Bob Kruger, the owner of AVL Looms, paid a house call this morning. He figured out the problem within half an hour, fixed it within another half hour, and then spent the next three hours inspecting and adjusting the loom. It’s so well-tuned now that it practically sings!
Here’s the tune I was playing on it this evening:
900 picks, no errors that I could see. Wonderful! I can’t wait to weave more on it.
I’m quite pleased with the sea turtles now. I re-sleyed the warp to a denser sett (48 ends per inch rather than 40 ends per inch) after deciding that my first sample was too sleazy. With the denser sett, the ripples show much more clearly, but are tantalizingly subtle, too – appearing and vanishing as you change your angle of view. I’m eagerly waiting for tomorrow morning, when I’ll weave a few more sea turtles and then cut off and wet-finish the samples. These are destined for a sample exchange that is due March 15 – I’ll do a second set as well, for a sample exchange due in May. And then I plan to weave a scarf in that pattern, then scrunch-dye it in a very weak solution of turquoise, to give the impression of turtles swimming through Caribbean waters. I’ll likely do a beaded hem in gradient colors, as I did for my In the Inferno scarf.
Major things are happening on the book front as well. I decided that the book was really ready to send to editors right now (as opposed to a week and a half from now, when I had planned to send it) and shipped it off to my editor at Schiffer Publishing for her review. I’ll probably send it to my other editors within the next day or so. This frees me to start working on other things, like the sample exchange and my entry for Handwoven‘s “Handwoven for the Home” contest.
And in cat-land? Well, we did a lot of spring cleaning over the weekend. An entire carload of stuff went to Goodwill, and we cleared out a big pile of boxes that had been cluttering up the living room. Since one of those stacks had been regularly used as a cat perch, we had to replace it, of course. (Can’t deprive the cats!) So we bought a big new cat tree for the bedroom, and moved the comfy old cat tree to the living room, right where the stack of boxes had been.
The cats are thrilled. Fritz and Tigress have spent the last two days lounging in the old cat tree, cuddled up to each other and even grooming each other! which is pretty unusual these days. They aren’t as enthused about the new cat tree yet, but they did explore it pretty thoroughly, and I’m confident that within a few days, it too will be covered in cat hair.
Here are a few photos of Tigress exploring the cat tree. (I wasn’t quite quick enough to photograph Fritz exploring it; by the time I arrived, His Highness had already done his once-over and headed leisurely out to check out the other cat tree.)
And here’s a photo of the two of them cuddled up in the comfy old cat tree, looking out the window:
And with that, it’s off to bed! Tomorrow will be an exciting new day, full of weaving adventures.
Love the turtles!