Determination…

We’ve done moved her in…

Tuesday my husband and I drove Brianna back to college.  Actually, I drove with Brianna, and Kevin followed in a different car.  It was great to have the last couple of hours with Bri, as we headed up the interstates to Massachusetts where she will be living for another year.

Sigh…

The dog decided to use a last ditch effort to try to get her to stay.  He draped himself across her and wouldn’t let her go…  I sort of felt like that but the dog could actually get away with it…

The brochures and websites designed to help students pack and move to college and dorm living talk about what you should and shouldn’t bring.  And they say ultimately that if you have more stuff than can fit in a car, then you are bringing too much stuff.  With two looms in tow and a few bags of yarn and weaving equipment, my daughter managed to fill a car and a half.  And we are talking a Honda 7 passenger wagon and a RAV4.  I couldn’t very well say anything to her since I remember going off to college with a sewing machine and a full size ironing board wedged against my head for the entire two hour trip.

That’s my girl.

We arrived at UMass Amherst and unloaded Bri, actually Bri and Kevin did the hauling, I just hung out and guarded everything, making sure it was all stored in an organized fashion on the roommates side of the room.  Her roommate doesn’t move in until Sunday. 🙂

Once we were unpacked and the cars moved, Bri got the kit that allows you to loft the bed, and created a little sitting area underneath, and managed to somehow fit a car and a half ‘s worth of crap into her little half of the dorm room. I got to climb up and make the bed.  And the first thing she hung was her wall hanging from the warp painting class she took with me in June at the Frances Irwin Weaving Guild with Sarah Saulson.  Bri painted Belted Galloway cows, which are her favorite, and are the breed of beef cattle that UMass raises at their farm.  (For those new to the blog, Bri is an animal science/pre-vet major)

She will be fine…

We went out to dinner one last time to celebrate a job well done…

Meanwhile, I was going under the assumption that Bri was leaving for school Tuesday, my husband and I would return on Wednesday and he would leave Thursday to return to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for another month.  Wednesday morning we got a call in the hotel room that said they were postponing his trip for another week.  So the good news is I get to keep my husband around for another week, and the bad news is I thought I was going to be alone for the next couple weeks and I could work around the clock reworking my presentation on Advanced Inkle Weaving for the Complex Weavers Conference in DC Sept 13-15.

My husband is making use of the time finishing up the reconstruction of the former pool area, and making it another glorious vacation destination in our own back yard. 🙂  The weather has been glorious and I’ve tried to be outside as much as possible.  The photo below shows after/before when we removed the pool.

But…

I have a conference to prepare for, and the thing is, I would have been ready except that Ann Dixon wrote a fantastic book called The Weaver’s Inkle Pattern Directory, and though I addressed it in my previous blog post, my daughter is the one who plowed through it trying out all the new weave structures possible on the Inkle Loom.

I needed to learn them myself especially since I am giving a presentation on Advanced Techniques.  Duh…

One thing that Ann Dixon doesn’t address in her book is supplemental weft, and I added a tutorial on that topic to my presentation, which had been on my list to do anyway.

I added a section on working with Monk’s Belt, which is really just pattern floats on plain weave, pretty cool on a two shaft inkle loom…

(Note to all those who read this blog and are not handweavers, I’m sorry, this will make no sense at all…)

Anyway, here’s the conundrum…

Laverne Waddington wrote a monograph a couple years back called Andean Pebble Weave.  She uses a back strap loom to do this two shaft structure.  It is a great little booklet, and it has been on my list to figure out how to do this technique on my inkle loom.  It should work.

Course I never got around to it.

Ann Dixon published her book and surprise surprise!  There is a chapter on South American Pebble Weave.  Bri figured it out right away.  Except the more I stared at what she did, and Ann’s directions, and the more I looked at Laverne’s booklet, the more I was not convinced they were the same thing.

I played around with South American Pebble Weave…

And then I read the first line of a little chapter Ann added called Paired pebbles.  This she describes, is “a less well-known technique than the usual South American pebble weave, pairs of pebbles (as the name suggests) are always worked together, with the same pairing throughout…”   Huh…

So what else could I do?  I set up yet another loom and figured it out, and yes, Ann Dixon’s South American Pebble Weave is quite different than Laverne Waddington’s Andean Pebble, they are threaded the same way, but Ann’s works off alternating pattern threads, and Laverne’s works off alternating pairs.  My head hurts.

But I have this beautiful little band started, it is slower than bobbin lace, and a little tedious, but I’m happy I tried it out.  I’m using thread I picked up at the American Sewing Guild conference, WonderFil’s Spagetti, a 12 wt. Egyptian Cotton.  It is a glorious thread in luscious colors, I bought four of them, and the pattern area is a lovely DMC size 8 perle.  I had to make all new heddles since the ones on the loom were of 8/4 cotton carpet warp, and way too heavy for these fine threads.  I ended up making the heddles from size 60/2 linen lace making thread.  It is pretty sturdy and should do the job.

I’ve been wanting to figure this out for a couple of years now, and I’m glad I had the day to really spend focusing on the difference between the two, and eventually I’d like to add this to my inkle presentations on advanced techniques, but it is pretty complicated and I haven’t figured out yet how to simplify and  interpret it in a PowerPoint tutorial.

My head still hurts…