No I’m not, no indeedy.
Spent a good chunk of today in Urgent Care with Mike, who it turns out has the flu. (A very strange flu – headaches and fever but no respiratory effects.) And, since I figured we’d be there waiting for hours, I brought along a bunch of Weaver’s magazines to read.
Weaver’s is one of those awesome magazines that teaches not just basic weaving projects (like Handwoven does) but also advanced theory, and actually publishes drafts for the sixteen-shaft weaver! It’s leaps and bounds above Handwoven, at least from this particular reader’s point of view. Alas, Weaver’s is strictly in the past tense, as they stopped publishing about 10 years ago. However, I have wangled all 44 issues of the magazine into my possession, and am happily reading my way through them. As I become a more and more experienced weaver, I hope to get more and more out with each reading – right now a lot of stuff goes over my head.
Oh yes. Where were we? Ah, the Urgent Care Center, with a stack of Weaver’s. I was flipping through looking at the pretty pictures, lacking the focus to read the articles, and saw a jacket that took my breath away:
(click on the image for the larger photo, it’s quite pretty)
Needless to say, anything that has tiger stripes gets my attention immediately, and this was just too pretty to miss. So I devoured the article, rushed home, and started winding off yarn to make this jacket. I’m going to make it out of 3/50 Nm silk (about 8400 yards per pound), hand-dyed in 20 gradual shades of red, orange, and gold, and yellow, plus about 10 oz of black. I’ve wound off all 21 skeins for dyeing and am now contemplating what colors to use.
I’m not in love with any of the red-orange-gold-yellow colorways that I currently have, so tomorrow morning I’m doing another test run with the newly arrived Sabracron F colors – gold and red in particular. If I don’t like that shade, I may try mixes of sun yellow and red. If that doesn’t work, there’s a decent range of colors in Lanaset (an acid dye) that I could easily use. There is no desperate hurry to dye the yarn, because I still have to weave off another six placemats using the indigo blue linen yarn before I can get the new project anywhere near the loom!
Job-wise, I’m still waiting to hear back from one company that is on its final round of interviews – they were going to interview the last person yesterday but it got postponed until Thursday, so I won’t hear anything from them until Friday. I hope it works out. Meanwhile, it’s a rush job on dyeing. Gotta get stuff done while I’m unemployed!
Oh yeah, and the indigo linen yarn came out great. It’s drying in the oven – the plan for tomorrow is to start winding it off into balls and weaving it into placemats, in between doing more dye samples (and maybe dyeing that silk!). I think my main focus at the moment is getting more sets of dye samples finishe, but there’s plenty of time for weaving, especially the mindless sort.
