It has been record-breaking cold out here – which, in my area, means it actually drops below freezing for a few hours in the wee hours of the night. Tonight is predicted to be about 30 degrees. For most of you, that’s probably a pleasantly crisp winter day, but around here it can cause all sorts of havoc – bursting water pipes, dead or severely damaged trees, and so on. Plus massively increased heating costs, because many houses (including ours) were built without insulation. (Our climate is so temperate that it is really only needed a few days a year.)
Since my loom lives in an unheated garage, it was probably about 45 degrees yesterday when I set out to weave. The dobby fan was not happy. (Probably the lubricant had solidified.) So I had to defrost the dobby box with a hair dryer and put a space heater underneath (set on low) to get the loom working. Fortunately, after defrosting the loom worked just fine! But I am a bit puzzled about how to defrost my soon-to-be-acquired new loom in similar circumstances, since its dobby box is located six feet off the floor. Oh well. Another problem for another time.
Anyway, once I got the fan working, things progressed smoothly, and I wove another two yards of pseudo-fabric. It looked like this:
(Yes, that’s my weaving studio. Messy and industrial-looking, but it works fine for me!)
I’ve since treated it with soda ash solution, and am letting it dry. Since it is both cold and rainy, this will probably take two days. So I’m guessing that I won’t be able to apply the dyes until tomorrow, which means no weaving until Wednesday or Thursday. Since I fly out on Friday to disassemble, ship, etc. the new loom, this probably makes it the last warp on the current loom. *snif* I’ll miss that little loom, even with a major upgrade. It and I have been together for quite some time, and despite its quirks I love it dearly.
What will I do while the warp is drying, dyeing, and drying again? Work on two things: the book and the website. The website is rather haphazardly organized, and needs to be revamped to reflect what I am up to now. This means changing the navigation, which is easy enough once I figure out what I want to change.
A more interesting question is whether to merge the book site with my personal site. I am inclined to say “yes”. So I will likely make the Creating Craft blog a subset of my personal blog, and I will probably take down many of the Creating Craft posts so as not to spook potential publishers. If you want to save copies of the posts for your personal use, do it now.
And I want to reorganize the front page of my site. This is a custom PHP template, so doing this involves coding PHP, which I’m not very good at. So this may take awhile.
For the book, I want to substitute some meatier chapters into my book proposal, to give potential agents/publishers a better idea of what the book can do. That, of course, means writing them up from the blog posts. I plan to do a good chunk of that work while I’m traveling to Minneapolis. I’ll be there from Friday to Tuesday morning, and am uncommitted for most of that time. It is going to be Way Too Cold for me to go outside for the fun of exploring – I looked at the weather forecast, and it’s positively gruesome (at least for a Californian). A high of -1 Fahrenheit? Twenty degrees I can sort of process, but minus one is completely beyond my imagination. If the gods had meant humans to live somewhere that cold, they would never have created California. Or at least my region of California. T’ain’t natural, I tell you.
Meanwhile, the kittens seem to be acquiring vices. I really must counsel Fritz on the dangers of binge drinking:
He does look happy, though! Hopefully he woke up without a hangover. 🙂
