Beamed on

Yesterday I settled on a ten yard, 24-inch wide sample warp. Yesterday evening and this morning I wound the warp and beamed it on:

Tonight I’m going to start threading. I’m hoping to get it fully threaded, sleyed, etc. and start weaving over the weekend.

You may wonder why the warp is white, when the intent is to have phoenixes in fiery colors. It’s because I’m planning to cross-dye the finished fabric, dyeing the silk background with acid dyes while leaving the cotton phoenixes undyed. I could start with a yellow warp, but since I plan to use a yellow weft, it will be easier to see the pattern if I leave it white. (Besides, leaving it white means I can wind the warp much faster – no need to skein, dye, and wind the skeins back onto cones before warping.)

Meanwhile, the fall harvest from the garden is coming in with a rush. The purple pole snap beans are flooding us with their first harvest (we planted them late), and our first lima bean picking produced several pounds. There are 34 mature or nearly-mature butternut squash out in the field, and we harvested quite a few sweet potatoes from just two of our sweet potato vines. Yesterday Mike harvested the popcorn – even after discarding a few ears due to extensive earworm damage, we have 57 ears of the most beautiful, gem-like kernels of popcorn:

Each ear is only about six inches long, but they make up for it in pure beauty. They will have to dry out a bit more before we can use them as popcorn, though, so we have hung them from the rafters in the dining room. It’s a good thing we don’t often have visitors – they would think us rather strange!

And here is the sweet potato harvest from just one plant (we have either four or six more – hard to tell under all those leaves!):

I can’t take credit for this bounty, though – Mike is the one who’s done all the gardening!