Tag: Flood

Signed, Sealed, and Delivered…

Last Sunday, I picked up my son, newly back from a deployment in Syria, and off we drove to Maryland for the day. It is about a 3 1/2-hour trip, and I was thrilled to have the company. He is such an interesting person to converse with, his knowledge of history, what led to what, and where we are now, is fascinating. Great conversation, perspective, and knowledge.

We got to my mom’s to deliver the quilt, and deliver it we did. First, she inspected the label I had made and attached to the back.

Then the unveiling… Of course she cried. I cried.

My son helped me hang it…

I got a great picture of my mom and my son. Mom will be 94 in May, each day is a gift.

She was so appreciative, but I think I was more appreciative for the gift of a project that kept me going, marking time through a difficult year. We talked this morning and she tells me that it is the first thing she sees when she wakes up, and she stares at it all day finding something new she hadn’t seen before.

Meanwhile, there was that flood thing… No progress on the restoration because…

I got this great idea… I have these spectacular perennial native plant gardens, newly planted last spring, and I can’t see them well from any area in my house. Long story… I woke up in the middle of the night last week to a voice in my head yelling at me to just change the window…

So this is the den currently. I am getting rid of the TV and credenza, and will move the piano in there, the cello, my recorders, and turn it into a music room. And I want to be able to look outside and see my gardens.

I have contracted Pella to replace the east wall pair of double hungs with a window wall with two casements. But the window won’t be ready for installation for 8 weeks. Sigh…

I moved my bar table and stool in there to have my breakfast and look out the current window.

Of course I’m trying to eat my breakfast and enjoy the view, and Mulder decides that he wants to see too. So much for my view…

It will all be lovely, and just in time for spring. Right now there is about 6 inches of snow on the ground, so I’m looking forward to seeing what that looks like tomorrow morning.

This is January. This is my month for dyeing. Once I got my rhythm, I can wind about 14-15 ounces of mixed cellulose skeins, scour them, move them into an overnight soda ash soak, rinse the dyed skeins from the previous day and hang to dry, and move the skeins from the soda ash from the previous day into a new dyebath, all in less than two hours. It is my morning routine. I’ve probably done 8-10 dyebaths. MX Fiber Reactive dyes from ProChemical. They had new colors for 2025, what could I do but try them…

This one is called Swamp…

And of course, I finished the twill sampler I had moved to my floor loom, and grabbed the next Structo. This one is a four-shaft overshot sampler, from Robyn Spady.

I pulled the warp forward, and transferred it onto my small floor loom.

I love this. I adore pattern samplers, I can sit down and in about a half hour, run through the draft, all five design areas, switch my tie-up from Rose fashion to Star fashion, and do it all again. This one should be on the loom for awhile, as I think there was about 6 yards of 20/2 cotton on those Structo spools…

As we head into the great unknown politically, and as so many have lost their homes to natural disasters, the world is looking a bit bleak right now. I try to stay focused on what is in my control, mourning the loss of giants in the textile world, Claire Shaeffer, and Jannie Taylor, and closer to home, the moms of two of my close friends, and one of my own, one of my oldest friends, we raised our kids together. She is gone, at peace I hope, and life will be a little dimmer without all of them. All I can do is put one foot in front of the other, wake up each morning and find gratitude in the day ahead. Yes, I’ll have to do a lot of shoveling tomorrow morning, but snow is pretty and healing, and I have northern dogs who think this is just the best! I want to be like them, roll around in the snow with abandon, and eat large gulps of fresh clean snow. Rest easy Judy, I will miss you terribly…

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…