Category Archives: Knitting, Spinning, & Weaving

Hello, World: A Rare Weekend Post

I just wanted to share this little fact with you: Life is okay. In fact, it is verging on Downright Good.

The gathering at the Fearsranch was much lower-key that initially advertised. First of all, there were three or four people missing, which made things so very much easier for me. And second, everyone was tired, it being the end of a week and after long amounts of travel on pretty much everyone’s part. The fact that every single individual I met in person for the first time was Made of Good Stuff helped immensely, too. Everyone was Made of Win. I expected this of Bodhifox, my main reason for being there, who felt exactly the same in-person as he does in his journal and over e-mail, but I didn’t have more than a passing familiarity with the others and no expectations whatsoever (beyond “eep people I do not know”). So Made of Win was a good thing. And my flatlining wasn’t as much of a handicap as I’d feared.

There was food. There was drumming. There was cask-strength Macallan. There was a lovely huge bonfire. There was good sleep. There was glorious sun, and breakfast, and discussions about house building (and oven-building and erecting mead halls and rebuilding the front porch), and sad goodbyes said. And there is photographic evidence plus summary and another decent summary the likes of which I don’t have the brainpower to pull off.

Pretty much the only bad thing that happened was I somehow flipped my knitting around and knit three or four rounds before realising it. I pulled the circular needles out and discovered that my swatch had lied to me (with great huge lies! I will never trust yarn again!) and if I had in fact finished the hat the way it was dear Mousme would be wearing it around her shoulders instead of her head. So I pulled the whole thing apart and cast on forty less stitches, and now I have five inches of hat and just made my first ever decrease! Had the Dreadful Thing occurred at home I would have gone ballistic, but the combination of being exhausted and happy and being elsewhere made everything all right.

We’re making pulled barbecue pork for dinner, and feeding a couple of friends whom we called on the off chance they were free (this will never work — you are? yay!). We came home from the Fearsranch with perry (pear cider, with which I am in love), and there is beer now too. I intend to bake Brie. No, I don’t understand it in the least. I’m exhausted. I should be comatose and unable to function. But somehow the night out with excellent people and the subsequent breakfast revived me. HRH and I are considering monthly or bi-monthly Friday night escapes, if they’re this good. And when you get home it’s only early Saturday afternoon, so you still have half a day plus another whole day of weekend.

And now I am going to go knit some more. I wonder if I’ll get to the double-pointed needles part of the project today. At this rate Mousme will certainly have the hat by Yule, and possibly much earlier. (Yes, I was worried about that before. But removing forty stitches from a round makes things progress so much faster.)

Warp And Weft

I am now the owner of a 24-inch four-harness table loom. It’s missing the shuttle and I believe a heddle hook, but apart from that it’s in usable shape. It’s very similar to this model, only older and a bit more rustic. An elderly friend of the ADZO family passed away recently and left no local family. She was a weaver, and had three (three? two?) full-size looms set up in her split-level home. She was a member of the Lakeshore Weavers Guild, who came in and took the full-size looms. The ADZO family went over yesterday and was told to take whatever of her things they liked. One of the things they mentioned seeing was a tiny loom in a back corner of the storage room.

My maternal grandfather was a weaver. I have a set of curtains he wove hanging in my office (which can be seen in these pictures). One of the atmospheric things I remember the most clearly about his house in Farnham was the entire room he had upstairs filled with his floor loom, his wools, and his equipment. Over the past couple of years I’ve planned to at some point learn how to use a drop spindle to spin my own wool, as part of a spiritual and meditative practice. Ideally, once I’d worked on that for a while, I’d move into weaving with the yarn I’d created. I like the sense of taking up a craft that’s been in my family.

It seems that the universe has decided to switch things up for me a bit.

Jen called and told the executors that she’d found someone who wanted the table loom if it was still available, and so ADZO and I went over this morning to collect it. There was a member of the weavers guild there too, and she asked me if I was interested in joining. I told her quite honestly that I had no time at the moment but a beginner’s workshop at some point would definitely interest me, so I got as much information from her as I could. Before we left she rummaged through some bags and gave me three huge spindles of synthetic yarn to dye and play with.

A 24-inch loom is tiny. You can’t do huge projects on them, unless you intend to patch your work together somehow. They’re pretty limited to table runners, place mats, scarves, that sort of thing. But it’s not the products I’m interested in so much as the process. There is so much spiritual metaphor and simile encapsulated in the process of weaving, as well as the attractive notion of doing something meditative with the hands that doesn’t feel like a waste of time. And as I said above, there’s the family connection that makes it all the more special for me.

I suspect that I’ll invest in a stand with treadles when I get around to using it seriously, because using hand levers to shift the harnesses slows you down a lot. You only have two hands, after all, and they’re already passing the shuttle back and forth and operating the beater.

So I have a whole new set of things to research and read about. (Plant dyeing! Patterns! Techniques! History!) It’s not pressing. I’m looking forward to it.

(What am I talking about? Wikipedia has entries on looms, heddles (which are set in a harness), and weaving in general to help you out.)