daryl – Daryl's Blog

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…

My world is whole again…

I will admit that I struggle with this whole season. And it is sad and heartwarming at the same time, the amount of people who seem to feel the same way. Expectations, family dynamics, travel, too much food, or not enough, all of it can consume you and leave you empty and depressed.

The woman behind me in line at the post office asked me in a friendly conversation starting way, if I was all ready for Christmas. I didn’t know her, a stranger, but she was eager to be friendly and just picked a way of striking up a conversation. I don’t think she was completely prepared for my answer, which was basically, “no”. I explained to her that I really had no plans for the holidays, as I had a son who was deployed, and hoped he would come home in time, but even if he didn’t, December 25th wasn’t some magical date where everything would come together. I had no plans, because there was no one to plan with.

The end of the year holiday season has always annoyed me from a business standpoint, it is largely just inconvenient, things are closed, places are overwhelmingly busy, schedules like deliveries are off, and I’m completely sick of emails begging for money, telling me how wonderful their products are for gift giving, “last chance on our special offer”, etc. I think January is really my favorite month because it is just normal. No holiday anything. Just 31 days of silence.

I don’t want to be a scrooge, yet this time of year really is, for me, magical, but not in the way that everyone seems to celebrate. My expectations are that it is cold, the gardens are asleep, the Winter Solstice is reassuring in that the light will come again, and that this is the season of generosity, of music, of gatherings with friends and strangers, and this is the season of one of the reasons for weaving. Towels. Lots and lots of towels. Even though my family is begging me to stop giving them towels, because their drawers are full, there are lots of others who have never gotten a towel, and are absolutely delighted with such a useful pretty gift.

So I finished up the 9 towels on the warp, I’ve already given out a few, and decided that they were so much fun to weave, I should just tie on another warp.

I looked at my vast stash of 8/2 cotton and randomly picked an icy warp.

I wound another 10 yards…

Tied it into the existing warp,

Beamed it onto the warp beam,

And started to weave. I’m sure the warp would be even prettier with a dark weft, but I have a couple of cones of an icy gray, and decided that rather than buy more cotton to have a dark weft, I’d just use what I have. Head start on next year, or hostess gifts when I need them.

I finished up the Deflected Double Weave Warp I had transferred to my floor loom from one of my Structos. I grabbed another one of the Structos and started offloading that warp onto my small floor loom.

This one was set up in a four-shaft twill sampler, or gamp, and once it was on the floor loom, weaving it off was a breeze. There was only three yards of warp on this, so I’m just weaving it as a scarf, but it may turn into zip bags, or I don’t know, I don’t have to monetize everything…

My guild’s final meeting of the year is usually some simple project, a make it take it kind of thing, and this year’s project was actually a bit magical. We created little weavings in the round, around a ring covered in cotton.

I took what was leftover from the guild sale, what didn’t sell of mine, and gave it to the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ for their small gift shop in the lobby of the Kirby Theatre at Drew University in Madison. I did this last year, and they ended up selling $500 worth of my items, and of course they get to keep all the money; my gift to them and the fantastic productions they do. There was a table of handmade items, some were mine, and some were by the ShakesPurls, a knitting group that supports the Theatre.

They had a large tree in the lobby filled with my ornaments.

They had a greeting card rack, and as I spun it around, I found all of my cards.

This is the season of music. And I’m really enjoying all the opportunities to play, dress up, rehearse, and I’m really really loving playing the cello. I practice at least an hour a day. We had both our holiday concerts with Montclair Early Music, many of you asked to see my costume, made up largely from just stuff in my closet I altered for effect.

I was hanging in the sewing studio, and started pulling out my more opulent fabrics that might work up into more costumes for the coming year. The public seems to love when we all come out in our medieval garb.

I have one more performance, this one tomorrow, in a local memory care facility. It is a great privilege to be able to take the gift of music to strangers, and maybe Christmas Carols might spark a bit of memory in those who have lost that ability. I love the music of the season, in all of its forms, though I will be glad to put away the holiday music and pull out new things to learn. We played Carol of the Bells at our winter concert a couple of weeks ago, which is Ukrainian, and after the concert, a couple of newly relocated Ukrainian families came up to the music director, with tears in their eyes, saying how much it meant to them to hear a bit of their homeland in this miserable war. Music has that power.

This time of year is for tying up loose ends, I love finishing up projects, and moving onto new challenges, and the greatest challenge I have ever taken on, was making this appliquéd cat quilt for my mom, from a Maggie Walker kit she bought in the 90’s. This was a really tough year for me, for many many reasons, and this quilt marked time, each month gone as I finished another block.

All of the last 100 pieces of the trumpet vine that runs through the central part of the quilt have been cut out, and today have been pressed under and ready to stitch on. I store them 10 at a time in sushi trays, stacked in order.

This is where the quilt is at this point, I’m seeing the end of an incredible project. I will miss it.

And the most important thing I want to share with all of you, is that he is home. My sister and her husband came with me yesterday to the National Guard Armory just outside of Princeton, and my son, who has spent the better part of this past year in Syria, is finally home. My heart is whole again. It will be a long road of reintegration for all of the returning troops, all he wanted last night was to go home to his apartment, with his beloved jeep that I kept repaired and running for him, and sit on his own couch with real pizza and a beer (no alcohol in Syria or any Islamic country). We brought him back to my house, where he grabbed his keys, hugged me goodbye, and took off to begin to pick up his life where he left off.

I’ll go and visit my mom who is 93, next weekend, and show her how far I’ve come on her quilt. That I still have my mom, and that she is still that amazing woman who raised me, is the biggest blessing of all.

Enjoy the magic of the season, the return to the light, the sleeping gardens, the opportunity to give gifts of music, things made from the hands, and just plain old friendship. Enjoy the music of the season, whether you play an instrument or not. And if you don’t, why not? I’m playing the piano again, glad I still kept the one I bought 40 years ago. And I play recorders, and now the cello. And there are always people to play with. You don’t have to be very good.

And I’m enjoying planning out my next year, what new adventures will I take on, what will my garden look like when everything wakes up? The night of the solstice it snowed about 4 inches. Everything is clean and white, and fresh.

Stay tuned…

And so starts the holiday season…

…with a vengeance! Thanksgiving is late this year, so hasn’t happened as of this writing. But the last few weeks have been horrifically busy, because, ’tis the season.

It is the season for our annual guild show and sale. I worked furiously making stuff from leftover scraps, for the sale, like ornaments…

Like zip bags…

And I loaded up the car, helped set up the sale, spent an exhausting three days working the floor, and selling my little heart out. I sold quite a bit of work, which made me happy.

Most of the unsold work was just delivered to the Shakespeare Theatre of NJ, for them to add to their little gift shoppe in the lobby of the Kirby Theatre for the final show of the year. ‘Tis the season!

The final show is A Christmas Carol, and because I volunteer as a stitcher in the costume shop, it has been all hands on deck. I always thought my least favorite show to help with costume alterations was Macbeth. Lots of black, lots of leather, and garments that weight 75 pounds. The current production is just as challenging. Many of the garments for this show have to be rigged for quick release, for costume changes that have to occur in about 15 seconds. There are only 8 actors in this version of A Christmas Carol. That means fitted corseted jackets have to be attached to full skirts, and full petticoat attached to that. With a lapped separating zipper down the back, where some of the layers were 1/2″ thick. We have industrial machines there at the costume shop, but nothing would go through this except the costume shop’s manager’s personal $199 11 year old Singer from Walmart. Try putting in a lapped zipper after the fact in a garment that weights as much as I do… Go figure… The things I am learning… I’ll go in one more day on Tuesday, they pack out on Wednesday and go into tech this weekend. Show opens December 4th. ‘Tis the season!

This is the season of harvesting, and I had a friend collect a huge bucket of black walnut hulls. I don’t have a garage to put them in, since that is now the weaving studio, and with the animals always getting into something, I don’t dare just put them in my studio. So I left them in front of the garage bay under the overhang, to protect them, and the squirrels had an absolute field day. There were crushed walnut hulls all over the driveway. Somebody was happy! I covered the bucket and now they are all moldy. Sigh… Maybe next year my life won’t be so crazy and I can soak them immediately and use them as a dye promptly.

It has been a beautiful fall season, especially in my yard with all the wonderful native plants and the colors that they are turning, much subtler than all the invasives on my property, but beautiful in their own way. However, this is NJ. And though it flooded four times in the last year, we have been under extreme drought conditions for the last couple of months. No rain. None. Which means no fire pits, no fireworks, nothing that could spark dry leaves and create a conflagration. Nevertheless, thousands of acres have burned over the last couple weeks, which is pretty scary in this small and overcrowded state. I became obsessed with watching the weather apps on my phone, hourly, praying for some kind of precipitation, watering where I thought I had no other option, but understanding that our reservoirs were half empty, and conservation was important. So it was with extreme joy that over the last few days, we received slow and steady precipitation, that amounted to nearly 4″ of rain. Everything looks wet and healthy.

I grabbed a photo of some of the color outside my studio window.

And with the all the rain, I was inspired to wind a warp for dishtowels, because, IT IS THE END OF NOVEMBER AND I DON’T HAVE MY HOLIDAY GIFT DISHTOWELS ON THE LOOM! I grabbed the draft from last year’s 4-shaft combination structure towels, based on this design from my eShop. I just edited the colors in my weaving software, and started winding.

I put 10 yards of 8/2 cotton. I have a lot of cotton. Within two days I was weaving… I’m calling this run Autumn Rain.

With a lot of help from Mulder. NOT!

I’m about three yards in so far. I try to do about a yard at a sitting. ‘Tis the season for dishtowels!

And for anyone who plays music, this really is the season. I played recorders at a Viking festival last weekend, and our annual holiday concert is this Sunday in Montclair. I play bass recorder, with Montclair Early Music, and we have had a number of opportunities to share our music with the public. Which means lots of practice and lots of rehearsals. And a couple of us are planning to take a quartet to a memory care facility in my county to play Christmas music. More rehearsals and practicing. ‘Tis the season!

And of course, thrown in there was the election. I don’t ever talk about politics in my blog, or my Facebook page. Most of you who know me know where I stand politically. And in the arts, most of us lean in the same direction, since we are such a diverse community. That said, I pray for some stability and kindness, and willingness to have frank discussions, and embracing those who think differently than I do. I’ve reached out to talk with those who voted differently than I did. And there is always more than one perspective, for any situation. I miss my late husband terribly, because he was the absolute best at seeing all sides of a situation and acting accordingly. And though election season is over for now, the 2025 gubernatorial primary season for NJ has already started, and there are about a dozen good candidates up for the position of NJ Governor. I’ve tried to limit my news exposure at this point. Because even though, ’tis the season, I don’t have the stomach for it right now.

And I wait. By the phone. For my son’s return from his deployment in Syria. I know the process has started for his return, but the military never gives details about troop movement, so I have no information, except that I’ll eventually get a text from him telling me he is on US soil. Soon…

And so dear readers, I’ll spend Thursday quietly with a friend, and then back to work rehearsing, weaving, and all the other things that need to be done in this season of darkness. I love the waning afternoon light through the trees, minus their leaves. I love the blowing leaves along the streets and in my yard. I left them in the beds this year, because apparently that’s the thing to do. Like covering up everything with a blanket for the winter. It rained, and I have towels on the loom, and my son will be home soon. All is well.

Stay tuned…

Look at the Time…

Too many cool things happening and not nearly enough time…

I know, these are definitely first world problems. I recently had my cable service upgraded to fiber, and they kept asking all sorts of questions about my TV use, and frankly, I’m not even sure how to work the smart TV I have, and I really don’t care. There just aren’t enough hours…

Fall is a super busy time here, and there are all sorts of fibery happenings, I skipped the HGA Spinning and Weaving Week this year, and Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool. NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY! But I am signed up for the remote Weaving History Conference starting tomorrow, and running through Wednesday. (I plan to do lots and lots of handwork…)

I had to take a break watching the sessions for my natural dye class with Maiwa, NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY!

I took a break from watching the daily sessions for the Sketchbook Revival 2024, which was free to join in, but I’m enjoying the sessions, or at least I was, until I realized there are NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY! So I paid for the sessions so I could watch them later…

Tuesday night my inventory list is due with all the cool things I’m selling at the Jockey Hollow Weavers Guild show and sale which opens in a week and a half. So that’s been my 24/7 focus for the last two weeks, making stuff for the guild sale from all my leftover scraps. I pulled a bunch of scraps from my massive collection in the attic, and made kits of various ornaments…

Kits for zippered bags…

Greeting cards, and tote bags. Lots of tote bags. I’ve been sewing up a storm… And Mulder is very happy to help.

And lots of rabbits…

Meanwhile, it is end of the garden season. We have so far avoided a frost, but I’m watching carefully. I harvested the last of the basil, and made another five batches of pesto for the freezer.

I harvested another huge bowl of grape tomatoes, and oven dried another bunch for the freezer as well.

And those were marigolds in the other bowl. Those I dried in the oven and popped that bag in the freezer to use for dyeing at a later date.

And I’m trying to dry flat, all the flag iris leaves, which are great for making cordage. Apparently I’ve found that if you dry them flat, rotating them frequently, they will retain their green color. I tried on the floor between two large looms. Except Mulder thought it was a cool fort and gathered up all the leaves to make a nest…

I’ve had to go to plan B… outside in a protected area away from critters but still with good airflow…

Meanwhile, at the end of September, I took a weekend away, with the Native Plant Society of NJ, at their fall retreat at the Cape May Science Center. What a great weekend. I have to say that plant people, turns out, are as generous of spirit and non-competitive as weavers, I felt right at home. And I met a couple of people who recognized me, and shared their desire to get back into weaving, a great winter hobby when the gardens go to sleep.

We had a number of hikes, and one of the goals was to see monarchs on their last stop before heading to Mexico. Walking with plant people was just the coolest thing, because they see things I would have missed. They point out bugs, and birds, and invasives, like Porcelain Berry, which I’d never seen, cool plant but horribly destructive.

And I learned the technical name for caterpillar poop, “frass”. An important term to know.

And I learned that there are native praying mantis and there are non native ones. I probably saw the non native one in my garden. Below is the native one, as pointed out by someone way more knowledgeable than me…

There were such interesting textures everywhere I looked…

And this amazing shaped tree was probably from some invasive vine that was eventually removed…

A photo op at a preserve with the Nature Conservancy.

I finished the doubleweave sampler I transferred from my small table loom onto the floor loom, in record time. I’m still working on the fringe, but the sampler came out really well. Right from Jennifer Moore’s Doubleweave Book.

I pulled down another Structo and cut off what I’d started, and transferred the 8-shaft warp from it onto my floor loom. This structure is Deflected Doubleweave, in 8/2 Tencel. I had six yards on my little Structo. What the heck was I thinking…

And here it is, I’m weaving away, through a yard already. What a breeze using my hands and feet! Refer back to my last post to see how I truly feel about table looms… My guild is doing a swatch exchange this year in just this technique. I’ll be quite ahead of the game as the swatches aren’t due until June… The Draft is from page 205 of Marian Stubenitsky’s Double with a Twist.

And I continue to hang in the music world. We had a performance a couple weeks ago at the Montclair Public Library. I was playing bass recorder, and professional photographer Mike Peters grabbed a shot of me in action and some great photos got posted on the website for Montclair Early Music.

Meanwhile, I am really enjoying learning to play the cello. And I went shopping. It started with me needing a decent bow… And now I own a very decent bow, and a cello to go with it. And I graduated from Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, which is I understand a big deal in the Suzuki world of music lessons.

Did I mention there are NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY!

So for the next three days I’ll be watching the sessions at the Weaving History Conference and madly assembling the ornaments. I also cut out snowmen, and gingerbread men. Pictures to come…

There are NOT ENOUGH HOURS IN THE DAY! Stay tuned…

True Confessions…

My life is so full of really fun stuff, gardening is winding down, the visuals are changing daily. New stuff is blooming, (hello goldenrod) and other plants are dying back, going to seed, and looking wretched (goodbye milkweed).

I’m taking a natural dye intensive through Maiwa, in Canada (remotely of course) and watching each module, carefully taking lots of notes, and starting to scour some of the yarns and fabrics in the kit.

I’m taking cello lessons. Yep, something I always wanted to learn, it is my most favorite sounding instrument of all. First draw of the bow string and I was hooked. I practice furiously every day, hoping the pads of my fingertips will soon harden up! The photo from the teacher is for me to try to replicate proper posture…

And in all of that, honestly, I miss weaving. I love and have always loved the gentle process of a shuttle going back and forth, feet and hands in a rhythm that makes my heart sing. That and the cello… Often I listen to one while doing the other.

So here is the true confessions part. I have 17 table looms, all with interesting stuff on them, and I HATE weaving on a table loom. Really. Please don’t write letters telling me all the advantages of having a table loom, I know what they are, that’s why I still have 17 of them, down from around 3 dozen. There is nothing better for teaching structure, portability, etc.

Before Covid changed the world and certainly my life, I was able to cart around an entire weaving studio in my car, and bring the world of weaving to the masses. I gave 12 of my sturdy little 4-shaft Structos to my weaving friend Anne Choi, who has a sheep farm and was excited to get them, and set up her own mobile weaving studio, concentrating in underserved areas that don’t have access to the joy of handweaving. She sent me these couple of images of my beloved Structos at the Newark Museum, here in NJ, this past weekend, another group of new weavers is born. Here is the link to her website.

So, what about me… Back when I was doing this regularly, with my daughter in tow (she is now an emergency vet tech, and has little time for weaving), I started to build a group of 4-8 shaft Structos, with all different structures, envisioning a follow-up round robin, where people could try things like Summer/Winter, Huck, Doubleweave, Deflected Doubleweave, Honeycomb, Rosepath, etc. I put 4-6 yards of fine yarn, cotton or Tencel, on these little Structos and got each of them started and there they sat. This photo is from October 2023, it hasn’t changed…

One of them, actually a Leclerc 10″ wide 4-shaft sample loom, with spools on the back, had a Huck Sampler in linen, the spools had come with the loom, from my mother-in-law, and I thought it would be perfect to use up all that linen. What was I thinking…

I had no idea how much linen was on this group of spools, so I finished the yard and a half sampler, and there was still plenty to go. I picked one pattern and figured, how much could there be? So, I wove… And wove… And wove… This went on for the last year. I will be honest, it was painful… I couldn’t believe that the end was nowhere in sight.

So determined to clear this little guy if it killed me, I finally last weekend wove until I saw the end of the warp, which on a loom like this with spools, is the paper tape end that tucks into the flange of the metal spool.

And there it is. 7 1/2 freaking yards. Of 10″ wide huck in fine linen. I could have done this in probably a couple sittings on a floor loom. Instead it took me months. Sigh…

I had needed one of the small looms for the group that went to the college for my retrospective. So back in January I decided to actually cut off a Doubleweave sampler I started, and rethread, and beam onto a floor loom. Desperate to weave something, anything, I sat down this week, and pulled out Jennifer Moore’s Doubleweave book, and started in again. Oh the joy of using my hands and feet. I only have two more units left on this sampler, and I’m loving every minute of it. I have the more challenging ones left, quilting in a pattern and doubleweave pick-up, but with my feet working as part of the team, I’m looking forward to this.

That said, I looked at that wall of Structos and thought, well damn, I’ll just take them one at a time, and dump them onto my little 8-shaft Tools of the Trade loom, and carry on. I’m actually excited. The planning is done (though I have to convert from a lift-plan to a treadling sequence, I have software for that), and once I dump onto my floor loom I can weave like the wind.

I was chatting about this brilliant decision of mine with a weaving friend, and as I took a sip of my tea, she blurted out, “Friends don’t let friends weave on a rigid heddle loom…” (Sorry, if you aren’t a weaver you won’t understand this comment) I spit my tea across the table! Them’s fighting words in the weaving community. Truth be told, I feel the same way, and again, please don’t send letters telling me the grand virtues and benefits of a rigid heddle loom, they have their place, much like my beloved Structos, but I have a dozen and a half table looms, all set up that are not fun to weave on. My blog, my opinion…

So I continue with my dye studies, and while I baby sit the pots for scouring and mordanting, I work on the quilt. It is all together, and I’m now starting on the 380-piece trumpet vine that meanders all throughout the quilt. This is something I really don’t want to finish, I’m having too much fun…

And, I looked at the calendar and realized I have exactly one month to make stuff for my guild sale. I still have lots of scraps left from my production years, though thankfully the pile is getting smaller. The pieced jacket I finally finished used up a nice amount. It will be for sale at the Jockey Hollow Weavers Show and Sale in Mendham NJ starting November 1.

I sold all those adorable bunnies I had last year, (blog post that shows the finished bunnies, scroll down…) and took the last of the mohair fabrics and scraps I had, and cut out four more. Mulder was doing his best to help.

So my days are full, garden for an hour, watch a module in the dye class for an hour, work in the dye studio for an hour, weave for an hour, do correspondence for an hour, practice cello for an hour, and fit in housework, processing a bucket full of tomatoes, basil for pesto (my freezer is filling up). Yes, I’m ridiculously busy, but having a blast, now that I am truly honest with myself and admitted I hate working on a table loom…

Stay tuned…