A wild and crazy night, with alcohol…

Yesterday was one of those “jello” days.  (The kind where no matter hard you try, you feel like you are moving through Jello… It started out with great promise, I got to sleep in since my daughter had delayed openings at the High School for three days, something to do with the lower grades having standardized testing and the seniors being herded into the auditorium for the requisite lectures on drugs, drinking and driving, and date rape…  Prom season is upon us…

Anyway, my list seemed do-able, plus I had a lunch date with girlfriends, at the sushi place.  Always a treat.  I did accomplish a little off my list in the morning,  but not nearly as much as I had hoped, and suddenly it was noon.  So I dropped what I was doing and raced into town for sushi.

So far so good.

Still on my list in the afternoon was 1) Cleaning the rest of the kitchen, 2) working on the Jacket, 3) weaving a scarf, 4) playing around with images to start another small art piece on the Structo.

I managed to come up with a couple of ideas for the art piece, I went into the kitchen planning to scrub the floor, and turned around and went back to the studio.  A message appeared in my inbox on the computer, from one of the guild members inquiring about topics for the business meeting at tonight’s guild meeting.  Crap.  The guild meeting was that evening, and duh, I’m the program…  Held over from the cancelled meeting from last month, I was giving my new guild lecture on Warping the Loom from Front to Back.  There goes my to-do list.

OK, so I had about another hour before I had to leave for the meeting. So I looked at the to-do list, and thought to myself, I can knock out a scarf in an hour, no problem.  It was already started anyway, so this should be a piece of cake.

So I started to weave.

It wasn’t going well.

This is hard to explain.

Sidebar: I put these scarf warps on using the AVL warping mill (if you are not a weaver, this will more than likely make no sense, just know I had a mess, and skip to the next paragraph).  It works great, I love the tool, except there is the assumption that the sections of warp you are winding are more than likely all the same type/size of yarn.  In the case of my scarves, they are not.  I have five clearly different sections, with totally different yarns, plus supplemental ribbons, and the warp beam is very small, 1/3 yard per turn, and I’m putting 15 yards on the loom.  I’ve had problems with the sections building unevenly, the more yarn on the loom, the larger the circumference of the beam, and the more chance the sections won’t be exact.  I’ve managed to make it work more or less up until now, but this time, it was pretty clear, no matter how I viewed the situation, this wasn’t working.  The entire left side of the warp build up incrementally so the warp really sloped upward on the beam to a point where I had tight on the right side and soup on the left.

In a fit of total disgust, I removed 20 inches of weaving, hurled it on the floor, and started to unwind the entire 15 yard warp.  In a pool onto the front of the loom.  I had to stop and go to the guild meeting.  It haunted me all night.  And of course I was lecturing on Warping from Front to Back.  Obviously I didn’t do that on this warp, since I used a sectional method.

I came back from the meeting and stared at the loom.  It was 11:00pm at night.

There was nothing else to be done.

So I grabbed the warp, and continued to pull it all forward, into a large pile of yarn on the floor.  It was hellious to pull forward (that’s probably not a word, but in this case it is accurate).  Many of the yarns are fine and doubled.  They were switched around on purpose when I threaded.  They didn’t come off the loom without a fight…

I ended up with this. My daughter walked into the studio on the way to bed, and took one look and said, “Good luck with that one…”, and immediately exited the studio…

To re-beam the warp, I needed to create tension, just like I illustrate in my booklet Warping Front to Back.  This warp is mostly slippery rayon.  I needed a lot of tensioning sticks (they are really least sticks in disguise).  I went into my stick barrel, which is tucked into the corner behind my laser printer, which I had to move out of the way to get to, and rooted around for my two sets of lease sticks (total of four).  I found three.  Crap.  The barrel was so overstuffed with wrapping paper, brown kraft paper, and all sorts of stuff that just somehow ended up in there. I hurled everything that shouldn’t have been in the barrel across the studio floor.  I was on a roll…

This is what the barrel looked like after I hurled all the overstuffed debris from it across the studio floor.

I found my four lease sticks and set to work, carefully stepping over the carnage…

Once in place, I began to beam.

It was about 1 in the morning.

There was no way I was going to get through this task without some assistance, and no way I was leaving it to morning…  I went for the assistance…

The warp stretched out the door of the studio, down the stairs, all the way to my bedroom.

At 3:30am I went to bed.  I figured I’d work until I finished beaming, or I was too drunk to beam, and then I’d deal with the carnage either way in the morning.  This is what I woke up to.

🙂