Daryl's Blog – The World from a Weaver's point of view!

On Making Lemonade…

At least I can reasonably state that the last two weeks have been if nothing else, entertaining…

I got a notice that my custom Pella Window was ready to install and they made an appointment for 10 days ago. Pella installers came, and did a fantastic job replacing the old, short double-hungs, and now I have a beautiful window facing east, to catch the rising sun, and look over my fantastic gardens, as they carefully begin to come to life after the long winter. Sounds almost magical doesn’t it?

I stood looking out of my beautiful window and think, if I hadn’t had the flood, if the day after Christmas they hadn’t completely gutted my den, where it rained broken pipe water from the room above, through the ceiling fan, if I hadn’t experienced any of that, I wouldn’t have this incredible view, and I wouldn’t have met all the fantastic workers who were kind, efficient, knowledgeable, and though we could rarely communicate with English, we managed to get the important concepts across. I genuflect in gratitude.

The restoration crew came in with a vengeance, the day after the window was installed. Insulation, drywall, spackle, more spackle, sanding the spackle, they were like a crew of bees busy in the hive. The painters started two days later.

All of this required me to be around. The whole time. Partly to answer questions, and partly to make sure that the animals didn’t interfere with any of the messy jobs they were doing. I stayed most of the time in my weaving studio, where I could let the dogs in and out and not disturb the workers. Which meant I got a lot of work done.

Though, I did, on the one day between drywall people and painters, help with a loom rescue. A weaver in the area, well over 100 years old, had passed, and her relatives wanted to donate what weaving supplies there were, to my local guild. In addition, there were two looms, and all of us, do what we can to rescue looms, as the house will be bulldozed within a couple weeks, including the contents. One loom, in the basement, an old Swedish style barn loom, my friend Susan has been sending around notices to area fiber people/guilds in hope that someone has room to rescue a large loom. But Susan and I drove over, with tools in hand, to rescue a 25″ Macomber, left on a porch, covered in mouse poop, hence the mask and gloves, in sad condition, but with some TLC, and a lot of elbow grease, my friend will bring it back to life. There is always good loom karma when you go to the effort to rescue a loom.

This all seems fantastical within the last 10 days, but I’m rather impressed at my ability to make good use of time.

First up, I’m taking a workshop through my guild with Natalie Drummond in Deflected Double Weave, the first week in April. Which meant I needed an empty table loom with 8 shafts. Which I didn’t have… Around 40 looms, and the one I needed wasn’t empty.

I’ve gotten real good at moving warps from one loom to another. The loom I wanted had the last remaining yard of a Rep class from last April, with Rosalie Neilson. I really didn’t want to waste it. So I spent an afternoon moving it to my floor loom.

Problem was, within the reems of documentation, I couldn’t remember exactly how to do this structure. I know it is alternating thick and thin wefts, but the myriad of designs in her handouts, all worked off Profile Treadlings, which I did easily in the class on a table loom, but couldn’t for the life of me remember how to interpret them. I spent a lot of time just sitting and staring and trying to work out what was there, right in front of me. At some point, working in my office (with the animals in tow) on my desktop computer with my weaving software, I finally figured out how to interpret the profile treadlings and create a treadling sequence I could follow. Should have taken better detailed notes…

So I will have this lovely mat, and this loom will be cleared within the week.

That left prep for the Natalie Drummond workshop. She requires a complex warp, hand painted with additional solids in varying values. Honestly, we only got the instructions just about the time I had to lock myself away with the animals, not her fault, and with only a month till the workshop, all the construction, gardening chores starting soon, (where I live it is time to start planting the lettuces, spinach, etc.) and the herculean task it will take to clean spackle sanding dust from every corner of the house, if I didn’t get the warp on now, it wouldn’t get done. Complicating things is I agreed to house Natalie, because she is a good friend.

I didn’t have time to paint a warp, and I didn’t have exactly the yarn she suggested, but I have a lot of yarn. And I’m determined to use what I have. So I pulled some old vintage Contessa, a long discontinued yarn from Silk City Fibers, mostly rayon with a silk fleck, which I have lots of, especially hand dyed. It comes in at the same 2100 yds/lb as the 5/2 Tencel she suggested. Along with the solids, I have a few variegated cones, and though she specifically said no variegated yarns, I understood why, because she wanted the colors to line up, like it was hand painted. No problem as I know how to do this, and Contessa variegated was mostly engineered to repeat itself. I grabbed my music stand, wiped off the dust, and propped my little warping board onto it, and wound a circular warp, lining up the colors as I went.

I added the solid colors, a light, a dark, and a bright, and then went to the loom and started sleying.

And threading.

And now I have another warped loom, ready to go…

Meanwhile…

I decided, while I was trapped in my studio, with the animals, to finish up the 10 yards of 8/2 cotton I tied into my fall run of towels. I ran out of the light grey weft about a yard from the end, and grabbed a small cone of dark blue, which is gorgeous, but I didn’t have enough of the dark blue to weave the whole 10-yard run, and wanted to use up some of the various cones of light colors as weft.

Washed and dried.

Since I will be scrubbing everything I own in the coming weeks, I decided that the now cleared loom needed a good dusting and wipe down with Howard’s Feed and Wax. The loom is patiently waiting for my next adventure…

That night, making dinner, this happened. The blender bowl just slipped out of my hand, taking out the lid for my beloved mini Oster food processor…

By the time dinner finished cooking and I’d cleaned up all the glass, I had gone on Amazon and ordered replacements, which were there the next morning on my doorstep. The new mini food processor, my favorite tool in my kitchen is even better than the old one.

Meanwhile, I moved to another loom, that had 5 yards of hand-dyed warp in a four-shaft combination draft, the same draft actually, as the towels. I had just started the fabric last year, so the loom could sit in a corner of my retrospective at County College of Morris, to give viewers an idea of cloth on the loom. The weft was a medium grey alpaca/silk from Webs.

So I dove in, playing around with different shuttles to get the maximum speed, and resorted to my old favorite, my AVL end-feed, the smaller one. I flew through that yardage, periodically checking on the workers and tending to the animals who were at this point really confused… But mom, there might be someone in there who will pet me, or even better, feed me…

That fabric is off the loom, washed, dried and rolled onto a tube.

And I dusted and wiped down this loom as well, with my friend Howard’s Feed and Wax.

I spent all day yesterday scrubbing everything in the book case in the den, and the moldings, which are awaiting installation tomorrow. I scrubbed the tile floor. I set up the little bistro set I ordered from Wayfair, so I could sit at the table and have my breakfast and watch the sun come up. My little bit of heaven, with a lot of elbow grease.

The cat of course, my constant companion, seems to like our new set up. He can watch out the window while patiently waiting to lick my bowl after I have my morning yogurt and granola.

So tomorrow, all the reconstruction should be finished, window trim installed, ceiling fan, and my cleaned wool rug that has been in storage since the end of December. If I can get my daughter to wake up on her day off, I’ll see if she can help me move the piano in there. The cello is already moved, and I have all my recorders to bring in as well. There is music in many corners of the house which will all be moved into the bookcase. (Once I dust them…) I will have my music room with a view… the best lemonade I could have ever imagined…

Spring is coming, stay tuned…

A deep rabbit hole…

I just love when I get so into a project I don’t come up for air. It helps to block out everything that is happening around me, and bring a sense of calm and determination to my life. There is always a huge mourning period when I reach the goal and finish the project. Until the next bus comes along…

Spring is coming. I can feel it. I just opened the sliders onto my balcony to let the dog in, and had this glorious warm sun on my face and I just stood there thinking that no matter what happens, the seasons keep moving forward and the sun eventually will shine.

Anyway, back to the rabbit hole…

When I ended my previous post, I had finished a puzzle and became obsessed with the colors, scanned a piece of the poster, ordered three more puzzles on Amazon from the same company, and started winding cakes of yarn, scouring through my shelves and bins for what I thought would work in the warp sequence. This is the original puzzle from a company called Pickforu.

I cut a 2″ strip of foam core, and divided up the scan vertically, since my warp would be a little wider than the paper I printed the scan on.

This was just too much fun… It was hard to attend to all the things on my to do list and my calendar commitments, because all I wanted to do was the next wrap.

I felt like I was playing in my sandbox when I was a little kid, just color and fun everywhere.

I then went to the computer and in my drafting software (Fiberworks in case you want to know) I chose general colors that represented the main color areas, and assigned structures to give some surface dimension. This warp would be combinations of plain weave and twill, with two additional shafts assigned to the supplemental warp ribbons that would float above and below.

Then it was time to wind. I was able to use a T-pin and mark where I was, an advantage of using foam core to support the warp wrap. And I followed the draft, to make sure I hadn’t made any mistakes in count, and yes there were a few, and I was able to correct them as I went.

I had such fun winding this twelve-yard warp, which I did in four sections.

I warp front to back, and one of the greatest advantages of doing that, with a warp like this, is that there is a constant check for errors.

So I tied the four 12-yard warp chains on the breast beam and sleyed the reed.

Apparently I didn’t grab a photo of that, but within a short period of time, all the warp ends were sleyed, additional ends were added where I found additional errors, or changed my mind about something, and soon I was threading, which goes super fast.

I use a Harrisville tensioner between the castle and the back beam, which works extremely well for me, and in no time at all, I had beamed 12 yards.

People have asked me what this will be. I had planned 5 scarves, but I change my mind all the time. Anything that is leftover will be woven, washed, and probably cut up for a tote bag or zip bags or greeting cards for the guild sale next November. Nothing ever gets wasted…

So of course, once I’m beamed, I have to tie it all on the front…

And then I have to start weaving, no matter what is calling me, because that first inch is always the best. This is all a cellulose warp, that is cottons and rayons and combinations, along with some silk yarns, about 90% hand dyed with fiber reactive dyes. The weft is 8/2 Tencel from Webs. There is a similar draft available as a download on my website.

Once I did the hem stitching at the front end, and wove about 10″, I put the original scan up against the warp and was really really happy with the exercise of referencing a photo for inspiration, or in my case, a puzzle. I feel like my month of dyeing in January paid off…

Meanwhile, yesterday, my guild sponsored a day of just gathering, free to members, whoever wanted to get together and participate in some interesting tutorial, something we use to do before Covid, called the February Freebee. This year we brought it back, and brought in Judith Symonds who teaches visible mending, which is a hot new textile technique du jour, repairing clothing that needs it, lovingly and creatively. And very visibly…

I brought in a pair of my favorite jeans, which got a huge hole across the knee, and yes, there are people who buy distressed jeans like this on purpose, but I just can’t… I stitched up the split across the knee with machine darning, so it didn’t get any worse, and in winter I don’t want my poor knee exposed to the elements, and then ordered an additional couple of pairs to replace them from Amazon. So wanting to repair beloved and well worn jeans in a creative way appealed to me. I used some engineered striped sock yarn and a patch of plaid cotton provided by the teacher, placed on the bias because the knee has to give and the denim fabric has lots of give, and started stitching.

Just gathering with friends on a random Saturday in February, talking about everything except the current world order was just what I needed. One of the women at my table had just joined the guild, coming over from my connections to the Native Plant Society. We talked a lot about plants and spring cleanup, since I’m new at all of that. Another woman at my table, a fairly new weaver instantly bonded with plant lady, and it was just lovely to watch new friendships form and old ones to be cemented. We need that so much, that sense of belonging and community.

Friday I drove to my friend’s house, and we hopped on a train, and made the trek into Manhattan, and then to the upper west side, had dinner, and then on to a small concert venue in a mansion/museum called the Nicholas Roerich Museum. A young Russian pianist Arseniy Gusev and Canadian/American violinist, Shannon Lee, are collaborating with music exploring the destruction of the stained glass in Winchester Cathedral in 1642 from Oliver Cromwell’s soldiers. Townsfolk picked up the shards of the broken windows and created something new from those fragments. The selection of works for the concert from their collaborative album, Witra? – Album by Shannon Lee & Arseniy Gusev made the connection to what’s happening in the modern world, with the invasion of and destruction of Ukraine. I have never seen such gifted musicians in my life. The most fascinating concert I’ve ever attended. And the concept, even as far back as 1642, of ordinary people coming together to rebuild something that was destroyed by war, and creating something new from the ashes, is something I need to hear every day. It is through community, friends and connections to others that we will keep moving forward.

So here are my patched jeans, it was such a fun day. And spring is coming…

Stay tuned…

A Watched Pot Never Boils…

…Though this is probably a good thing if you are mordanting yarn…

True confessions… I hate to baby-sit anything. I am bored, distracted, whatever you want to call it after about 5 seconds. Yes, I’m the most patient person in the world, but I have ADD, meaning I get distracted easily, and always have to have my hands busy…

So I finished my Fiber-Reactive dye sessions for January, my shelves are overflowing with colorful skeins that I’m itching to play with. Dyeing with MX Fiber-Reactive dyes, you set up the pot and leave it over night. Set it and forget it…

February 1st, I decided it was time to revisit and continue on my natural dye education and move onto the next step, which is mordanting the wool yarns, and wool fabric in the kit I purchased from Maiwa, to be able to follow along in the 10 module class.

I had previously attempted to mordant yarn, a step necessary before dyeing, and was using a regular electric hot plate, and of course, because I absolutely can’t stand to sit and watch a pot to keep it from boiling, I got distracted by something else in the studio, and I ended up felting the yarn.

I decided it was the fault of the hot plate, since it was electric, and I’m use to cooking with gas. I had seen instructors use induction burners, and I thought, that would be perfect. So I ordered one. I found out pretty quickly that it wouldn’t work for my purposes because it had two settings, 140 degrees, which is about my hot water from the tap, and 212 degrees, which is boiling. Nothing in between. You can’t hold anything at a simmer.

So I ordered another one. This one, a Duxtop, I did a bit more research, and reading the manual online, it had, starting at 140 degrees F, increments of 20 degrees up to 460 degrees F. I bought it last fall, and finally took it out of the box.

I thought, this will be great, set it and forget it. Yeah… no… I take my wetted, scoured wool yarn, and gently place it in the pot with the correct percentage WOF of Potassium Aluminum Sulfate, and set the temp to 180 degrees. I walk away. I didn’t feel like much was happening, so I put in my dye studio thermometer, and no matter how long I waited, the temperature never got above 140 degrees. Great, I’m figuring it is defective. I go back and reread the directions and there, in the fine print, it says, “…different cookware yields different temperatures, the temperature readout is only an estimate of the actual cooking temperature. It is accurate enough for daily cooking requirements. (No it is not…) The temperature in your pan may be different than the setting you have selected. Please test a few times to find the proper temperature setting for your particular cooking task and cookware…”

Sigh…

So pinned up to my wall is a note, that after some testing and constant pot watching, I’ve determined that to get the temp up to 190 degrees, I need to set the induction burner temp to 280 degrees, and once it reaches 190 degrees, drop the temp to 260 degrees where it will hold at 190 degrees for the hour I need to mordant the fiber.

Of course I’m bored and distracted the whole time, and my studio is one giant distraction. I get into trouble when I can’t focus on a task. I look up at the ceiling and what to I see? A pile of 6-8 ft. lengths of climbing rose runners we trimmed from the rose arbor back in 2021.

I know it was 2021, because I found a photo I took after we cut them. My daughter I remember, spent an entire Saturday breaking off all the thorns.

My intent at the time, was to use them for basketry; some of them were 3/8″ thick. Last summer, when I took a freeform basket class at Peters Valley, I took one of the lengths, and soaked it overnight in my pond, the only water body big enough, and brought it to class. The teacher began to play with it and we realized that these runners when dry are hollow, so they just bent in half, instead of curving into something I could use for a handle or a rim.

So I’m babysitting a pot, and staring at these runners in the ceiling, and I go off on a super unrelated tangent. I need to use them, or get rid of them. I’m sick of dusting plant materials in the ceiling.

I ended up cutting the rose runners into 24″ lengths. This idea popped into my head, influenced by a willow tray I made in a different class at Peters Valley last summer, that I could line up all the 24″ lengths and make a garden fence of sorts. I thought about weaving them, but I wanted space between the elements, and though I could use a leno technique, I just didn’t see how it was realistic to weave these into what I wanted.

So my next thought was some kind of knotting. Long story short, spending lots of time watching pots and thinking of all the possibilities, I ended up using a skein I had of Euroflax wet-spun linen, and suspending the first 24″ length from the frame over the door of my shower stall. From there, I added the lengths of linen, and did a couple square knots between each additional rose length. I found a bunch of knitting yarn bobs, and used them to support the long length of linen I cut. I soaked the rose runners in a large plastic basin on the floor of my shower as I worked.

It took a couple of days, but I’m really happy with my little fence.

When we converted the garage into the studio, I had a split ductless Heat and AC unit put into the block on the north side. It attaches to a compressor at the base of the foundation on the outside. It blows a continuous warm dry air, which has killed most of the plants in that particular area.

My landscape designer found an American Holly and told me that it would be happy in that location, and so last fall she planted it. I worry that the steady stream of dry air would affect the holly, it looked a little dry on the leaf tips that faced the compressor unit. And so, even though overnight, we got about 5 inches of snow with a quarter inch glaze of ice on top, I worked my way out to the side of the house, and placed my little fence behind the holly, which was looking a bit glazed from the ice.

I’m so very very proud of my little fence. I wish I had a willow patch. But I’ll settle for cutting more of the rose runners as they reach for the sky this coming year.

Meanwhile… I eat my meals at the puzzle table, otherwise I’ll mindlessly doom scroll on my phone. My mom loaned me a puzzle someone gave her, a brand I’d never heard of, Pickforu, which featured cats in stained glass. This was one of the most fun puzzles I’ve ever done, the colors are magnificent. (I’ve since ordered three more from Amazon…)

I grabbed a bunch of pictures of the poster, and thought about what I could do with those colors, and all that newly dyed yarn just hanging off the shelves in my overflowing studio.

I went around and pulled everything I thought could work in a color layout for a scarf run. I could use more scarves in my collection of things to sell at the guild sale, give as gifts, give as donations, etc. I figure I’ll put on a 12 yard warp. Maybe get 5 scarves?

The yarns that were skeined for dyeing had to be wound into cakes of course, which required hours of baby sitting the electric cake winder. I have one from Boye, it really is not a good product, but it is what I have and there aren’t a lot of reasonably priced alternatives out there. So I babysat for hours today, transferring the skeins to the electric cake winder.

And while I sat and monitored the action of winder, I knitted. I’m working on the second sock, which I started after my trip to Japan, 2023?

By the end of the day, or quitting time which is when I get attacked by all the animals for dinner, I had started the heel flap for the second sock.

I only have a couple more skeins to transfer to cakes, and I can start doing a yarn wrap. Really looking forward to this next adventure. And yeah, I still have to monitor the pots and mordant the silk and the cellulose fabrics. At least those won’t felt…

Stay tuned…

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered…

Last Sunday, I picked up my son, newly back from a deployment in Syria, and off we drove to Maryland for the day. It is about a 3 1/2-hour trip, and I was thrilled to have the company. He is such an interesting person to converse with, his knowledge of history, what led to what, and where we are now, is fascinating. Great conversation, perspective, and knowledge.

We got to my mom’s to deliver the quilt, and deliver it we did. First, she inspected the label I had made and attached to the back.

Then the unveiling… Of course she cried. I cried.

My son helped me hang it…

I got a great picture of my mom and my son. Mom will be 94 in May, each day is a gift.

She was so appreciative, but I think I was more appreciative for the gift of a project that kept me going, marking time through a difficult year. We talked this morning and she tells me that it is the first thing she sees when she wakes up, and she stares at it all day finding something new she hadn’t seen before.

Meanwhile, there was that flood thing… No progress on the restoration because…

I got this great idea… I have these spectacular perennial native plant gardens, newly planted last spring, and I can’t see them well from any area in my house. Long story… I woke up in the middle of the night last week to a voice in my head yelling at me to just change the window…

So this is the den currently. I am getting rid of the TV and credenza, and will move the piano in there, the cello, my recorders, and turn it into a music room. And I want to be able to look outside and see my gardens.

I have contracted Pella to replace the east wall pair of double hungs with a window wall with two casements. But the window won’t be ready for installation for 8 weeks. Sigh…

I moved my bar table and stool in there to have my breakfast and look out the current window.

Of course I’m trying to eat my breakfast and enjoy the view, and Mulder decides that he wants to see too. So much for my view…

It will all be lovely, and just in time for spring. Right now there is about 6 inches of snow on the ground, so I’m looking forward to seeing what that looks like tomorrow morning.

This is January. This is my month for dyeing. Once I got my rhythm, I can wind about 14-15 ounces of mixed cellulose skeins, scour them, move them into an overnight soda ash soak, rinse the dyed skeins from the previous day and hang to dry, and move the skeins from the soda ash from the previous day into a new dyebath, all in less than two hours. It is my morning routine. I’ve probably done 8-10 dyebaths. MX Fiber Reactive dyes from ProChemical. They had new colors for 2025, what could I do but try them…

This one is called Swamp…

And of course, I finished the twill sampler I had moved to my floor loom, and grabbed the next Structo. This one is a four-shaft overshot sampler, from Robyn Spady.

I pulled the warp forward, and transferred it onto my small floor loom.

I love this. I adore pattern samplers, I can sit down and in about a half hour, run through the draft, all five design areas, switch my tie-up from Rose fashion to Star fashion, and do it all again. This one should be on the loom for awhile, as I think there was about 6 yards of 20/2 cotton on those Structo spools…

As we head into the great unknown politically, and as so many have lost their homes to natural disasters, the world is looking a bit bleak right now. I try to stay focused on what is in my control, mourning the loss of giants in the textile world, Claire Shaeffer, and Jannie Taylor, and closer to home, the moms of two of my close friends, and one of my own, one of my oldest friends, we raised our kids together. She is gone, at peace I hope, and life will be a little dimmer without all of them. All I can do is put one foot in front of the other, wake up each morning and find gratitude in the day ahead. Yes, I’ll have to do a lot of shoveling tomorrow morning, but snow is pretty and healing, and I have northern dogs who think this is just the best! I want to be like them, roll around in the snow with abandon, and eat large gulps of fresh clean snow. Rest easy Judy, I will miss you terribly…

And in the end, she kept calm and carried a lot of yarn…

When I wrote my last blog post two weeks ago, my world was full again, my son was home from a deployment in Syria, and all was well with the world. The next day, the Monday before Christmas, my daughter and I went to the theatre to see a lovely production of White Christmas at the Papermill Playhouse. It was a great show, and we drove home, completely unaware of what was happening in our house. A heating pipe burst (actually turns out in four places), in the back of my daughter’s second floor bedroom, and while we were gone, it flooded the back half of her room, and was raining through the ceiling fan of the floor below. We did our best to figure out how to shut off the water, call the police (who were kind and supportive but not very helpful), call the plumber hotline at 11pm the night before Christmas Eve, drag out rugs and debris that were most critical, file an online insurance claim, and realizing we had no water until the plumber could get there in the morning, went out to an all night QuickChek (which my daughter apparently knows well since she works the night shift), and a stop at a Taco Bell, because it was 2am. I don’t ask, she was driving…

Christmas Eve was a parade of contractors, insurance reps, a restoration company, the plumber, all while I had promised a friend to drive her to the airport in what turned out to be a blinding snowstorm. You can’t make this stuff up. In it all, I stayed remarkably calm, because the alternative wasn’t very productive.

Christmas night, my wonderful son came over, helped me move anything that was not nailed down from the affected rooms, and we got take out Chinese. Not my best Christmas ever, but certainly a memorable one, and my son, who has been through hell and back, was the most amazing level headed, flexible, calm and decent human being, and I couldn’t be more proud of him.

8am the day after Christmas a crew showed up. And the mitigation work began. By noon my den looked like this.

They moved the sofa, and put in my living room, where I already had two sofas. They put the credenza with the TV in front of the piano, in my dining room. They tried to work around a floor to ceiling bookcase, and a 1950’s phone booth. Don’t ask…

In the upstairs, my daughter worked all through Christmas night, since she works nights, and this was her night off, and moved everything from her room into a guest room. To save all of her stuff, I lost count after 18 loads of laundry. Time was of the essence, and since she works the night shift, filling in for a Christmas Eve overnight into Christmas morning, I jumped in to help. (My daughter is a critical care Vet Tech in an 24/7 vet hospital).

By the afternoon her room was filled with drying equipment.

And same with the den, the noise was deafening. The only place I could escape the noise was my studio. There is a metaphor there I’m sure…

And so, for the next four days, I listened to the loud sound of machinery drying out my home, meanwhile, I hid in the only places unaffected, my weaving studio, my sewing studio, and my bedroom/office. This was not a bad thing.

I had planned to go to my mom’s after Christmas to show her the progress on The Quilt. Of course I had to cancel those plans because of the mitigation work, and since I was basically confined to the studio, I started winding skeins for dyeing. And I kept working on the twill sampler…

And then there were knots over the back. Yippee!

And I finished something like four towels worth on the new towel yardage…

And I kept working on the quilt. New Year’s Eve, I went to a concert, part of Morris County’s First Night, the cello player was my teacher. I went with one of my music friends and we went out for sushi afterwards. I was home by 9pm. I spent the rest of New Year’s Eve working on the quilt. I finished all the appliqué work 30 minutes after midnight.

That spurred me on to get the borders on the quilt, which spurred me on to go out to a quilt store for backing fabric, batting and advice. I was out anyway picking up my work from the Shakespeare Theatre pop up shop, where it looks like they sold $700 worth of my work. They get to keep all the money. We do what we can to support the arts.

Anyway, I got lots of advice, about how to quilt, whether to cut the edge binding on the straight of grain, as suggested in the directions, or whether to cut it on the bias, which, why wouldn’t you do that? In the end, I did what I wanted, because why would I do anything else?

I came home, inventoried my work while I washed the backing fabric, and then set to work trying to figure out how I was going to quilt it. I decided that I’m not skilled enough to do free motion embroidery, and I didn’t want to see machine stitching anyway, to compete with all the hand appliqué. So I stitched in the ditch wherever background fabrics were pieced. It was enough quilting for a wall hanging, and by Friday night, last night actually, the quilting was done.

Today I attended a winter sow lecture at the library in the next town, and came home with a tray of pots filled with soil and seeds from a number of different perennials. They will get cold hardened outdoors, under chicken wire (which they provided as well), and be ready for the spring.

Then I went down to the sewing studio, and put on the binding. On the bias. Because I know better.

So the quilt is finished except for a rod pocket, I can’t believe it. My weaving friend Tommye Scanlin, wrote a lovely book called Marking Time with Fabric and Thread, just out in October. Tommye is an incredible tapestry artist, and the book is about marking time, fiber artists who use their medium to mark days, weeks, months, years. Journaling of sorts. It is a beautiful book, full of inspiration. And this quilt was like that. I spent the last 15 months or so working on it, through a challenging year, it was so centering and so calming, and one of the most important things I’ve done in recent years. All for my mom, who wanted to make this but her eyes and hands at 93, just can’t. So mom, this one is all for you. Thank you for the gift this quilt was in helping me mark time.

So the carrying yarn thing in the title? 1/4 of my daughter’s floor to ceiling 12 feet of wall closets, is full of yarn. She had some pretty great stuff in there. (Which I’m stealing, she doesn’t read my blog!) I started carrying all the yarn down to the weaving studio to figure out where to put it. The knitting machines are now down in the weaving studio. This is going to take a long time to sort out, but ultimately, we lost nothing. Everything was cleanable, and salvageable, including the wool rugs, and I’m thinking of rehoming the TV and credenza because I don’t ever watch TV, and turning the den into a music room, with the piano, the cello, and all my recorders, music stands, and music. I’m part of the music world now and getting together at peoples homes to just play is a real joy. I want to have that space too. I even brought my cello, beginner that I am, to a rehearsal of Christmas music with some of the newer recorder players, the Monday right before the flood, and held my own playing the bass line, which I knew well on the recorder, but now I could play it on the cello.

So my world going into 2025, after 16 years of blogging, is a little turned upside down, but I have friends, I have places to gather with friends, I have plants patiently doing their winter thing, I have music, I have yarn, I have some fresh MX dyes on their way from Prochem, and I have projects waiting to help me mark time. And I have a quilt ready to take and give to my mom. All is well with the world, at least in my little corner. Eventually reconstruction will begin, but for now the house is quiet again. Happy New Year to all of my readers who have stuck with me over the last 16 years, I hope you find lots of new adventures, things to learn, and new friends in the new year.

Stay tuned…