Something From Nothing Projects

Day 253: They say that hindsight is clearer than foresight, and I'm here to tell you just how true that is. In fifty-plus years of weaving, I have thrown away thrums which, had I had the good sense to turn them into something useful by tying them end for end, would have measured in miles and pounds as opposed to yards and ounces. Oh, I managed to half-life quite a few of them, taking three-foot lengths of leftovers from the floor loom and using them for warp on the rigid heddle, but even then, I was discarding enough to make my Scottish conscience grimace. I crocheted some into potholders, used some to tie quilts, but by and large, my stash of thrums was growing faster than I could find ways to employ them. Recently, I discovered zanshiori, the art of making functional cloth from waste thread. I so enjoyed my first project (left) that I immediately warped for a second longer one. And, if the truth be told, I still haven't put a very big dent in the mass of thrums I've accumulated just in the last year or so. I've dubbed the bags I'll make with this cloth "Something From Nothing" projects.

Lord Of All He Surveys

Day 252: It's been a while since I posted a portrait of Merry, and he was in a mood to pose today even though I had to use a fairly long exposure. He owns the world, and knows it. In this case, he had taken possession of my desk chair, and I knew better than to try to reclaim it by any direct means. Instead, I decoyed him by saying, "I'm going in the back room. You wanta come help me weave?" That was all it took. He ran to the Loom Room door, and as soon as I opened it, he hopped straight into his little weaver's box and settled in for a nap. Y'see, there's one important thing here: he doesn't like to let me out of his sight. When I work in the kitchen, he either sits on my chair at the dining table or curls up on a shelf in a box specifically designated for his use. He's gotten much better about leaving all of Mama's fascinating strings alone, and even let me warp a rigid heddle loom without offering his not-so-welcome assistance. Such a sweetheart he is!

Two Feet

Day 251: Two feet and about four inches. That represents roughly a third of the McLeod shawl done and dusted. My goal has been to weave at least one colour unit (defined as a full sequence of either black or yellow) and, Merry permitting, some days I've been getting through a full repeat of the two. This is definitely a labour of love. The width of the piece extends my reach to the maximum, and because my stick shuttles aren't as long as the warp is wide, I have to coax each pass through carefully, reaching into the warp to nudge the stick along until I can capture it on the other side. Even so, the work is progressing faster than I'd expected, but in between sessions, I like to sit down with a project which isn't quite so demanding. To that end, I have all three inkle looms loaded, and am also working on the zanshiori which is on the rigid heddle. Never a dull moment around here!

Hosta

Day 250: Years ago, I planted a couple of Hostas at the end of my carport, thinking it would be nice to have some foliage there. Now, those few have multiplied into a sizeable colony, and they surprised me by putting up some of the most attractive inflorescences in the yard, at least in my opinion. Later, this flower head will open out into the array of trumpet-shaped, purple-tinged florets one generally considers to be typical of Hostas. At this point, they are at their prettiest, resembling nothing quite so much as albino artichokes, right to the lavender tips. The contrast against rich, deep green shadows is striking. The inflorescence lasts several weeks as it progresses through its blooming cycle. I never expected Hostas to be so rewarding.

Zanshiori - Weaving Leftovers

Day 249: In weaving, "right" and "wrong" are subjective. As long as the end product pleases the weaver and serves the intended function (even "just because" is a viable function), the Weaving Police should just keep their mouths shut. It's a little different when you're entering a competition. There, you have to abide by certain strictures or you will find yourself subject to criticism. However, the individual weaver is a creative artist, and in no place is that quite so apparent as in zanshiori. The term translates directly from Japanese as "leftover threads" ("zanshi-", i.e., thrums and tag ends of cones/spools) and "weaving" ("ori"), and the most important thing to know about this type of weaving is that there are no rules. In fact, it is the flaws and imperfections which give zanshiori its character. It can be done within guidelines such as the way I am working it here with bits of 8/2 cotton, or it can be entirely random, materials drawn from a basket or box at the weaver's side, using whatever comes to hand. I spent the better part of a week tying together four ounces of thrums in two balls (one mostly browns and black, the other mixed colours), planning to use them as weft in a rigid-heddle project. I had seen a video of zanshiori-made shopping bags, and took one suggestion to heart: double the warp threads so that two pass through each slot and each hole. It made warping a breeze, and for the most part, Merry let me do my work without interfering (well, I did have to tell him "No!" a few times). The dominance of the warp helps blend the weft colour changes visually. Already, I am enjoying the character imparted by the knots as I put into action one of my grandmother's best pieces of advice: Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.

Rose Campion

Day 248: Good old Rose Campion! Even though the Barren Wasteland could use some serious weeding, Silene coronaria rises well above the tangle of old grass, last year's Rudbeckia stalks and the yarrow I've been totally unsuccessful in eliminating. I don't do much to the Barren Wasteland these days, preferring to let the tall "volunteers" hide the sins of my neglect. The Rudbeckia tends to get out of hand and the ones closest to the sidewalk interfere with trips to the garage. When I get tired of detouring around them, I yank a few. They re-seed and repopulate readily, negating any feelings of guilt I might have about removing them. The Rose Campion is another story. I would encourage it to spread, but it doesn't seem to want to expand its territory. But then, the Barren Wasteland is about survival, and any flowering plant which doesn't have plans for world domination is welcome there.

Kiwi Flowers

Day 247: I'm having trouble typing because I have all my fingers crossed that this year's Hardy Kiwi crop will be bigger than last year's. Last year was actually a record, with something like two dozen end-of-thumb sized berries when the final tally was in, and that was almost four times as many as I'd gotten the year before. I suspect that like my fig tree, once the vines start producing, they'll yield more with every passing year, although in past years, there have been other issues interfering with fruit set, such as heat waves, cold snaps and lack of pollinators. I have three vines all tangled up with each other: a self-fertile "Issai," and a pair (male and female) of another variety. Self-fertile varieties reportedly do better when they have another species to pollinate them, although they will produce a crop without a partner. I'll be happy with whatever I get, though. The berries are fuzzless and pack just as much flavour as their large cousins.

Small, Medium and Large

Day 246: I'm afraid I don't have a "super-size" inkle loom to show you (that would be a floor model), but these three serve quite well to keep me busy. "Large" is the standard Ashford inkle and can make a band 110" in length. "Medium" is Ashford's Inklette, and holds 72". It's the one I dubbed "Inky-dinky Inkle," but that was before I got "Small," which I refer to as a "micro inkle." I can squeeze 39" out of it, but only because I have very small hands. It's a wonderful little travel loom. Most of the time, all three are in operation, however I just pulled a band off "Large" and haven't decided what to warp up next. I usually use heavier threads on it ("heavier" being 8/2 cotton). The warp on "Medium" is sewing thread with 10/2 cotton for the pattern threads, and the piece on "Small" is tatting cotton #40 with #20 for the pattern.

Even Eatonville

Day 245: For as red as rural Pierce County is known to be, it was surprising to see roughly 50 people turn out for the "No Kings" protest in Eatonville WA (population 2845 per the 2020 census). We gathered at the main intersection (the one and only stoplight), and while most people stood on the corner in front of Plaza Market where travellers to the Mountain would best see them, we occupied all four corners. Some folks came for a while and then departed. Dozens of drivers honked and waved support. A few flagged us the finger or shouted profanities, and most of those responses came predictably from the demographic of jeepers, farmers and horsemen, motorcyclists, people in run-down cars and similar ilk. I stayed for the scheduled hour,, and was further surprised by seeing a solitary brave woman with a "No Kings" sign at the public rest area in Elbe, a place redder even than E'ville. If our turnout was this large, I can hardly wait to hear the national figures.

Progress!

 

Day 244: I feel justified in posting another photo of the progress I'm making on the McLeod shawl because it's been quite a struggle to get to this point. The weaving is going much better, with only one shed (1/4) giving me any trouble. I've also discovered that if I feed my Helper before allowing him into the Loom Room, he goes right to his little weaver's box and curls up for a post-prandial nap. When I'm done with my session at the loom, I say, "I'm going OUT. Are you coming with me? Come on, let's go have some sprinkles!" (In case you're wondering, sprinkles are a small, crunchy cat food...not a treat, mind you...which he just loves.) So, thus far, I have six inches done on the shawl. I have planned it to be 72" long, not counting fringe. It measures 32" wide under tension. My squares are a little taller than they are wide, but I think that will work out when I wet-finish it. Will I waulk it? Possibly, and yes, I heard that "WTF is waulking?" from the back row. Traditionally, tartan fabric is put through a process of pounding as the wet cloth is passed from hand to hand through a succession of people gathered around a long table. The task is generally accompanied by rhythmic singing of "waulking songs," and is a time of socializing. The beating of the fibers felts them together somewhat to form a firmer, warmer, and nearly water-resistant cloth.

McLeod of Lewis

Day 243: The weaving of my tartan shawl has finally begun. This is McLeod (MacLeod) of Lewis, aka "the loud McLeod," which I am entitled to wear only thanks to a bit of shady family history. There was a dalliance between my grandfather's mother and a passing McLeod, unearthed when Grandpa visited Scotland in search of his true lineage. He knew that his legal father was not his biological father, but as to how he discovered the link to the McLeods (as it is spelled in our line) is something I do not know. In any event, this is our tartan, and the shawl is something I have wanted to weave for a very long time. For that reason, I have been diligently working my way through a number of difficulties, notably having to change the sett from 36 to 30 in order to obtain a 50/50 weave. Even now, it's hard to get a clean shed because the wool is "grabby," and this is further complicated by the fact that my longest shuttles are only 24" and the piece is 30" wide. I keep reminding myself, "It's a shawl. It's six feet long. It's not like you're weaving eight yards of it. You can get through this if you're patient." That said, it's slow going, but I'm a McLeod, and am nothing if not determined. After all, that's our motto: "Hold fast."

Why I Keep A Blog

Day 242: Even as I am working on another hexagon quilt, I am also cutting the little wedge-shaped pieces which comprise the arcs of Double Wedding Ring. They are smaller, giving me the opportunity to use up some of the fabrics from the bag labelled "Fragments." It seemed like as good a time as any to better organize my fabric stash, so I started pulling things out of one box to put in others. In the bottom, I found several plastic bags with labels saying, "Potato Chip." Now I've made a lot of quilts in my career, and I can generally remember where they've gone if I have some sort of prompt to put me on the right track, but this one was a puzzle. "Potato Chip? Who got Potato Chip?" I asked Merry. "Kevin got Scrappy Stars. The boys got Patience Corner and the Twenty-Year Quilt. Joe and Sharon got hexagons. Anne got the first Cathedral Window. Who got Potato Chip?" (There were others, but those sprang immediately to mind.) "Ah!" I said, "I bet it's in my blog!" And it was. Potato Chip had gone to one of my sisters-of-the-heart. And the funny thing is, I had just been thinking that I had never made a quilt for her. This is one of the reasons why I keep a blog: quilt phenology.

Daisy

Day 241: Some days, you just need a goddamn daisy. Sorry if my bluntness offends you. I don't make a habit of voicing my political opinions outside a close circle of friends, but my stress level is so high currently that if I don't let some of it out, I'm going to explode. Every day, it seems like there is some new crisis, and it makes me wonder what's going on behind the scenes that we are being pulled away from seeing by the "shiny object" of a manufactured scenario. We are being manipulated with distractions, being sold the biggest "reality show" ever staged. We're being conned by a team of experts with a jackass as the figurehead, who himself is being conned by a larger machine (or so I believe). What's the end game here? And who is actually behind it? Not Don the Pawn. He hasn't got the brains. Meanwhile, everyone is calling dirty, ineffectual names on social media, feeling self-important as if they were actually doing something productive. I go to bed with a black cloud of despair hanging over my head. I don't sleep, wondering what kind of life I will have, wondering what kind of life I can give Merry if I find myself without an income. It is a deep, dark well I find myself staring into, and some days, the only ray of hope (invasive or not) is a goddamn daisy.

Two Birds, One Stone

Day 240: Five years. That's how long it's been since I went geocaching (not counting CITOs and one related event). Even then, I had only been picking up the occasional cache when I travelled out of my immediate area. Gas prices were on the rise, and I'd found almost everything in the immediate vicinity, so I decided it was time to step back. I let my membership lapse, and I pulled all of my own caches (largely because I didn't want to leave a legacy of little bits of plastic in the woods if I should happen to keel over dead), but I missed the activity. After our Park CITO at the end of May, I thought, "Surely there must be some new caches, nice ones, by now? Why don't I join up again?" So I did. Today while going out for groceries, I looked for and found three, two of which were reasonably interesting. The third one was here at tiny Dogwood Park, a very predictable hide in the brushy back corner, redeemed by having pinpoint-accurate coordinates. And that said, no matter how many times I see it, this is one view which never gets old.

Handstitching Hexagons 2.0

Day 239: And here we go again! Given the generous donations of fabrics by friends, I embarked on another journey with hand quilting hexagons on June 5. I already have the first of 17 rows done and assembled, and am started on the next row. Instead of having two of each combination accented by "uniques," this Version 2.0 will be constructed with opposites, i.e., each hexagon has a counterpart in which the fabric used for the frame becomes the center, and vice versa. I have not yet decided if I will include any unique blocks, but since most of my quilts contain puzzles of some sort, it's very likely.

Setback And Revision

Day 238: Even when you're prepared for the possibility, it's disheartening when you have to rethink a weaving project. Despite using my table loom for some careful testing of the wool in order to establish the proper thread count necessary to achieve perfect squares in tartan, the floor loom had different ideas. I had woven 12 throws when it became obvious that my "square" was taller than it was wide. No amount of beating would cram 16 passes into the same space, and that meant my sett was too close together at 36 epi. In fact, it was so far off that I am acting on the assumption that my original "guesstimate" of 30 epi would have been correct, and that's what I'm engaged in presently: pulling all the threads out of the reed, changing to a different one, and rethreading. Note: this does not mean I had to re-thread the heddles! I've had to do this on a few other projects over the course of my weaving career, but never with 1024 ends to wrestle! And that said, if an epi of 30 doesn't work, I'll be repeating this process until I get it right. This is going to be an "heirloom" piece, so it has to be perfect.

Honeysuckle

Day 237: Fond childhood memories of slurping nectar from honeysuckle blossoms meant that it was on my list of "must-have" plants for my yard. You have to understand that when I moved in here, the only "landscaping" was Big Doug (already over 100 feet tall and firmly established), the yew hedge out front, a weedy lilac and the Whatzit Tree, a flowering somethingoranother, identification of which even eluded the Master Gardener I went to for help in figuring out what it was. That was it. I immediately set about creating habitat for birds and pollinators, each year adding as many new plants as my limited budget would allow. Of course, the contorted filbert was one of the first things on the list, and the tree which is now 12 feet tall and about 15 feet wide began its life here as a single twig a foot and a half long. The Japanese maple now towering 20 feet above my driveway arrived in a one-gallon pot. You'd never recognize the yard now from what it was 35 years ago, now shadier and cooler and full of little chirpy birds, a happy haven for butterflies and bees. The hummers love the honeysuckle, so I leave it for them, although I have to admit that sometimes I'm tempted to nectar at its bright orange flowers myself.

Kittygons Complete

Day 236: The Kittygons quilt is done, except for sewing my "made by" label to the back! Finished dimensions are 78" x 60". I started this project on July 4, 2022, and was well into the hand-quilting of it when my dear little Tippy passed away. It went on hold when Merry moved in, and stayed in the cupboard until a month or so ago when I decided it was time to finish it up. I had not yet applied the binding, and since Merry kept trying to eat the fuzzy polyester batting, I bound it slightly ahead of schedule. Normally, I would have waited until I had quilted it out to the edge, but I only had a few "flowers" and the border hexagons to go, so I pinned the "flower" centers, and stretched the quilt, basting the top to the backing and batting. Then I put the bias tape around the edge, hoping that I wouldn't have any wrinkles or folds in the muslin back. This morning, I put the final quilting stitches in place. Now I can devote myself to the second "quilt-as-you-go" hexagon project already in progress.

Golden Chain Tree

Day 235: This is a Golden Chain Tree (Laburnum), not to be confused with Golden Rain Tree (Koelreuteria). It is part of the Family Fabaceae (legumes), not Sapindaceae (soapberry), placing it in the same botanical "box" as peas and Scotch broom as opposed to the one containing horse chestnuts and lychee. Now, have we got this straight? Stop calling Golden Chain Tree by the wrong name! Mine happens to be a weeping variety with droopy branches as well as dangly inflorescences, and it was one of my "must-have" plants for my yard. It took me a decade or more to find one I could afford, and the contortions we went through to arrange transportation from the nursery where I bought it on a fall close-out sale were hilarious. It was in an enormous pot, for one thing, and given the size of the pot and the height of the tree, the distance between the footwell in front of the passenger seat of my car and the back window meant that we had to carefully bend the top of the tree to get it inside. There wasn't much room for me in there as I drove it home with leaves tickling my ears, only to face the challenge of manipulating the pot (heavy!) out of the car and over to the "$200" hole I'd dug for my $20 tree. That was my father's advice showing: whatever you paid for the plant, dig a hole worth ten times the amount to plant it in. Okay, the rich soil I bedded it in didn't actually cost $200, but there should be bonus points for backache. My hard work paid off. My lovely Laburnum is now covered in pendent golden chains.

Allium

Day 234: Like chives on steroids, the flowering heads of this Allium variety tower two to three feet or above ground level, opening as a ball almost six inches in diameter. I planted several colours last fall, and so far, only the purple ones have opened. Not all types will have the height these do, but if you want tall, showy colour in your flower bed, I'd give this one a big thumbs-up. Best of all, since they are members of the onion family, they're ignored by squirrels, moles, deer, elk and raccoons, common predators of tastier bulbs like tulips. Purportedly, Alliums naturalize readily, spreading by both division (bulblets) and by seed. For my money, they can bring it on!

Kittygons Almost Done

Day 233: The Kittygons quilt is almost done! All that remains is the outer row of partial hexagons along one edge and a few on the side I'm currently stitching. The back side shows the stitching best. Each dark green center has a "daisy" in the middle, and hidden in the hexagons somewhere, there is also a bee (not shown in the image). I like hiding surprises in my quilts! There were a few issues along the way with this one, notably that my sewing machine began acting up when I was about halfway done with the piecing (now fixed), so some of the seams weren't stitched firmly. As I've quilted each hexagon, I've fixed the loose bits by hand. Note that this was made as a machine-sewn quilt top, then batted and backed with muslin before I put it on the quilting frame (as opposed to "quilt-as-you-go" where each block or piece is made and finished individually). Merry has already decided it's his.

Ragged Robin

Day 232: A couple of years ago, my sister-of-the-heart Patty sent me some seed from her Ragged Robins (Lychnis flos-cuculi). I planted most of them in an enormous pot just outside my kitchen door, with the remainder going along the west side of my house. The following spring, I saw rosettes of leaves developing in the pot. "Hm," I said, "those must be Ragged Robins." They didn't bloom that first year, so in order to prevent myself from pulling them up as some sort of weed, I stuck a label in the pot. When the second spring came around, I was happy to see stems with buds rising above the rosettes, and sure enough, they bloomed. I let them go to seed in the hopes of having more, but as such things occasionally happen, the label faded or went missing, and at some point during the winter, I apparently decided to weed the pot. At first when no Ragged Robins came up in it, I blamed critters, but then a niggling memory suggested that I had indeed been my own worst enemy. I was very sad, very sad indeed, and moreso when Patty posted pictures of her Ragged Robins and asked me how mine were doing. But all was not lost! Remember I said that I'd thrown some seed down on the west side of my house? I even marked off the area as a "no-mow" zone. There are only a few, but I still have Ragged Robins.

This story puts me in mind of one from my childhood. My father was a diligent weeder, and decided to help my mother by pulling all the thistles out of her flower beds. Unfortunately, the "thistles" were in fact her Oriental poppies. I don't think she ever forgave him.