to come from. :( But I have decided that I'm not going to cancel Complex Weavers/Convergence. That's what plastic is for after all?

White Place Mats

I know this picture is dark - I wanted to show the texture of the cloth and the flash just wiped that out.

So this picture shows the end of one mat, the hem with cutting line and the beginning of the next mat.

The set up is identical to the red mats but the warp is one strand of a 4/8 white plus a 2/8 beige cotton set at 10 epi.

The weft is two strands of 4/8 plus one of a fine cotton slub, all in natural white. The hem is one strand of the fine cotton slub.

The weave structure is again broken twill on a straight twill draw, with plain weave hems.

Adding the beige to the warp gives just a hint of colour and helps to highlight the texture of the cloth. While the cloth will flatten after wet finishing, the beige will give some depth to the shadows of the fabric and should - one hopes - give it a little more interest than just an all white warp and weft.

I'm still procrastinating about getting started on the afghans, partly because I will have to do a bunch of math (ick) and then wind spools with - hopefully - the correct amount of yarn on them. I'm going to measure fairly carefully because I don't want a lot of yarn left over on the spools, and neither do I want a lot of waste. :} Bambu 7 is not exactly cheap.

But tomorrow I only have one errand to run, one order of colour gamp kits to fill and after that I should be able to clear the worktable off and get started number crunching if nothing else.

Plus I'd like to work some more on the transcription of Sharon Alderman's interview on WeaveCast. Still 27 minutes to do. :}

Get Up and Go

Leclerc skein winder for winding yarn for quills - and a couple of proto placemat warps in amongst the rubble

For the past few months I have been 'suffering' from a serious lack of get up and go. I've been blaming this lack of energy on a whole list of things - the unremitting stress in my life, my health issues, adverse drug reactions, yadda, yadda.

Whilst whining about this last night over coffee with a friend and moaning about the diuretics and Plavix - the current suspected culprits - she commented that her mother had taken diuretics for much of her life and found that she very quickly became deficient in potassium and had to supplement it. My friend also said that if that was the problem, it would become very apparent very quickly once I started supplementing potassium.

As it happened, I had some bananas at home, so I ate one last night. This morning I was reasonably productive but was reluctant to give too much credit to one small banana. :}

However, feeling somewhat better, I decided to pick up some potassium supplements while I was at the store this afternoon and took a first tablet with dinner.

And have been working steadily for two hours getting quills wound for the kits. Plus I don't feel so fuzzy headed and - well - squashed is about the only word I can think of to describe how I had been feeling.........

My bp continues to fluctuate and spike for no real reason, which is worrisome but not terrible, so I won't think too much about it for now. If it continues to be this erratic by the time I see the doctor in January, I'm going to ask about changing out one of my bp meds and try something else. You know - the one that causes weight gain as an adverse effect? I'd sure love to lose some weight and nothing seems to help. So right now I'm blaming those pills......... :^)

The colour gamp kits are nearly ready to ship - should be able to get most of them into the mail tomorrow. After that I will start working on the afghan warp for the AVL, finish the rayon chenille warp on the Fanny (two more scarves), then begin making placemats. And start back on transcribing WeaveCast episodes. I've gotten very far behind on those. :(

I haven't seriously made placemats for many years - people still come up to me at the craft fairs and say their 20 year old placemats still look like new - but this year I had people coming looking for them so I guess it's time again. Perhaps people are wanting a new colour, if nothing else?

Currently reading The Night Visitor by James Doss (gave up on 13 1/2 by Nevada Barr - too gruesome for me)

Four Boxes

Someone emailed me today asking if the four box fly shuttle was really useful or if it was 'overkill' as her friends were advising her. :)

When I ordered the loom originally (1983) I ordered it with the double box fly shuttle. Over the years, I found the double box useful even though I didn't use it all of the time.

When I ordered the air assist for the loom in the late 1990's, I was weaving for a fashion designer and quite often fiddling around with 3 and sometimes 4 shuttles. It made sense for me to upgrade to the four box fly shuttle to accomodate the designs I was weaving for my client so that I could weave them more efficiently.

After having AVL assure me it would be impossible to fit the four boxes to my loom, I ordered it anyway and Doug found a way to fit it on the underslung beater of my loom.

I then challenged him to come up with a way to change the boxes using the air assist system. Again he was assured by 'experts' that it would be impossible, and again he found a way. :D

Quite frankly I haven't been using the fly shuttle much for the last 3 years as I've been mostly weaving scarves and hand throwing. But that's the thing about tools. They wait very patiently for when they are needed again.

This project is using 7 shuttles. I'm winding the metallic by hand on the pirn because it won't work on the industrial pirn winder, so I have one AVL shuttle and 6 of the industrial shuttles. Four of the shuttles are in the boxes, the others are parked on the stool next to me and I change them out as required.

I expect that the yarns trailing toward the stool are visible in the enlarged picture. I stopped weaving tonight after the 8th headdress because I need to wind more of the metallic. Plus I'd made such good progress that it felt like time to quit and work on the transcription of WeaveCast episode 35. I've been wanting to listen to the interview with Tom Beaudet for a long time, but just haven't had the time to do that until now.

But to answer the question of whether or not the four boxes are useful? It depends. If you need them, you really need them. If you don't - well, they won't complain if you don't use them. :)

More Tea Towels

This is the second treadling on the current warp. I simplified the sequence somewhat and now have 'strings of pearls'? The red line is a cutting line so that I don't have to guess where to separate the towels when they come off the loom. You should be able to just see that I've woven the hems in a point twill progression. I prefer to do this rather than plain weave as there is less tendency for the hems to be a different width than the towel proper.

Also checked the area I wondered about in terms of a sleying error, but it is, indeed, a section where several of the very fine 40/3 darker threads are grouped. No mistake - this time! :}

Got four towels woven yesterday, and even managed some transcribing. But I'm also very behind on doing WeaveCast - new episode posted today - so I'm hoping to start on the last one before I leave on my next trip. I'm anxious to hear the interview with Tom Beaudet, who has been very kind to me. :)

Finishing - a Little

This photo doesn't really do these towels justice. The subtle colours make the fabric very rich. The cloth has two different sides - one more blue, the other more beige.

I got two of the cloth storage rollers cleared off and serged everything that could be serged. Today I ran a load of tea towels through the washer and dryer, and just finished pressing them.

The ones above were the most successful - and the ones I'd been most dubious about on the loom. The natural linen before wet finishing was a kind of drab greyed beige. It lightened up considerably after scouring. :)

The next most successful ones were those I'd thought were going to be too flimsy when they were on the loom. They turned out perfectly, while the ones I'd increased the ppi on were a little too dense and a bit stiff. Live and learn! Always...........

However I now know that I can go ahead with the next warp and use up the last of the 2/40's combined with the 2/20's with the singles 6's for weft and at 24 epi/ppi, I'll get some nice towels. And use up a bunch of yarn that really needs to be used up!

The current warp is nearly half threaded, but tonight I'm trying to finish transcribing WeaveCast's latest episode. I first met the Other Mary Black when I took a workshop at Coupeville Arts Center on Whidbey Island.

I never met The Mary Black in person, but did have some correspondence with her when I put together the original profiles of the Guild of Canadian Weavers master weavers.

GCW recently transferred what I had done on slides and a transcript onto CD. It is for sale at a very reasonable price. If you are interested in a snippet of the history of weaving in Canada, the profiles of these women (for they are all women - so far) you'll find lots to inspire on the CD.

Some of the people who achieved the GCW Master certificate: (The) Mary Black, Dini Moes, Linda Heinrich, Jane Evans, and of course, moi, along with many others.

I'll find the URL and put it on my list of links to the right.