Tag: Diane Click

I have a plan…

One of the joys of just doing, is the brain has a chance to wander, while weeding, watering, weaving, cooking, cleaning, spinning yarn, knitting, not so much playing music. That requires intense concentration. I do a lot of things that just allow my noisy brain to just wander…

One of the things that has been routinely popping up, as I spend time in my studio, is how much I would love to go back to my original three looms I started with, back in the late 70’s, and bring the sewing room up from the basement, consolidating all of my fiber work into one space again. The more I think about it, the more excited I get. A lot has to happen first, a lot more stuff has to find a home other than here. And my daughter has to be on board, as some of the looms are hers. But I have a plan, and it is formulating into a goal. I’m thinking maybe by the end of the year…

One can only dream…

Meanwhile, there are still more than 25 looms in the studio, of all sizes and types, and many of them still have warps on them. I’ve made a huge dent, my all time high was 64 looms, but when the last big one left in the spring, the 12-shaft 54″ Tools of the Trade, Duchess we called her, to live at Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, a huge amount of space opened up and I saw possibilities.

So I’m on a mission to clear off more looms. The really challenging ones are the remaining Structos, the little looms I used for teaching. I put long warps of fine thread on them, never thinking they’d ever get woven off. Silly me…

Last blog, I was working on clearing a Frankenstructo, made from odd loom parts, of a warp set up to do the Rosepath borders from the Carol Strickler book of 8-shaft patterns. I finished all of the 40+ borders, and the five swatches using the same threading.

This was serious fun. There is a little bit of warp left on the spools, and I’m taking the loom with me tomorrow to the convent to let my new student, a young nun, have a go at learning some new skills, two shuttles, following a draft, 8-shaft, floating selvedges, etc.

Meanwhile, one of my weaving friends is offering a summer boot camp in fiber for adults in Maryland, and needed additional inkle looms. Those I have. My stash is dwindling, but I had a couple to spare once I cleared the warps from them. This one was the sampler I used when I taught complementary warp design. I finished that one off.

And this one, I remember setting up for The Gathering, which was an annual or semi annual event at Sievers Fiber School in Wisconsin, where I believe I was giving the Keynote address that year. It was a weekend long event, and there were demos, and I remember setting up an Inklette loom, which easily fit in my suitcase. I looked at my resume and realized I set this loom up in 2014. 12 years. It was time. The pattern is free form, Ann Dixon in her book of Inkle Loom Patterns calls it Runic. I had to look at my Advanced Inkle Weaving Monograph to remember how to do this technique.

And then there is the Quigley sampler, moved to a floor loom from a Structo, a while back. I chug along, doing a new technique every few days, following my handout generously sent by Diane Click, who taught this as a workshop back in 2015. She graciously allowed me to reproduce the part I used, some 16 samples, and it is available for free from my eStore. I cut the warp off this morning, having finished all the swatches.

There was still a bit of warp left, so I looked at what I had woven carefully, and one of the motifs was exactly the size of the template I use for making my ginger jars. If I weave 6 of these motifs, I’ll have six sides for a ginger jar for the guild sale in November.

This is what the ginger jars look like…

Meanwhile, the gardens are lush and buzzing with activity. This time of year seems to be the peak of everything flowering at once, milkweed, Joe Pye, Purple Coneflower, Black Eyed Susans, Monarda, and a few other very cool plants thrown in because there are SOOOOO MANY BEES!

I sit at my window every morning and have breakfast and have immense gratitude for nature doing its thing, and for my ability to witness just a small part of it.

Lots of butterfly activity too, my lovely monarch just drifts in beautiful movements from flower to flower…

And I had never seen this one before, Google Lens says it is a Great Spangled Fritillary Butterfly. If anyone knows better, put it in the comments.

I grabbed this photo of my Astilbe, which isn’t native, and though I’ve pulled most of it out, there is one patch, and it is gorgeous when it blooms, and it too is covered in bees.

My neighbor, the one who comes out every so often to have a smoke, came to get me the other day, had to show me something. I was out watering in the back yard. So I followed him around to the front, and he pointed to the top of a telephone pole along the street, and there in all its magnificence was a Red-Tailed hawk. We stared at it for probably half an hour. It was gorgeous.

And of course, the produce is starting to come in, in spite of the ridiculous heat, followed by severe storms. What a summer…

Enjoy the photos, it is a jungle out there…

And of course there is lots of music, three of the groups I play with will be performing the end of August at the annual Medieval Fest in Montclair, but more immediately, NJ Early Music will be performing at the close of the Morris County 4-H fair Saturday night.

I feel like I’ve come full circle, when my kids were young, we were heavily involved in 4-H, my kids raised hamsters/guinea pigs, and had a couple of snakes. There is a wonderful photo from 2003 of my late husband holding our Mexican Rosy Boa, (I think its name was Al), at one of the fairs. And one with my son Eric, which made the local paper.

I would set up a fiber demonstration area every year at the fair, demoing weaving, spinning, and lacemaking. Both of my kids grew up demoing weaving at the fair. Everyone entered things, from animals to artwork, to photography, to weaving, and we all won many ribbons. I even had a 4-H prep group that met in my home every week.

So I feel like I’ve come full circle, now I’ll be performing at the closing ceremonies, Saturday night, I haven’t been to the fair in more than 20 years. I’ll have my cello and my bass recorder. And of course in costume.

Stay tuned…

There are no coincidences…

There is so much to write I’m not sure where to begin…

I will start by saying this is a challenging day, this morning I woke with a start, and looked at the clock, 4:34am. It was this exact time, 10 years ago, my husband passed. I laid there for awhile, this day for some reason has been more in front of my mind than in the past few years, where time puts distance between hard things and how we feel about them.

I have written many times about my ponds. They were my late husband’s pride and joy. He spent hours counting fish, sitting by the ponds, finding peace there. I have spent a fortune trying to keep those ponds alive. Because he had traveled so much prior to his illness, the ponds had started to deteriorate. By the time he died, they were overgrown, I can’t remember if there were any fish, and they were in sorry shape. Because I have replanted most of the property with native plants, bushes and young trees, water features are an important part of the ecosystem of the yard. There are snakes, and frogs, and all kinds of pollinators flitting about, and I now get to spend hours, counting the fish and finding peace in that rushing water.

Unfortunately, over the last 10 years, problems arose, and it has been a challenge to keep the ponds going and keep the fish safe. One pond has goldfish, and that has stayed largely maintenance free, other than routine filter work. The other one, closest to the deck, has 8 koi, some of which are now 10″ long. They are affectionately known as pond pigs. They are hilarious, and are an endless source of joy.

I’ve had huge issues over the last few weeks, coming out in the mornings to feed the fish, and finding the pond half empty. My beloved pond guy, Bob, has tried hard to find the problem, and finally, I just told him to completely rebuild the waterfall, once we determined that was the source of the water loss.

He took it completely apart and found a couple of chipmunk nests, and some nice size holes in the liner under the rocks. I watched him completely rebuild the waterfall, it was air tight! Daryl 0, Chipmunks 1…

Twenty-four hours later, the stream or spillway I call it, which is where the filtered water dumps, failed. I came out in the morning and the pond had completely emptied and there were flopping 10″ koi in 4″ of water. I was heartbroken. And angry. I had a few choice words for my late husband, through tears, not understanding why this all can’t just work the way it is supposed to. I called my pond guy again, and he came out and we spent a long time talking about what to do. I had many well meaning friends not really understand the dynamics and emotional connection to these ponds and my late husband, who just said, “sell the koi and back fill the whole thing”.

Bob and I talked about options, I let him sit for a long time and stare at the spillway, which turned out, that a patch from last winter had failed. It has been an emotional roller coaster of a week, but yesterday, Bob came back with a liner, and an underlay, and he pulled the plastic tubs that created the stream bed, and started from scratch. I scampered around the yard, finding appropriate rocks and flat stones. I helped as best I could.

By 5pm last night, I came to the understanding that time isn’t kind to ponds, and sometimes they need to be redone, and that my late husband knew it was time, and maybe in his divine presence, he directed this to all fail at the same time, so that by the anniversary of his death, the pond would be fresh, and renewed, and good for a number of years. I’m sticking with this version of the story, because it gives me peace. I knew this was the correct thing to do, when Bob turned on the water and it all worked the way it should.

I sat out there today, watching the pond pigs (koi) feasting on Creeping Charlie (who knew it is considered a snack for those piggies!) A young grackle flew in, just a few feet from where I sat on the deck. I grabbed a photo (to help identify it, I’m not a birder), and he proceeded to jump into the top shelf of the waterfall and have a splash. He was having a great time.

I had a tree company come in a couple weeks ago, and remove the last of the horribly invasive 10 feet tall burning bushes, Morrow’s honeysuckle, and forsythia that lined my neighbor’s driveway. We do plan to plant the area with perennials in the fall, and there are baby baptisia growing there from my seed dance last fall. We had planted a small sumac tree and had hoped it would fill some of the space.

I have a neighbor across the street, who comes out every hour to have a cigarette. Joe sends me pictures of deer activity in the lower end of the street. He texted me the other day to tell me there were five gold finches in the front yard. He is loving the activity in my native plant yard, and understanding that having the perfect lawn, and mulched beds, isn’t good for diversity of species. It creates a sterile environment.

So of course, the deer herd made its way to my poor sumac tree, and with the invasive wall of burning bushes gone, they decimated my poor sumac in one go.

I was crushed, and sat for a while on my porch trying to think of options other than 6 foot deer fencing. I noticed an unused hanging planter on the decking of the porch, and placed it over what was left of the sumac tree. I tied a half bar of Irish Spring Soap, which I use prolifically in my textile studio to deter moths, to the hook of the plant hanger. It was a long shot.

Twelve days later, this is my sumac tree, and there are babies popping up all around. Daryl 1, Deer 0…

My gazebo, that my husband and I built, laying the circular patio, 25 years ago, while I was going through breast cancer treatment, had collapsed last winter, which I mentioned in a previous blog. My daughter rebuilt it for me, and I hoped the native vines I had planted would survive.

Survive they did, there was an explosion of native honeysuckle…

And crossvine…

…and more than half the replaced canopy is covered now in vines. Good vines.

My yard is incredible. My dogs love nosing around, finding odd things and critters. They all seem to live in tandem.

They seem to leave alone my yard crew, happily munching through the ground cover.

I have a pair of cardinals that came up to my open window every day for a week or so, the female, I named Ethel, and her mate is Fred, is quite the chatterbox. She chattered away for hours, little chips. Mostly towards Fred.

And I named the pair of Finches that hung out eating the seed heads from the Packera, Lucy and Ricky.

And last night, my daughter and I sat by the newly repaired pond and she captured this photo of a Northern Flicker. I’ve never seen one before. Her birding friend identified it.

And I have to share this cool tool my daughter gave me for Mother’s Day. It isn’t actually a garden tool, but I thought it was perfect for cutting edges in the beds, it is a throwing ax, shaped like a Uterus. You can’t make this up… So here I am, using it to edge a bed, it is really well balanced, and doesn’t matter which side I pick up. It is called a Uteraxe…

This has been an intense season of rehearsals, and concerts. I had one, the beginning of the month, that required a Viking costume, preferably in white. This was as close as I could come. I was playing recorder for this concert, so didn’t need my split skirt like I do for cello, so I used a walking skirt I’d made a few years ago, from a Folkwear pattern. I made the vest last fall, and the blouse was from an older costume I haven’t worn in awhile.

The following week we had another performance, this time for a Steam Punk Festival. If you don’t know what Steam Punk is, look it up. The costuming is like a fantasy Victorian. So I came up with pieces from my wardrobe that I could modify into something that would work for the day.

My cello recital was last weekend, I’m glad that is over so I can work on some new music. I have one more concert in a couple weeks, with cello, and then there is a breather until the end of August, and right into fall performance season.

And yes, the studio is quite active. And there are no coincidences. One of my cello teacher’s other adult students is a young nun, and along with the teacher, we played a trio of Shubert’s Ave Maria, along with a pianist for the recital. This young nun, from a local convent, and I have become friends. Turns out, her spiritual advisor’s mother was a weaver, and this young nun has had a huge desire to learn to weave. There are no coincidences that our paths have crossed.

I loaned her the small Leclerc 4-shaft sample loom, which was warped with the Learn-to-Weave sampler I designed for teaching purposes. I told her to finish off the warp, and meanwhile I would think of something more permanent. She sent me this photo, very excited, that she thought she was finished. I told her to keep weaving until the knots came all the way to the back of the castle.

Meanwhile, though she would love a floor loom, practicality insists that a small table loom would have to do for now, until she really shows that this is going to be a lifelong passion that will benefit the other sisters in the community. I have an 8-shaft Frankenstein like Structo I put together a few years ago from assorted parts, that I kept with a warp set up for the Rosepath series of borders in Carol Strickler’s 8-shaft pattern book. I really wanted to at some point go through the 40-ish different borders. I wasn’t planning on doing it this month.

So I wove, one or two a day.

…and I wove some more.

I now have maybe a dozen borders left to do, and then I’ll work with my friend to see what makes sense for her next. I know she ultimately wants to weave stoles for the nuns who are ordained as priests. (This is an Episcopal order, nuns can be priests.)

And I had a warp that I had moved from one of the Structos to a floor loom, so I could weave it more efficiently. Or so I thought. This was not one of my brightest moments. I mentioned in a previous blog, that I had set up a Structo with an 8-shaft Honeycomb sampler from Malin Selander’s Weave a Weave.

Selander’s book is written for a sinking shed loom, which I don’t have. My floor looms are jack looms, rising shed, which means for you non-weavers, that when I step on treadles to separate threads to create an opening for the shuttle to pass through, I’m now lifting 7 of 8 36″ rock maple shafts. Which is completely impractical. And I can’t weave Honeycomb upside down because the back is such a floaty mess you can’t see the pattern.

So I spent an afternoon, and moved the warp yet again, to my bigger table loom.

This is weaving so much easier, and I’ve already done two nice size samples of one of the honeycomb designs.

I’ve been documenting for the last few months, a different warp I transferred from another Structo table loom, to my small 8-shaft floor loom. This one is called Quigley, it is an 8-shaft four-tie unit weave, that is fairly complex, but the designs are stunning. I was using a handout from a three-day class given in 2015, at the Florida Tropical Weavers’ Conference, by Diane Click. She generously sent me the handout when she heard I was interested in the structure.

Many of you have written me that you would love to get in touch with Diane, and obtain a copy of the lengthy handout. Unfortunately Diane had a hard drive crash and lost a lot of her documentation. We have corresponded back and forth, and ultimately decided that I would scan the handout I have, and offer it free to anyone who wants it. I scanned just the part I used, and you can get it here in my eStore.

I had a dream early this morning when I finally fell back asleep. I was taking a workshop at Peters Valley School of Craft, a place my husband loved, and someone came up behind me and gave me a big bear hug, which freaked me out in the dream because I didn’t know who it was. I was able to wrench myself free, and I turned around, and it was Kevin, my late husband. I took from that that all would be OK, and that he was still watching out for all of us, and that what I did with his beloved pond and gardens, is what he would have wanted and that he was still watching in the background. I’m going with this interpretation, it was a pretty powerful dream, and I found that the rest of the day, I was at peace, and spent a lot of time with my pond piggies.

And if you are still reading at this point, I know this was a long one, here are some lovely flower pictures to make you smile.

There are no coincidences…

Bittersweet Farewells…

Don’t worry dear readers, I’m not going anywhere. But there have been some changes that have me saying goodbye to things that impacted my life in some way, in many areas of my life.

The biggest news is a bittersweet farewell to the Duchess. I’ve blogged about her many times, this is a 12-shaft 54″ wide Tools of the Trade loom, a monster of a loom, challenging to weave on with this aging body. But weave I did. My daughter brought her here to live, picking her up from Rochester, NY, in the middle of Covid, and I was able to clear the warp she put on shortly after that, along with one I transferred to this loom, from a 12-shaft table loom, (which is now safely in Michigan) using a pattern I purchased from Denise Kovnat. I referenced that in my previous blog post.

I cleared the loom of that warp in short order. It is a very gorgeous piece of Tencel fabric, and no I don’t have any idea of what I want to do with it. It will sit quietly and be, for now.

I started packing the loom, stripping it down to reduce weight. Fashion Institute of Technology, in NYC was sending a moving van to pick it up and move it into their new weaving space. The movers came last Tuesday in the icy rain, two strong guys with a big truck and a lift gate, and within two hours, it was loaded…

…and installed at FIT. It looks really happy with the other multi shaft looms, looks like mostly Macombers. I hope it helps a new generation love weaving. Or at least get a good workout weaving on it!

Of course that left a huge chunk of space in my studio, which I filled by just rearranging some of the furniture that was already there.

I had moved my teaching set up, for zoom meetings, to the back corner of the studio, away from light and traffic, and that was fun staging a new look behind me as I taught or just tuned in to Zoom.

With all the space, and rearranging, I’m seeing things I haven’t looked at for a while, and getting psyched to start getting more things on the remaining looms… I have a couple that are empty…

It is also a bittersweet farewell to winter. It’s probably not completely done, but it reached 69 degrees today. I will say, that though for the first time since my husband died, I’ve given thought to how much this house is to care for by myself. This latest snow storm, of 14 inches, on the back of another one that produced about 15 inches, almost finished me. I worked doggedly every day to try to clear a pathway to my house, and to try to dig out the cars. Snow days are fun until you are the one removing the snow. My daughter was on her annual Star Trek Cruise in the Caribbean, and my son was in NC at Ft. Bragg for leadership training with the military. So they were absolutely of no help. This is the picture from the Ring Camera on my front porch, after I managed to clear the front deck steps.

I shoveled daily…

But it was really beautiful. The snow was heavy, and covered the trees, and one morning, after the first snow storm, after the roads were clear enough to drive, I actually pulled over on my way to the Shakespeare Theatre to volunteer, and just looked at the stunning landscape of everything covered in a blanket of white. I didn’t even try to get a picture. It would have never done it justice. This was the view out the window in my music room.

So a farewell to this winter, hopefully there will not be anymore storms like this for the rest of the season. The snow is gone now, with the warmer temps, leaving behind a dreary muddy landscape (we got 3.25 inches of rain in the last 24 hours).

And a sad farewell to my beautiful vine covered gazebo, which didn’t survive this winter. I’m debating what to do, I can’t fix it myself, and I can’t find a handyman, and I’m just sad…

But I did go out today, and start to clean out the vegetable garden, and planted some arugula, lettuce and spinach seeds. Spring is coming…

Meanwhile, I had hoped to say goodbye to my natural dye class I’ve been doggedly working through for the last number of months. I managed to use up all the exhaust baths I saved from my 18 dye adventures.

I washed samples that I’ve been sitting on for a few weeks before I divided them into thirds.

I divided up all the samples, these are the cellulose fabrics, into thirds, one third for an extensive dye notebook, one third for Iron Modifiers, and one third for an Indigo overdye.

I thought I’d be through the indigo unit by now, but alas… I needed 7 pounds of very ripe bananas. Really…

There are many ways to create an indigo vat, and Maiwa teaches making Banana mash and using it to feed the indigo. I’ve done other methods, but I’m good at following directions. You would have laughed hysterically at me trying to carry what I hoped was 7 pounds of bananas across the produce department in my Shoprite, in the very thin produce bags, to weigh on the scale, nowhere near the bananas, and watching the bags rip as I tried to lift them onto the scale. The other shoppers were quite aghast… The things we do for our craft…

So I wait patiently for them to over rippen…

Meanwhile, I try to weave every day. I’m doggedly working through the Quigley course Diane Click was gracious enough to send me a few years ago, when I mentioned in a blog I had put a Quigley threading onto one of my Structos. Having transferred that warp to a floor loom, I threaded it based on Diane’s extensive handout from a class she taught in Florida in 2015. I do a new sample every day. I think there are 19 samples in total. I love this structure, a four tie unit weave, though it is very slow and tedious, especially in 20/2 cotton.

And dearest gentle readers, this will sound really silly, but I’ve been in mourning every since I binge watched the latest season of Bridgerton, which for those who have never seen it, is a Regency era romp through life on the ton under Queen Charlotte, turn of a couple century’s ago, (you might remember she was married to mad King George), and it is so gorgeous, so decadent, so utterly ridiculous and so addicting, that I couldn’t stop watching until the last episode. Now I have to wait probably another year and a half for season 5. The costumes are incredible. The sets lavish and stunning. And Queen Charlotte’s head pieces, are the highlights of any scene she is in. I don’t have a TV, and I don’t watch television, but I started watching Bridgerton during Covid, on Netflix, and it has been the one decadent treat every couple years. I’m sad the season is over.

And finally, I took a one day workshop in Broom making at my weaving guild. It was so much fun. The teacher, Sue Muldoon, stayed with me and I realized how much I missed the one on one I used to have with my hostess when I’d travel. Always a new friend, with an amazing story, and I’m a better person for each of the wonderful people who hosted me over the decades I taught. Sue is a wonderful teacher, very prepared, and I made some pretty cool brooms…

And there you have it. My daily life at this point, with the coming spring is now a check list of ‘Weave every day’, ‘Finish the dye class’ (when the bananas are ripe), ‘Play in the muddy gardens every day’, and of course practice every day for all the music groups I play with at the moment, spring concerts are coming up, and the set lists for each group are growing. There are multiple rehearsals each week, and I’m improving in tiny increments each time I sit down with the cello. One day I hope to be competent…

Stay tuned…

Life Happens…

I finished up my last blog, and headed “down” the shore (a NJ expression) for an overnight, meeting up with an old college friend and her husband, who had just flown in from the West Coast. It was a lovely day that Sunday, and then hurricane Erin stirred things up, and Monday was a cold, rainy day, thrilled to get rain, but sadly not at home two hours north, and definitely not a beach day. I headed home Monday night.

Tuesday I spent the day with my sister at the NY Botanical Gardens, finally getting to see the Van Gogh’s flowers exhibit. It was pretty incredible. But more importantly, my sister is a superior gardener and well versed in native plants. We poked around, examining labels, identifying plants with my trusty app, and acted like two horticulturists, or in my case really, a horticulturist wannabee… We discovered all the different variations of Rudbekia (hirta, fulgida, and triloba, if you are interested…)

Tuesday night I started feeling sniffly, and by Wednesday morning I was sick. I was so sick, feverish, I got really suspicious. 48 hours before, I was with a whole group of people… hmmmm.

So I wanted to start this blog post with all the glorious pictures of my new costume, and my cello debut at the Montclair Early Music Medieval fest. Turns out, I couldn’t go because, I TESTED POSITIVE FOR COVID! Damn… Bad timing. So basically I cancelled my life for the next 10 days, until I tested negative once more. I was really disappointed, so many things planned for the end of the summer. Fortunately I was sick for just a couple days, and stayed in bed, and did what any weaver would do, took a loom to bed with me.

I cleared one of my Inklette Inkle Looms of a Supplemental Weft piece that has been on there for too many years.

I was on a roll, and couldn’t go anywhere, so I cleared another Inkle loom, this one set up for turned Krokbragd. Both looms were donated to Jockey Hollow Weavers for their loaner loom program. Two more looms out of my studio.

Meanwhile, the gardens, in spite of no rain, (in spite of being sick, I still went out and watered the critical things) my tomatoes are prolific.

So I made a pot of sauce…

And that warp from hell? The one that wouldn’t end? I was determined…

6 yards of 20/2 fine cotton. I initially worked through the Robyn Spady overshot sampler from a back issue of Handwoven Magazine, switching back and forth from Rose fashion to Star fashion, and then I just said, “Screw it”, and picked one of the patterns that appealed to me, and just wove. And wove. And wove…

So now I have this incredibly long sampler I will have to do something with. I think zip bags? At least a portion of it.

Which meant that I could move another warp onto that loom from my dwindling collection of Structos. I chose to move over an 8-shaft Quigley, the original pattern on the Structo I got from Tom Knisely’s book of Table Linens. It was designed by Diane Click and is a four-tied Unit Weave.

It is complicated to weave, and when I originally posted it on my blog, a couple of years ago, Diane actually wrote me, told me she taught a workshop in this structure at the 2015 Florida Tropical Weavers Guild conference (I’m pretty sure I was there teaching) and generously sent me her handout. Since I had already set the loom up, I didn’t do much with it, but now that I had the opportunity to rethread, bingo! Now I can work through her handout and really study the structure.

I was on a roll, and though I finally tested negative for Covid, I decided to move the warp on the 4-shaft Structo I had set up with Doup Leno. I wanted to prove to myself that I could weave Doup Leno on a Structo, but table looms are painfully slow, so once I moved the warp, I blew through a half yard in a sitting. This is 10/2 cotton.

Then I decided to move the warp on another 8-shaft Structo with a Honeycomb draft, from Malin Selander’s Weave a Weave. Here is the original piece I cut off the Structo before I moved it to my 8 shaft 36″ floor loom.

This probably wasn’t my best idea, I should have waited for a smaller floor loom, but I wanted to reach out to my contact at FIT in NY who is patiently waiting for me to clear Structos. I wanted to make it worth the trip for her.

This is going to be a bit technical, so if you are not a weaver, just skip to the picture and move on. Malin Selander’s book is written for a sinking shed loom. I have rising shed jack looms. In a sinking shed loom, in Honeycomb, only one shaft gets pulled down at a time, the rest stay up. Easy treadling. (Though I’m curious because I’ve never seen an 8-shaft loom with a sinking shed, at least from the era the book was written). I have rising shed jack looms, like I said, which means, to have one shaft stay down, I have to lift 7, 36″ wide rock maple shafts. This is quite the workout. And yes, I could weave it upside down, but trust me, you don’t want to do that in Honeycomb. Cause I’m kind of designing as I go… Not only that, one of the designs in her Honeycomb sampler calls for 18 treadles. I have 10. It is easy to weave on a table loom, you just pull levers and engage the shafts you want. (There are 254 combinations of shafts in an 8-shaft loom) Not so easy on a floor loom. So I jumped down a rabbit hole, determined to figure out a skeleton tie up so I could use more than one foot, and get the tie-up down to 10 or less treadles.

There is an old program on the internet called Tim’s Treadle Reducer. I went there, and either it is no longer functioning, or I blew it up. If anyone knows its status, please let me know, it was a really handy tool. So I was on my own.

I sat with the draft for an hour or so, after transferring the tie-up for a rising shed loom. And slowly I worked it out to be able to use less than 10 treadles, two or three at a time, but set up in a way that one foot could press two at once, having the treadles adjacent to one another. I was pretty damn proud of myself. (I tweaked it further, shifting the plain weave to the middle, the photo shows the middle of my calculations.)

I haven’t woven that one yet, but this is a different design in her Honeycomb sampler, it is a very cool weave structure, but I’m going to be with this one for a while, since there are something like four yards on this 16/2 cotton warp.

Yesterday was an interesting day. First, it rained. We have been under extreme drought conditions here, I’m struggling daily to keep my plants alive, and Wednesday we planted another four dozen native bushes and perennials. It started raining Thursday night, resumed on Saturday, and well into this morning. I’m thinking we got more than 2″ of rain. For that I got on my knees and gave thanks to the universe for taking care of its own.

Secondly, if you own a PC with Windows 10, you probably know that October 15th is D Day. Microsoft will no longer support Windows 10 with security updates. Which is really problematic, leaving any computer with Windows 10 vulnerable. My tech guy came over yesterday, I was not going to try this myself, to upgrade my two computer systems to Windows 11.

Yeah, so the first computer, my laptop I use for teaching online, which I can annotate with a pen, set up in my studio, the processor in it won’t support Windows 11. So $1000 later, I have a new laptop on its way. Apparently the processor in my desk top computer will also not support Windows 11, but my tech guy, who is really brilliant, found a work around, and got everything on my desktop updated. Of course I have high anxiety knowing by the end of the week, I’ll be ripping my hair out making sure all my programs work on the new laptop, finding registration codes, passwords, etc., and getting a new code for Fiberworks. Which I definitely need that critical piece of computer software.

So one computer is safe and updated. And it rained. And I’m Covid free. And my sister didn’t get it. And my garden continues to delight and astound me. Leaves are starting to turn, things are beginning to die back. And I just cleared a number of looms, all going to good homes who will use them for teaching.

And I looked at the calendar and my eyes got really big, and I realized I have six weeks to make as much stuff as I can for the guild sale, inventory sheets are due the end of October. OMG! Fortunately I have a 5-yard plus Overshot sampler to start with…

Stay tuned…