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 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.
I don’t get out much, so I’m easily impressed. Not really, but I had time to kill before my haircut appointment, so I wandered around in Joann’s yesterday. My intention was to see if I could find a barrette to attach some beaded embroidery to and to see, if by some strange chance, if they had some silk to dye. Lucky me–I found both! But on the way to the silk, I saw these fabrics and could not resist pictures.
Two types of “flowers” in the same fabric
Reminiscent of flowers
Flowers
I guess these must be for weddings, but who knows. So, we go from the sublime to right across the aisle and the ridiculous. For some reason this struck me as an interesting juxtaposition.
Cow
The reason
I did find some silk dupioni. There was some confusion though because the bolt had one price and the sign for the section said 30% off. When I asked the cutter to check the price, she brought up a price that was $5.00 higher than the one on the bolt. She gave me the bolt price, though, and cut me two yards. I took a picture of the bolt end because I began to wonder if anything on the bolt is truth. But the good news is that with a coupon, I got the two yards for the price of one!
Dupioni bolt
Wallowing and warping
As to the wallowing I’ve been doing–it has stopped. It’s time to end this and get going. The studio is cleaned of its bits of ikat tape and yarn. The warp is out and waiting for me to start measuring. Now if I could find my newspaper in an accessible place each morning, life would be good. Oh, and if the coffee pot was still alive. Guess I’ll just have to adjust!
Right now, tired is my middle name. Actually, that’s not quite accurate–it’s no-energy. My energy has lagged for weeks not, not the usual day here and there. My low thyroid is fixed and is now back to normal. In order to cover all the bases, my doctor also ordered a urinalysis and a sleep study, just in case.
Oxymoron?
This is what was NOT happening
Let me tell you, “sleep study” is a misnomer. Sleeping does not happen during that long night. I slept for three hours maybe but won’t know for sure until the report is submitted. The technicians placed sensors all over my body, in my nose, in my mouth and in my hair. The ones in my hair were different than the rest, but didn’t realize until the next day that the technician used wax to adjoin them to my scalp. Huge globs of wax! The technician told me to use the hottest water I could stand to get them out.
After the study ended at 5 AM (yes, 5 AM!), and I drove home, had coffee, and read the newspaper. Then I washed my hair. Afterwards, realized another glob remained. Back to the water faucet. I ended up washing my hair three times. All that remained was going to the grocery store (spice dinner on Sunday), and trying to stay awake.
Finally, at 9:00 PM, I decided that it was safe to go to bed. Sleep, glorious sleep! It was wonderful!
Green beans and shitake broccoli noodles
Spice dinner
Our latest spice dinner was Sichuan–really good. Even though my sisters, mother, brothers-in-law, and I always enjoy the company, we don’t always enjoy the food from these dinners. For this dinner, we had green beans (because green beans just say Chinese, right?), pork tenderloin, and shitake broccoli noodles. Isn’t it funny that Chinese food seems “normal” to most of us?
This is a confession. Not a big one, although I do feel a bit guilty–sometimes.
Part one:
I seldom go to check my mail in my post office box. When I do go, I quickly sort through whatever is there, trash part before I leave the building and put the rest on the car seat beside me.
Part Two:
The second part of this confession is that I seldom clean off that seat, unless forced into it by circumstances. The second part of the confession is really what nags at me a bit. Just a bit.
UCC Paraments
Yesterday I was taking the car in for inspection and a good vacuuming and wash, so I cleaned off the seat, putting everything in a plastic bag to trash. I was surprised to see what looked like a handwritten envelope, but we get all kinds of advertisements that look like that nowadays. They are really computer generated, so I looked more closely at this one. Turns out it was real, and I found the most delightful surprise inside! A card with my picture and one of the paraments on the front and inside were many signature and a thank you.
And finally, the moral:
The moral of the story is, of course, twofold: check my mail more often and clean out the car more often. Not that I’ll pay attention to the moral.
The best part:
My car is inspected and found fit for the road. It is washed and shiny clean. The license tags are just waiting for me to show proof of insurance, the inspection proof, and money. The money part seems to grow in size each year (this is not part of the best, just a fact of life).
