Touching Base

Oh boy, the days just fly by and I never get to Fried Green Tomatoes anymore, though I often compose mini blog posts in my head, mostly while I'm driving.

The posts in my head are snippets about the new preacher at Circular who is working out very well, thank goodness (in last Sunday's sermon, Pete Seegar was likened to the old-time bibical psalmists. Well, of course, but I had never quite thought of it), but just now I have lukewarm enthusiasm for church as a regular thing -- couldn't I just read his blog?

They are snippets about the "campaign season" which I can hardly stand to turn in to. . . but still I had this reflexive feeling that I wanted to watch the party conventions.

And that leads to a snippet about living sans television, but that is a real quick snippet because it's hard to really know what we're missing because we're um, . . . missing it. All I know is that whenever I do get to see television I think "No, I really do not want this going in my house all the time."

I miss commercials. Annoying as they are, they are a bit of cultural lingo I miss being tuned into. Sometimes in the conversational swirl, I realize I've just been eliminated because I've dropped into the "we don't have cable so no TV reception" hole. But really, the only things I miss are The Olympics and The Oscars (and Masterpiece Theatre and Sunday morning news talk shows but now we're back to not wanting to go to church. . .)

For mindless diversion, we have Netflix and this summer we watched five seasons of a show that ran from 2006 - 2011 on BBC called Doc Martin. He was a surgeon in London but developed a phobia of blood, so now he's a GP in a small village in Cornwall. He's the stereotypical surgeon with no social skills, no bedside manner but he's in a small community where he really needs them. It's filmed in a lovely seaside location and has wonderful quirky characters. Now that we have run through all the episodes, we actually miss the people who populated the little village of Portwynne. We're looking for something else to love but haven't found it yet.

Here's a recent weaving project:

Using these particular colors was an assignment from my weaving study group -- and I made myself use yarns I already had so I dug into these novelty wools and mohairs -- I suddenly remembered these are not ideal for warp threads. Anyway, I'm not crazy about it, it looks very 1970s to me.Plus, it is too much wool for our Lowcountry winters.  I think I'll take it to GreenPeace and let it be the house scarf for anyone who needs one. It gets cold enough up there to appreciate it even if the colors are a bit blah.

And of course every other day I'm sure I have something totally original to share about Fred & Ethel.

This is My Chair

This is my chair

This is my couch

That is my bed

That is my bench

There is my chaise

There is my settee

Those are my footstools

Those are my rugs

Everywhere is my place to sleep

Perhaps you should just get a hotel room

          from I Could Pee on This and Other Poems by Cats

I'll try to check in here a little more often.

A Creative Bust

This weekend I took rag rugs to a craftshow and shared a booth with four other members of the Palmetto Fiber Arts Guild. It was outside the insanely busy Earth Fare, so a great location. 

Somehow, I had built it up in my mind that they would all sell so I was taking pictures so I could remember what they looked like, how they were warped, etc. I posted pictures on Facebook and Twitter, I really hyped it. Nothing sold. Nothing. How disappointing. And um, embarrassing.

But hey, that pot of daffodils coming up through the pansies looks great, doesn't it? Mom and I did that when she visited back in the fall.

And I did meet a guy who makes the frame for bottle trees. I've got to have one. They keep away the bad spirits, you know.

The Baby Blanket Continued. . . and Finally Completed

The baby blanket I started in early April progressed nicely, with only a few unexpected interruptions, but still, the baby arrived before I got it to the parents. It is for a couple who were Debbie's good friends, and I wanted to do something nice for them. It always buoyed Debbie's hope for the whole world when people she loved chose to parent the next generation. I understand the baby is a girl -- and her middle name is Deborah. Nice.

Here, the warp thread have gone through the beater and the heddles. The most tedious part of this warp is done! Yea!

 

At the top of this picture, you can see that the warp has been pulled to the back and tied onto a bar. Towards the front of the loom, you can see several sticks running through the warp. Those sticks help keep the warp threads from tangling as the warp is wound to the back.

Here's another shot of basically the same thing. The back of the loom is at the bottom of this picture. I turn a crank handle that moves the entire warp back, back, back, until I can tie the ends off on the front bar. This process is hard on the tread, and if a thread gets hung up or snarled, it sometimes breaks. You can fix it, but it's a pain. Those sticks in the front help a lot. I just learned that trick. (Thank you Garnette and Michaela!)

Finally, I got to weave! This warp is 34" wide and I wanted the blanket to be square, so I wove 36" in length figuring it would draw up some when I took it off the loom. Under the tension of the loom, you can hardly see the waffle weave design at all.

Here's how I dealt with the only warp thread that broke while I was weaving: I tied it off close to the weft (so I wouldn't continue to rake the beater over a knot as I kept weaving), took the new thread through the beater, through the correct heddle, then just wrapped it around these 2 heavy bolts and laid them of top of the back beam. Subtle like a truck, but it put the thread under enough tension that everything could progress just fine.

When the blanket first came off the loom, I could see the waffle design, but not very distinctly. I could only hope it would pop out after it was washed.

And hooray! It did. White on white is always going to be subtle, but the little waffle squares show up nicely. This 100% cotton drew up more than I was expecting. The finished blanket is 28" wide and 30" long. Live and learn. I think it will be fine as a dressy blanket and it should not shrink any more with further washings.

A Good Use of Rainy Days

We've had two days of pouring-down rain this week. Not only has it washed the pollen away, but I've spent two days inside, completely happy, listening to the entire playlist on my birthday I-Pod and warping the loom with my favorite yarn -- Henry's Attic Queen Anne's Lace. It's going to be a baby blanket for a good friend of Debbie's in Winston-Salem. If Debbie were here she would do something really extravagant to welcome this baby, so I thought I'd do something special. 

Here's the Queen Anne's Lace.

Here's this cute song; Love Bug, by Joan Armatrading playing:

We've both come down with the love bug and it means we got to stay in bed.

I hope you'se guys don't get this 'cause it knocks you right offa your legs.

Love Bug. .  talkin' 'bout Love Bug. . .

Let me 'splain the symptoms - first of all, there's hardly any pain.

With the love bug, you kinda lose your memory - you see, hear, think, talk, dream, care just for 1 person only.
So don't come down with the Love Bug 'cause it drives the sense right outta your head.

:-)

Here's the beginning of the warping process. The blanket will be about 36" square. Eight threads per inch in a waffle weave. White on white. Stay tuned.

Girlfriends' Weekend 2010

I'm getting my stories out of chronological order here, but in early December I went up to Virginia and spent a weekend with long-time friends Kathy and Lee at Kathy's house in Manassas. This is our annual get together that always features fabulous meals by Kathy. My favorite dish this year was Quinoa Black Bean Salad with Smoky Lime Dressing. We keep telling her she really should write a cook-book.

 On Saturday, we ventured out and went to the Torpedo Factory -- which at one time was indeed a torpedo factory, but now is three stories of art studios and showrooms down on the waterfront in the historic district of Alexandria.

Almost immediately we encountered Tanya Davis who, along with her watercolors, was selling origami snowflake ornaments. She took the time to show me how to fold one right there. It isn't easy, but between her help and You Tube videos, I'm going to master this one.

This woman has the largest loom I've ever seen and she wove these huge tapestries with wool and some metallic elements. She had family in Mount Pleasant  and I think would have happily come home with me

There was some kind of Scottish Heritage Festival in the area so there were men in kilts everywhere we went. These dancers were on the lower level of the Torpedo Factory. We watched them for awhile but no one asked us to dance so we went on down the street and had dinner at a pizza restaurant. 

The rest of our weekend together was several other good homemade meals, talking, watching movies, dog walking, and playing Bananagram! It's always fun and so comfortable to be with them. We are thinking maybe wait a little longer for next year, and they will come to Charleston in February or March 2012. Boy, that sounds a long time away!

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.