My days are so wrapped up with the sale and all the various emails associated with it, that I feel like all my words are gone. Do you ever just get “talked out?” And then there’s the mammogram, bone density, dentist. Don’t want to talk about those either. What does it say when you have a mammogram at 2:30, and your results are in your email by 4:00? Did someone really have time to read it?
The studio is swept and kind of clean. The warp is tied on again, and I have started weaving. What it will be is still unplanned. Spontaneity is my middle name nowadays. I’m thinking a simple stripe, but with colors that I have never used before, thanks to the Churro Club. Very subdued.
The sale ends October 31, so now’s the time to take advantage of this. And there’s still time to sign up for the emails. After the 31st, things should be back to normal–whatever that is.
Here are the links for the ones so far.
1 2
3 I somehow deleted the link for this one. 4 5
It’s Wednesday, the day I usually write a new blog post, but no words come. In the last few days, I have cut off the last itty bitty pieces, retied the warp, prepared the warp for weaving, and … I am ready to weave. What will you weave? you may ask. The answer: I have no idea. Resistance is high on getting any dyeing done, so sticking with yarns already on hand will have to do. Small enraptures me right now, so maybe that will be the “next big thing.” At any rate, I’m ready and will start today.
Taking a class
Speaking of small, Rebecca Mezoff is starting a new online class about weaving on small looms. Read about it here. I am definitely taking this course, since working on small looms is very different than working on the a large one, obviously. Be sure to watch the video; Rebecca does a really good job with all of her videos. There are only so many learning curves that I am willing to have in my life.
Learning curve
Now, about learning curves–Some may have noticed that there is now a shop on my site. Now that was a learning curve! If you are on my mailing list, you know that I am having a Fall Sale. 25% off! Read about the details here, or you could sign up for the newsletter and be reminded. Sale ends October 31.
Daisies always make me smile. Always. I have never seen Shasta daisies bloom except in the spring before, so it was a nice surprise to get early one morning this week. We all need a smile, right? Especially now, with all the world and national news bombarding us all the time. There’s research that says smiling is good for our mental health. See here and here.
Lantana
Then, when I looked around, more flowers came into view. They weren’t even in my view finder before.
Antique rose
So, let’s smile. What does it for you? I would love to hear. We would all love to hear.
With a twisted knee, I used an ice pack and took up knitting–again. I like to try this every other year or so, but I’m really not sure exactly why. I almost got socks knitted once, but I always lose track of where I am. Yarn is everywhere around here, but most is not the next to skin variety. I wanted to learn to knit on the diagonal, again, don’t ask me why. Finding a gradated yarn , I got started. So that experiment is ending. The knee is good, no more ice pack and sitting around.
The trip that wasn’t
A trip to the Taos Wool Festival was in the works, that is until I got on the road. A dash light came on, indicating a problem with a tire. I stopped and checked, nothing looked wrong, so I drove on. In Wichita Falls and stopped at Discount Tire. They checked everything, air pressure included. The light still didn’t go off, so I made the decision to drive home.
Realizing that I was really ambivalent about this trip and that I also did not want to be driving in the middle of the New Mexico mountains somewhere and be stuck, it seemed best to return home. My little Prius has over 139,000 miles, so I’m careful, especially when I’m by myself As long as possible I expect to keep driving this car. Turns out the problem was a tire sensor had gone out. Those guys are not cheap! Thankfully only one had to be replaced. I try to look at these kinds of things as an amoritized expense
Since I drove by it on another trip to Taos, a visit to the Mora Valley Spinning Mill was on my list of things to do. I had planned to stay in Las Vegas, as it’s an interesting town, then drive on to Taos the next day. Arroyo Seco was on the list also. Weaving did lots of things in conjunction with the wool festival. Would’ve been nice.
So the trip that wasn’t…it’s not like I don’t have anything to do here. Plus, stay tuned for a small surprise that will only go out in my newsletter. Sign up here.
flowers from my daughter. Don’t you love the juxtaposition of the flowers with the wrestler photos?
Always a nice surprise
These flowers arrived via FedEX before 10:00 am. That’s a surprise in itself! My daughter sent them, and I love all the different blooms and greenery included. Good job, Megan. (By the way, my daughter was born and named waaaay before the popularity of the name Megan nowadays. She was named after a family friend, whose name was pronounced Mēgan. I can only imagine how often she hears a different pronunciation). By the way, don’t you think the wrestling photos behind the flowers are a nice touch? ;))
Planter
In addition, I bought myself a birthday present,
… which arrived in several big, heavy boxes. How I’m going to manage to get the thing to where it belongs, is a different story altogether. It’s a waist-high 70-in planter, which I know will have to be assembled. So, I will probably have to handle this the same way I did the bookshelves that I assembled–open the box and carry the pieces individually to their future location. However mine is different than the picture in that it is natural wood, not painted charcoal. I love the greenhouse cover. I want to grow vegetables! Then there will be the filling of the beast, which I am told, will hold 380 quarts of planting material. Why do they give this in quarts? I will have to look this up and see what it translates to in big bags.
And then there was this
When was the last time you actually celebrated a birthday? For me, it’s been a really long time. Sunday was our family spice dinner. This dinner was Parsi, a group of people I had never heard of before. This was one of the best dinners we’ve had, well except for one of the dishes. Here’s the list:
But, after dinner I was surprised by my sister with a birthday “cake.” Interesting, but I did blow out my candle. My mother gave me bunches of work to do–lots of bulbs to plant. All in all, a good week. Plus, we got rain, and it’s cooler than 100 degrees. Life is good.
I decided to weave using mostly fall colors, but now I’m wondering, “What was I thinking?” Notice all those little pieces of yarn hanging around? Normally, I would needle-weave these in while it’s on the loom. There are millions of these little guys. It would take longer to weave them in than it took to weave this. Also, normally, I weave right side up, but I’m going to make an exception here. I had also thought to hang this vertically, thus using my usual method of hanging with a board and Velcro. That can’t happen with all those bits of yarn hanging around on the back. So, I guess I’ll have to build a frame, wrap canvas around it, and stitch this to the canvas with invisible stitches. Drat! says the lazy me.
Fall at the store
And then there are lines
I was captured by this display as I left the grocery store. Love the colors of all these squashes, and others that are not in the image. Some of the colors are beautiful, even if they’re warty–lots of different shades of green and orange.
Ceiling/roof at my bank
Had to visit my credit union last week, and I just had to get a pic of the clouds through this structural ceiling. I’ve always loved it, ever since they rebuilt after a tornado many years ago. My phone doesn’t do the whole roof/ceiling justice. Don’t you love the black lines against the blue of the sky and the soft white of the clouds?
September by Kathy Spoering
Calendars
Since there seems to be a theme of fall here, I’ll move on to calendars. Have you seen Kathy Spoering’s calendar tapestries? She has put these tapestries into a calendar, which can be purchased from her Etsy store. She started this series with her Four Seasons tapestries in 2003 and continued on to weave a tapestry for each month. I got mine last week! Isn’t it great! There are so many things that I have no desire to do weaving-wise–multi-shaft pattern weaving, pictorial tapestries–but I so admire the skill of the artist and the beauty of the finished work. Just like there are paintings that I would never choose to hang, but I admire the skill of the artist and the creativity in the work.
I seem to be giving myself birthday presents this year. Of course, the best one of all is that I get to wait at the auto shop to get lots of high-mileage preventative things done to my car–NOT! Would rather have scheduled this for a time other than my birthday, but other days were full. Oh, well….
I just have an inch of hem to complete before cutting this off the loom, It’s only 30 x 3 inches, totally spontaneous, until a pattern emerged. I’ve decided to weave another small piece next, using a mix of fall colors. Some will be my own hand-dyed yarn and others will be churro yarns from the Churro Club. I think I’m going to weave it something like the piece below–if I can remember how I did it.
Wildflowers, Tapestry, hand-dyed wool, silk on cotton warp, 58 x 8.5 inches
What about this orientation?
Wildflowers, vertical
And now for the personal
In the never-ending search for organization, I’ve been trying a new method (for me) of keeping up with my calendar and tasks. Even though it’s so convenient to use my phone for appointments, I still like to use paper to keep up with my to-do list. Here’s where the bullet journal has entered my life, at least as an experiment. I dug out an old notebook to use for now, experimenting with adapting this idea for my use. So far, so good, but the usefulness of using any method is to review it daily, and that’s where I fall down and crash. If this works for me, I will buy a new journal for next year and start fresh again.
Now, for a total non-sequitur–Well, maybe it doesn’t qualify for even that, because a non-sequitur usually has at least something to do with a previous statement–The blog post that has the most views is one from 2012 about cerise and fuchsia. Hmmm….how ’bout that!
What will be next for this warp? I don’t know, but it will hold something. Before I can weave the “real” next project, wrapped yarn will be dyed, ikat ties unwrapped, rinsed, dried, and balled up. So, I will use some of the thousands of butterflies left from other projects and just start. A warped loom must be used, or momentum will be lost. I have made a list of things that I want to accomplish each day, and am checking them off. A small step, but it seems to be a necessary one for me at this point.
A complete change of subject that has nothing to do with weaving
Since there’s a new movie coming out with Tom Hanks as Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, many articles about the amazing passenger plane landing are being published again. How they can make a full length movie about a six minute almost-catastrophe, I have no idea, but…
I read an article in WSJ in the words of Captain Sullenburger, I guess just a series of quotes put into a sequential order. One quote caught my attention, in which Captain Sullenberger says,
When I saw my father’s injury, I said to myself, “Oh my God.” Then I pushed myself to relax. I had been taught that if you panicked in life, you’d be ineffective and you couldn’t help anyone or yourself.
My thoughts were about an eight year-old boy telling himself to be calm. I’m usually calm in an emergency, but I’m an adult, and frankly I wish I could use this mind control thing with everyday life. I admire people who do. Another quote below reminds me of a book review I read.
Is it all about parenting?
My parents weren’t in the habit of telling my younger sister, Mary, or me what to do. They encouraged us. They wanted me to become my own person.
The title of the book is Do Parents Matter. The book explores how parents raise their children in many cultures around the world, and how the children turn out well, even if the mother sleeps with her child, or lets them do grown-up things at age five. The next day I read another piece about children and what they can do at a young age. The author wrote the article after seeing a 1928 silent movie about children learning. There was play, then suddenly the child was using tools. It was shocking to the author (Alison Gopnik) and probably would be to most of us. Here’s a quote:
My 21st-century reaction reflects a very recent change in the way that we think about children, risk and learning.
Ms. Gopnik references a paper by David Lancy, which can’t be accessed without the appropriate passwords, but he has written other articles that are accessible, plus a book.
I’m probably not going any farther with this, but I do find this whole discussion interesting, maybe because it reinforces my opinion that my responsibility as a parent was to teach my children to be independent, responsible adults. What do you think? Yes, I know this has nothing with weaving or art, but it’s something to mull over while working on whatever the next project turns out to be.
Return to weaving thoughts
I went down a few rabbit holes, first via Pinterest, then to the follow-up of some weaving pins.
Flowers popped up overnight among all the weeds and grass. I have no idea what they are. At first I thought they might be wild onion, but there’s no onion-y smell. They have no leaves, just the stem rising up with a flower atop. Several clusters of them pushed their way into the area; however, this is the most populated group. All the rain we’ve had this week brought them to brighten my day. Three inches! Yes, three inches in August! But better than that is the cooler weather. Of course, rain automatically means humidity, so there is that.
Tah dah! Warping is done. There may be weaving in my future.
Yes! Finally warping! You would think that after so many years of putting on warps, that I’d have this down. Nope. However, I think maybe it’s happening now. I am putting on 33 yards at 6 epi, using the warping wheel set for 3 yards per revolution. Since I have plenty of warp spools, I’m warping six ends at a time, 11 revolutions, placing ends in the reed, and repeating to get a two-inch section. Gee, I hope my math is correct!
A friend posted the picture below of Brownies lined up for summer camp. Dresses? Really? I know we each didn’t a uniform for each day of camp, but what did we wear otherwise? Even the counselor is in a dress. Geez! I asked my mother, but she said we didn’t wear pants, so I guess shorts were out also. I know, growing up in Texas, fashion trends took a couple of years to reach us. Of course, this was before instant communication. I don’t think I wore pants to school until I was in college. Mother said she was fourteen when pants “came in.” The main thing I remember about this camping experience was riding the very early school bus to “town” and having swimming lessons there in the public pool. I remember this whole camping experience with great fondness. We were in second or third grade and spent the night at camp for a week.
Brownie camp
Yesterday I took my mother on an errand, and couldn’t resist this building. Even though I grew up in this town, I don’t remember noticing the knight in shining armor or the crenellations at the top.
Crenellated roof
The Churro Club
Churro club Love these colors!
If you don’t know about the Churro Club from Weaving Southwest, let me explain. Every month you receive a box of yarns with colors that are not available in the usual product line. If you want more of the colors, you have to order them before the month ends. I have no idea what I will do with these yarns, but I love getting the new colors each month. It’s like a surprise gift for adults! Aren’t the colors that arrived today wonderful? Teresa and Joe are doing some really innovative things with their business, including the Churro Club and Yarn Bales. Check ’em out.
And then there’s the weather
So, okay, talking about the weather is boring, but … Friday it was 107, the hottest it’s been in ages, maybe years. Then a front came in, bringing a bit of rain, lots of clouds, and temperatures in the 80s. Glorious! Energizing! Maybe I’ll even finish that warp!
