Duncan's Birthday

Yesterday was Duncan's birthday so we gave him his due. Here he is with all his presents and cards. And evil brownies in lieu of a cake. We went down to Folly Beach for dinner. The plan was to eat too much and go for a long walk on the beach, but Hurricane Faye blew rain in steadily all day so it was too stormy for much beach walking. We drove through Folly though, and it looked nice there -- fewer people since school has started, things sort of buttoned down. We saw some surfers heading for the ocean, but they seemed to be about the only ones.



Here is Duncan's favorite card that came from his Aunt Mary. On the inside it says:

Another year closer to driving a gigantic car real slow with your little gray head peering over the dashboard!



He's not sure why she sent it to him though ;-)

A slow morning

It is a blustery day, as Pooh would say. The wind is a bit Howl-y. I'm probably not entirely on my game this morning, but I assume things will even out -- with the weather and with me.

Turns out, the warp for the rag rug I'm well into is way too short. It has turned out to be an exercise in sloppiness -- I shouldacoulda done a sample to actually measure the percentage of uptake for these thick cloth strips. I shouldacoulda made the warp 2 yards longer "just to be safe". I'm not even sure that would have been enough. I can only say, it has been a really long time since I've done a rug with torn rag strips like this -- and I've probably never tried to do such a defined pattern. I was trying to do some multicolored stripes of varying widths and at the midpoint, repeat the pattern backwards to the end of the rug -- so that if you folded the rug in half, the two sides would match. It just appealed to my sense of order.

Most recently, and I mean when I lived on Hill St., I did the shaggy rag rug and a rug out of loops from old t-shirts. Way back when I lived on Arcaro Drive, (to remember, I have to picture myself weaving in these different places) I made several rugs with loops from panty hose -- sounds weird, but they came out in nice varying shades of brown and were very strong. So, I don't know when I last did a rug like this with strips of fabric woven in.

I do like the warp on this one. Since I can't do my nice orderly half and half repeat, I have decided to punt and hope the stripes turn out to appear casually randomized. The good news is I have less than 12" left to weave. I will take it off the loom and take it to Black Mountain to tie fringe, wash it and let it dry in the sun on the deck at Greenpeace. Here's a picture of the rug on the loom a day or two ago.

Just to start

Just wanted to try this out to keep the world of communication technology from getting too far ahead of me.
Since I'm not working too much right now, I have time to learn something new. I'll try to record some of my weaving and home improvement projects. Will try to keep editorializing and man-bashing to a minimum. We'll see.