I'm Still Here

Hello. It's been such a long time since I posted about weaving. Tim and Claudia got Tim's web presence up just before they left on a long holiday, and they're due back next week, so that's how long.

I haven't not been thinking about weaving; in fact I found nine post drafts this morning, some with titles only, some with the first few sentences, and I remember writing two or three more and deleting them. But I haven't been weaving much. So what have I been doing since the end of the exhibit?

Since my parents left, I finished my income tax filing (which, as usual, took 2.5 days after 2-6 weeks of thinking about doing it); cleaned the house (this took a bit longer, and so far it's been just preliminary cleaning, no blitzing) and the studio (ditto); read up on and played with designing a corkscrew twill; wove three cashmere scarves for the gallery; finished/fringed a whole lot of stuff that have been sitting around for up to a year, and washed/finished half of them. I've also had a prolonged dental crisis, for which I could not get an appointment until last Wednesday, and a plumbing/draining disaster caused by the Nelson City Council digging up the road directly above my water main; I'm hoping at least the practicalities of the water saga will be resolved today, and the swelling of the right half of my face to go down completely. But what a boring list.

Creatively, I was art-ed out. I didn't want to plan weaving; I wasn't even enthused about thinking about weaving. I also had a hard time shooting photographs for our photo blog, so I went through the motion and didn't worry about the quality. And for a while, I didn't touch my camera, nor my computer.

I tried to weave off the warp ends that accumulated on the big loom; there were between one and three meters left of each of the four exhibit warps, and thought I would have fun making pieces of fabric just for myself. Not so. At all. I forgot how to have spontaneous fun, and I couldn't pick just-for-fun wefts: I knew why weft A melted into the warp and showed off the weave pattern, and why weft B shimmered, but I no longer had gut feelings, and for the life of me, could not see what I liked, and that is so uncharacteristic. So, after two samples for a warp-end fun piece, I managed to weave a tiny piece of fabric off of the last purple variegated warp used for "Deep". That was one full day's work. Day Two went a little more smoothly, as I decided on one weave structure for all the rest, and I concentrated on the weft colors only, but still, I never anticipated anything like that. In one piece, I used a rather rough blanket-singles in my favorite mid-navy-blue; it wove up much coarser than the merino and possum/merino/silk combination I've grown accustomed to, but the colors look delicious. Sadly, I haven't been able to wash these fabrics of the plumbing problem, but I will show you some when I've finished them.