And little other care hath she

Gracie decided to take a nap sorta half way under the covers today, which of course made me coo all over the place and take pictures, because I'm a crazy cat lady.

I went to a fiber festival today at a fairground a little south of town. It featured a variety of fibers, fiber-producing animals, hand-made cloth and articles of clothing, as well as dyes, chemicals, looms, shuttles, spindles, and a plethora of other tools I could only begin to imagine how to use. (And of course elephant ears, because that's what makes something a festival.) My weaving teacher was there as well (apparently), and told me later that she had had bought way, way too much, but I personally didn't get anything other than a slush-puppy. Whenever I'm surrounded by pretty, I'm tempted to buy stuff, but today was an exception, seeing as I either didn't have a clue how to use any of it or it was fairly expensive and very nice. I mean, I suppose I could buy homespun, hand-dyed fibre for the next scarf I spend a year occasionally poking at in between other projects, or a hand-made gossamer shawl to keep me warm while I lounge around in my pjs, but... maybe next time.

Speaking of keeping warm, I have to admit it's about this time every year that I start to think favorably about colder weather. Despite swearing oaths on all that is holy every February that I will not be such a damnfool the next time around, cold air, sweaters, leaves, cider, apples, rain, more festivals, and even a little bit of snow start to sound really nice around mid-August. It must be something the tourist buearu puts in the water; I don't even like apples that much. I actually (having resisted the angora gossamer) stopped by Old Navy today and bought sweatpants in anticipation. They were on sale; don't judge me.

Still up to this nonsense

It's taking forever because the brown thread's not thick enough -- meaning I have to send the shuttle through twice every for time the thread appears so that it's double-thick -- and because I have to beat the thread at least 2-3x as often as usual due to the pattern being so nitpickily detailed that the weave needs to be incredibly tight for it to show up right.

Also, when I lean on the beater to pull it in tight, it bangs agains the bony part of my forearms, so I'm covered in bruises which hurt when I lean on my desk or the dinner table.

Weaving's fun, guys!

If I could just get her to actually use them....

I actually finished all three towels in time to get them hemmed for mother's day! I really didn't think it was going to happen, but I somehow managed. Here's what it looked like when it first came off the loom:


It was quite long:

Up close shot of the patterns I chose:

Finished towels!

She was very happy them! I wish I could have gotten a shot that showed it better and wasn't so posed, but I'd forgotten my own camera so I couldn't sneak a candid shot:

::weftweftweft::

Update on the new project already! I'm trying to get three hand towels spit out before my lesson Wednesday -- my teacher's bringing her sewing machine to hem the ends so I can have them for my mom for mother's day. I need to have 105 inches by then and I currently have ...15. Guess what I'm doing this weekend!!



Close-up!

I'm pleased with how it's turning out so far. Like, absurdly pleased. Yay!

Moving right along

Presque fini...



...tout fini!!


(I'm watching you....)


New project!

Update!

Regard! Cloth!



I'm trying different kinds of weaves/patterns. (Click to embiggen image.)

A tangled web we weave

Gaah, I'm a bum blogger, guys -- sorry. Part of my excuse is that I was in Virginia visiting family for a while, but, well, most of it is that I was lazy/busy with other things. Like, for example, my first weaving lesson!

I have (am renting) a loom!:



My teacher, Julie, is having me start out by making a scarf. The process of weaving itself is only so complicated -- like knitting or crocheting, it depends on how complex and intricate you want the final product to be. However, while with knitting you start by picking up a couple needles (or with crocheting, a hook), grabbing your yarn, and you're ready to go ...getting a weaving project off the ground is a bit more complicated.

I'd never really thought about how the thread gets on the loom. For a scarf to be 60" long, I can't even remember how many yards we measured out (using a warping board), but it took a while. You take the colors you want and go back and forth, back and forth.... We then took it off the board, folded it up in a funky loopy-chain way (which Julie will have to show me many times over before I get it right), tie it off in a few places, snip here, snip there, and voila, you end up with several threads of a given length which you then have to roll onto a bar at the back of the loom, which, in the picture above, is where the brown paper is, on the left toward the bottom (the paper keeps each revolution of threads from tangling with each other).

At this point, I'll skip a step or two because a) I don't want to put you to sleep, and b) I don't remember exactly what we did. It involved lease sticks. Most of my time since has been spent thusly:




Threading the heddles. See those metal rods? Those are heddles. See the little holes in the middle of each of them? Each of the 160 or so threads had to be pulled one by one through each of the holes in a certain pattern. There is no way to sit up straight to do this, since you have to lean way over the reed to get to the threads, and since it took an hour and a half (then another 1/2 hour when I realized I'd screwed up and had to go back and redo about a quarter of it), I had the biggest knot in my upper back by the time I was finished.

PS, doing this all with a curious, not-declawed tabbycat watching your every move? It's like war... mindnumbing tedium punctuated with moments of blind panic.

Then I grabbed a hook and pulled each of the 160 strings through the reed (I wasn't quite finished when I took this picture, as you can see):




That was less tedious, or at least less painful, than threading the heddles, since I could sit up straight. It also went faster, and was kind of relaxing.

Purdy:



I'm now done until my next lesson, but I'm not ready to start weaving yet -- when Julie comes over this week, she'll show me how to tie down the front end.

Not only do I have the loom set up by the window, I also have a nice view of my beloved little apartment:



So that's the news here.

Arty farty thready nonsense

My art class is going well! It's continued to be very basic, but we've only done drawing so far, and we're starting painting next week, which I know much less about. Plus, painting is our teacher's focus (he's a grad student in his final year) so I expect he'll have more to say, just as I'll have a lot more to learn. I'm going to invest in some oil paints -- I've only worked with acrylics before, but I like the finished product that comes with using oils better -- there's a certain luster you simply cannot achieve with acrylics no matter how much gloss medium you add. Plus, there's a romance and a sense of continuity with the past that I like about using the same kind of paint (basically) that Michelangelo, DaVinci, Picasso, and hundreds of other artists have been using down through the centuries. Also, I like the smell.

At the end of class yesterday, one of my classmates, a particularly chatty and effusive retired school teacher, was babbling to our teacher about something or other, and I'm not quite sure how it came up, but she mentioned she weaves. Immediately, my head snapped up, because I, and I don't know if I've ever mentioned this, really want to learn how to weave. It's always seemed kinda neat -- it's beautiful and old fashioned and looks peaceful to do; Anna's mom had that huge loom in the basement (which always looked like a giant contraption for creating magic to me), and it was hinted that the dorans in Wise Child used looms to weave tapestries for some undefined mystical purpose. Also, the concept of actually creating cloth by hand (and not just by knitting) is pretty amazing. (Like, seriously, it's a flat surface. Made of individual strands. One dimensions adding up to create two dimensions. TRIPPY.) Then at the Fallsburg festival last fall, I watched a woman demonstrating how to weave and was thoroughly captivated. I probably stood there for ten minutes while my poor mother waited for me, bored (but inside where it was warm, and with cider, so she couldn't complain). It was at that point that I actually started to think about learning how to do it myself, and not even a week ago I spent some time googling our city's name plus "weaving lessons," trying to come up with some options that didn't require you take four days in a row off work and pay them $250.

Anyway, I mentioned to my classmate that I'd been wanting to learn how to weave, and she got very excited and next week will be bringing me the phone number of a friend of hers who gives private lessons for $15 an hour, and Y'all, ...I'm going to learn to weave. And it is going to be sweet.

The only problem with the Holly Learns to Weave plan is that if I really get into it, at some point I'd conceivably have to buy a loom. And that is ...not cheap. And would make moving considerably more difficult. So, in the meantime, I'll have to go visit Anna's mom a lot or something, which I'm sure she'd actually be pretty thrilled about.