Pavers

I finished installing the pavers for the dye sink yesterday.  Here is a “before” shot of the raw dirt (from the side I didn’t do):

And here is a photo of the finished pavers:

That should give a nice flat surface for the dye sink.

The first line of pavers are deliberately separate from the back set.  They aren’t load-bearing (the sink will rest on the pavers in back) and there is a tree root directly underneath them.  I’m hoping that if the tree root moves and heaves up the first section of pavers, it won’t disturb the sink.

I will possibly also fill in the left side (the raw dirt) with the red lava rock beside the pavers, since I have an extra bag of it, but haven’t decided yet.

Next up is to build the loom platform, which will happen this weekend.  The painters are also coming on Thursday to paint the interior of the house – so the house will be buzzing with activity!  It promises to be an exciting time.

Once the loom platform is built, I will start putting in the garden, I think.  It’s late in the season to be planting, but as we have an exceptionally long growing season (first frost around November) I think it’s probably OK.  We can set up drip irrigation on a timer to make sure it gets watered properly.

Meanwhile, I have sent 100+ samples off to the CNCH Special Sample Service, and have entered two yardage pieces for the CNCH gallery.  Neither is what I’d call perfect – I have never been able to mend fine cloth (15,000 ypp or finer) without the mend being more obvious than the flaw, and it is usually easy to cut around the flaw for garment purposes, so I generally don’t mend unless it’s really obvious.  I also was having mechanical trouble with my loom midway through – well, the long and the short of it is that there are floats in the cloth in several places where a shaft got stuck, and I’ll just have to live with it.  I hope it isn’t too obvious.  But I gather that gallery entries were a bit sparse, so I’m doing my part to beef up the entries.

Nothing too fibery on the horizon, alas – though I might design a few more patterns for the 140/2 silk samples I’ll likely be doing immediately after the move.  I need a diagonal flame pattern that’s about 4″ x 4″.  Shouldn’t be difficult to do on an expanded advancing twill pattern, I think, but I need to play around a bit to make sure it will work.