Random Day of Oddities…

First I should follow up on my last post.  I gleefully took my trusty 15 year old Kenmore (that was made by Janome) sewing machine in for a servicing, after such success with my old Baby Lock Serger.  Alas I got the call from the repair shop, that said my trusty old workshop machine wasn’t worth fixing.  Somehow the whole zig zag mechanism was shot, and the machine parts would cost more than what it would to replace it.  Sigh…

I stewed for a day, and then went to look to see what it would actually cost to replace my old trusty machine, and behold…

$199.00 with free shipping from Amazon…  It is pretty much the same machine as far as I can tell from the descriptions and photos, so it will fit all my walking feet, and other assorted parts for a short shank machine.

So that’s on its way…  Meanwhile, I took my Janome 66oo Professional machine in, I had trouble even leaving it there, I adore that machine and somehow not having it in my studio made me feel like I was missing an arm.  The repair guy called back in an hour and said the timing on the machine was perfect and there was nothing for him to service.  Sigh…

So back I went, and picked up my sewing companion, and with all my electronic children back home, and my dress and fabric basically finished waiting for the photo shoot, I decided to do the only thing I could do under the circumstances, and completely houseclean the studio.  I sort of go through this when I complete a major project, I clean up the table, and put things away, and dust and vacuum and generally make everything tidy.  (As tidy as is possible considering how my stuff is crammed in this little 350 square foot space).   I went through all the paperwork, paid all the bills, sent off my application for Small Expressions, got the books in order for the tax man, and cooked a lovely dinner with my son.

I have a new standby sewing machine on it’s way, and my husband is coming home in another 48 hours.  Which is a good thing, since I just had a complete system wide USB/card reader port failure.  12 ports and all of them not working.  I was able to dump the images onto my laptop from the card reader, then reload them onto a USB drive, which still failed to work until I rebooted the whole system.

See, this is why I’m a weaver.  There is never any issue with a loom, because it doesn’t plug in.  It is a simple device, powered by my own hands and feet, and my imagination.  There are no webcams to cause blue screen of death, there are no USB issues.  There are no timing issues like on a sewing machine, no power outages, no internet down time, nothing that can get in my way of total control.  I suppose I just hit the nail on the proverbial head…  I’m a weaver because I can be in total control.  When something isn’t going well, it is more than likely my fault, because I didn’t handle a yarn correctly or failed to select the right yarn for a project or miscalculated sett, or something I can either fix or learn from.

Random electronic failures are out of my control and seriously frustrate me and make me want to rip everything out of the wall and go back to working with a pencil and paper…  And a needle and thread….

And so dear readers, I give you some photos of my cleaned up studio, this is as good as it gets considering I have four floor looms and six table looms plus a myriad of inkle and frame looms, and the other eight or so table looms are scattered in other areas of the house, garage and attic…  My spinning wheels and spinning stash are also located elsewhere.

And now I’m going to shut everything down.  Close the door, and climb into bed with an old fashion book, not my Kindle (which I do love) but a real honest to goodness book with no bells and whistles or ability to plug in…