Not a Kitty Place!

Day 99: I heard the creaking of a cupboard door, indicating that Somebody was looking for food in all the usual locations. Food? He's been known to drag out crackers (a favourite), but he'll settle for a stale granola bar if that's all he can find. I laid my work aside and went to retrieve the Cat. The cupboard above the counter was undisturbed, but then I noticed that the righthand door above the washing machine was slightly ajar. I hadn't heard him jump down, and that was suspicious in and of itself. I peered into the dark space and was met with a returning stare. He knew he was in trouble. "Oh, that is NOT a kitty place!" I said. How he gets in there is nothing short of a contortionist's best performance. The washer only gives him three or four inches to stand on because the cupboard is deep, but somehow, he manages to get the door open, and then in a remarkable display of thigh strength, launches himself upward and over bread pans, a recipe box, a flour sifter, a butter dish and other various cookware without knocking anything off. Getting him out is another story entirely. He doesn't want to jump all the way to the floor, and knows better than to try to lower himself down onto the slick washer, so I have to offer him my shoulder, and then pull his hindquarters out. I guess I'll just have to keep performing cat extractions for now, because the wood is too hard for me to drill. At least there was nothing in there he could eat.

Crewelwork

Day 98: It recently occurred to me that there was one type of needlework I had not discussed in my posts other than a casual mention of it being among the various crafts I do. There's a reason for that, namely that I don't do it any more, not because I didn't enjoy it, but because the particular type of yarn it requires is no longer produced (or not by any recognizable manufacturer). This is crewelwork, a type of embroidery which uses 3-ply wool in the same manner you'd use regular embroidery floss. Like floss, it could be divided so that one or two strands could be used at the stitcher's discretion to create finer lines, smaller embellishments and more intricate blending. The wool disappeared from the market 25-30 years ago, and at the time, I thought it just wasn't being carried by any of the shops I visited (this was well before the internet, mind you). Needlepoint yarn (an entirely different product) is available even today, but the three-strand crewel wool simply vanished. Today, you can pick it up second-hand on websites such as Etsy and eBay, but you're taking a chance with respect to moth-chewed strands or worse, moth eggs. Strangely, these two pieces (the only ones I still own) have never been bothered by bugs. Truly, the loss of the wool was a crewel twist of fate for those of us who enjoyed the art.

Checked Off

Day 97: This band was another one of those interminable projects. I wove it on my Leksand loom, and struggled with warp tension almost from the start. I've tried several different warping systems, have changed the loom's rollers and brakes around to achieve a different angle on the warp, have tried using the equivalent of "angel wings"...in short, I've tried everything I know to try, and I still have warp tension issues nine times out of ten when I'm weaving more than two yards, three at the very most if the band is narrow. I've analyzed every aspect, and have been unable to figure out why the issue occurs, but in any event, end-of-the-year meant I was going to dedicate myself to finishing "hanging" projects, and this was one of them. It measures 150 inches in length and about 1 1/4" wide. I used 16/2 cotton for the ground, 10/2 for the pattern and coloured threads. More to the point, it's done, and I don't have to think about it any more.

Record Keeping

Day 96: As a young weaver...that would have been shortly after the mass extinction event which wiped dinosaurs off the face of the planet...as a young weaver, I didn't see the value of keeping a record of what I wove. Indeed, I didn't think about it at all. Later, I began keeping samples of things I'd woven with new patterns or new threads, but even so, I was not keeping track of everything I wove. If I used a rigid heddle loom, I didn't bother at all. Consequently, I do not have a full record of 50+ years of weaving, but I'm a bit more diligent now than before, and I try to make a card for each weaving, even if it doesn't include a sample. There have been many times when I knew my files didn't include notes for a project telling me how many ends I'd threaded, what sett I'd used, what shrinkage had occurred when the piece was wet-finished, and I'd have to start from scratch, calculating for width and length of a warp. Hindsight, they say, is clearer than foresight, and had I known then what I know now, I would have kept better records. It just takes a minute to weave that little extra bit, maybe not even the full width of a warp, and to put all the pertinent information on a 3 x 5 card with notes like, "Boring pattern!" or "Should have used a wider sett." We learn from experience, to be sure, but when possible, I strongly suggest backing it up with a hard copy.

Bob-bob-bobbin Along

Day 95: This was the part about weaving with boat shuttles which I thought was going to drive me crazy: changing bobbins. I had stick shuttles down to a fine science. Given the width of my project, I could calculate the number of wraps it would take to complete it, and in the case of hand towels and placemats, I could usually wind enough for a whole one onto a single shuttle. Bobbins don't hold nearly as much, and of course there's no way to know how much you've wound onto one unless you're very good with a gram scale and mathematics. Also, having to change them out often seemed to me that it was going to be an enormous pain in the neck, but as it turns out, it goes quite neatly. Fortunately, I have a bobbin winder for loading them with thread, and I can do a pretty fair imitation of a level-winder if I pay attention to what I'm doing. You still need a lot of them, but with a dozen, I'm like the red-red robin, just bob-bob-bobbin along.

Second Memory Wreath Block

Day 94: From the onset, I decided I was not going to push to complete a 12-block Memory Wreath lap quilt in a particular time frame. Rather, I'll work on it when the mood strikes me. I completed this second block yesterday and already had the pieces cut for a third. I glue-basted them to the paper forms this morning, and have started stitching the large triangles to the center. The unifying factors in this semi-scrappy quilt are the white bits and the dark green outer triangles. The centers will lean strongly toward green, and the interior triangles will be in two shades of a colour also represented in the center. Here, I chose aqua to be my "B" colour. The third block picks up yellow/gold for "B." This design doesn't stitch together quite as easily as Ring Cycles did, but it doesn't present any major issues with assembly.

Max Goes Home

Day 93: For all of having enjoyed the quiet, smooth operation of a countermarch loom, the time has come for Max to end his stay here, and go home to daddy. When Daisy arrived, I discovered why weaving on Max had been harder for me. Daisy's breast beam is a full two inches lower, and although I've enjoyed having more space in which to work, Max is significantly deeper between the breast beam and the shafts. I am a small person. No, that's an understatement. I am a very small person, and consequently, when I sat at Max, I had to keep my elbows raised to pass the shuttle. Likewise, I found myself stretching too far forward as I tried to squeeze one more motif in before advancing the warp, and that action taxed my back. While I had originally intended to keep Max, working with Daisy convinced me that he needed to be returned to my weaving partner Ed who, at 6' 4" has no problems with either height or reach. I finished the eighth placemat last night (wait...I thought I'd warped for six?), and today worked the little sample for my weaving files. That said, I'll miss you, Max. We had some good weaves in your short tenure here.