I finally stopped procrastinating and filed my taxes this morning, and to my surprise, I’m getting a substantial refund! 95% of it is going towards wedding expenses, but I did decide to treat myself to a small purchase, so I ordered a few more colors of fiber-reactive and acid dyes to experiment with.
Some other wonderful things have happened since yesterday! Teresa, the dyer I was chatting with at CNCH, has a pile of tapestry yarns that she is sending me for cost of shipping (thank you Teresa!), and Jeane, a dyer in Southern California, has finished winding the sampler skeins for my dye trials. (She wound 400 of them in a weekend – big applause for fast turnaround!) And the table loom I had loaned out to a friend should be coming back to me mid next week. This is great – it means I should be able to get started with the tapestry samples by next Wednesday. I have some linen I can use as warp, so I won’t need anything more (except a tapestry beater, and I’m kinda tempted to use a fork instead).
So now it’s time to roll up my sleeves and get to work. I have four goals for the next two weeks:
- dye a bunch more samples for my dye work (this will probably happen over the next two weekends)
- start work with tapestry
- clean up my studio
- play more with doubleweave drafts and get an understanding of the theory of doubleweave
Since I can’t work on the first two until my sample skeins and tapestry yarn arrive, I’m going to work on doubleweave and studio-cleaning, and maybe reading some of the HUGE backlog of books I acquired recently.
My mother spent a lifetime weaving tapestry using a fork (Gense Facette stainless, salad fork – the small one) so there’s Time Honored Precedent!
how in the name of all that is holy did she make 400 warps in a weekend? Even using my reel, my record is 10 before I fall down and refuse to move and/or fall asleep while doing them.
Obviously, not my favourite part of the process. I have to dress 50 little looms for the kids every summer. Wish I had time to teach them to dress the looms themselves, but we don’t, so they work on “prepared” looms.
have fun!