Combination Structures on 4 shafts

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…

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…