house – Page 3

June 11, 2012 by Tien Chiu Leave a Comment

Packing the studio

T minus 12 days to moving! Time to quit playing with Tinkertoys and get serious about packing. Yesterday I whipped out the tape gun and the U-Haul boxes and packed up most of my craft books. I have two large bookshelves mostly full of various craft books, but I have managed to (mostly) fit them into eight book boxes, with a few tagged to be given away. I will have to do some weeding-out once I get to the new house; there won’t be room for everything, and frankly there are some books I haven’t used in years and really should get rid of.

The end result of all that packing is an appalling mess. It’s not that the studio wasn’t a mess to start with; it’s just that all the nice orderly stuff has been packed, so what’s left is the stuff strewn on the floor, table, etc. There is a lot of it, and it will be need to be sorted and packed. And then there are the bedroom, dining room, and kitchen left to be done…plus a bit more in the living room, which is partially packed. And did I mention the garage?

Well, at least it will be motivation to shred the last three years of credit card statements, pick up the random cones of yarn, and sort the detritus on my desk and craft table. I’m dreading it, though.

At least the zucchini is still happy:

You’ll notice it’s started to bloom. The flood of zucchini will soon commence!

June 3, 2012 by Tien Chiu 3 Comments

Moving swift-ly

Today was exhausting but liberating. I moved four carloads of stuff from our current house to the new one, starting around 6am. I disassembled, moved, and reassembled a six-foot utility shelf. And I moved Sophie-the-loom, breaking her down into her component parts, packing her carefully into the car, and reassembling her in the garage (her new home). The AVL warping wheel and loom bench went with her, of course. And…drum roll please…I moved the very first item into my new fiber arts studio! (My dress form – photo in my previous post.)

The flooring installers finished today. The house looks glorious – light, airy, and clean. And, since all the contractor work is done, I can now start moving delicate and/or awkward items to the new place. I am sternly telling myself not to move the entire fiber arts studio over immediately – I need to have some stuff here if I am to do any fiber arts work at all between now and moving day, but I am just dying to see how the new studio will work out. We’ve also hired professional movers, so it seems rather silly to schlep all my stuff myself, one carload at a time, when three burly guys and a twenty-six foot truck are eminently more suited for the job. But I’ve never been good at waiting and I really want to be moved in now, dammit! so I can get on with my fiber art instead of being stuck in eternal we’re-moving limbo.

So what’s a girl to do if she can’t pack the studio and can’t work on anything else, either?

Well, I’m experimenting with swifts. As far as I can tell there are basically five variations for yarn-holding devices:

the umbrella swift
the wheel-style swift, e.g. the Goko swift
the squirrel cage swift
the straight-armed swift (which looks like a skeiner except with adjustable arms to accommodate different skein sizes)
the very bored spouse (which holds the skein between two outspread arms until it gets tired of this and wanders off to have a beer)

I already own two umbrella swifts, one wheel-style swift (the Goko), and have ordered a squirrel cage swift. I’ve tried using my Crazy Monkey electric skein winder as a straight-armed swift (it’s too heavy to really work well). And for some reason, I just haven’t been able to get the yarn onto the spousal swift – it keeps muttering something about having better things to do than stand around holding yarn all day.

Anyway, the Lacis umbrella swift was working well enough for small skeins, but I got curious about swifts. So I have a lightweight squirrel-cage swift on its way. What’s a squirrel cage swift? Imagine two hamster wheels mounted on a stand, some distance apart, with the skein stretched around the hamster wheels. As the yarn reels off, the skein rotates around the hamster wheels, keeping the skein taut while allowing the yarn to reel off evenly. (Am I the only one visualizing some very dizzy hamsters?)

Meanwhile, Deb McClintock was nice enough to send me this photo of a Japanese-style swift, sold by Habu Textiles:

Lao-style swift sold by Habu Textiles, photo courtesy of Deb McClintock — Japanese-style swift sold by Habu Textiles, photo courtesy of Deb McClintock and Takako Ueki

Now this is ingenious. It’s a wheel-style swift, similar in concept to the Goko swift sold by Schacht, but much more adjustable, simpler, and a lot cheaper to make. It’s basically two sets of wooden spokes stuck into a hub, and connected with loop of strings, which can be moved up and down the spokes to accommodate larger or smaller skeins. The skein goes around the strings, and friction holds the whole arrangement in place. It’s very lightweight, too, a huge advantage when dealing with fine threads.

So of course I’m going to try building one. How do you build one when your tools are all packed?

Time, my friends, to go to the toy box. Literally. I’ve ordered some wooden Tinkertoys. (Fiddlestix brand, actually, but essentially the same item.) These, if you didn’t grow up with them, are little wheels with holes drilled through the center and around the edges. One connects the wheels with tight-fitting rods to create all sorts of wonderful little structures, and Tinkertoys were among the great joys of my childhood. As far as I can tell, they should work perfectly.

At any rate, I’ve ordered a batch of Tinkertoys, and they should be here on Wednesday. I’m hoping to make the swift on Wednesday night, and will post photos if and when I succeed.

June 3, 2012 by Tien Chiu 1 Comment

How weavers mark their territory

My room Sure beats peeing on things. 🙂

June 2, 2012 by Tien Chiu 3 Comments

House and garden

(Warning: no fiber content in this post. I promise there will be lots of interesting fiber stuff in the next one, though!)

As requested, here are photos of the new flooring and the garden!

Here is the flooring we are paying a small fortune for:

stranded bamboo flooring, viewed lengthwise

It’s stranded bamboo, which is shredded bamboo mixed with some sort of resin composite and fashioned into incredibly hard “wood”. The bamboo grows quickly and is renewable, so this is considered a “green” flooring – though that wasn’t our first reason, it’s a nice bonus. It’s also a beautiful color, like golden honey, with just enough texture to be visually interesting.

The flooring actually isn’t that expensive as flooring goes (I think about $6-7/square foot), but the house is 1100 square feet and we’re redoing everything except the bathrooms, so it’s pretty pricey. (That sucking sound you hear is the contractor opening up and vacuuming out my wallet!)

Here’s another photo of the flooring, which looks truer to color on my monitor:

stranded bamboo flooring, viewed crosswise

And, here is the living room, which previously had dingy paint and ugly, ratty gray carpet with lots of stains:

a partial view of the new living room! Much nicer than ratty old carpet and dingy, scuffed-up paint. — a partial view of the new living room!

And now, let’s go out into the garden.

First, a terrifying tactical error on my part: I bought and planted a zucchini plant without inquiring which type it was. It turns out it’s a vining type, not the bush variety I usually plant, and if past experience is any measure, it’s going to take over the entire back yard and flood us with zucchini:

the ominous zucchini, looking innocuous as it plots to take over the world

This is three weeks after transplanting. Tremble, world!

Next come the melons:

two cantaloupe plants - Petit Gris, I think. — two heirloom cantaloupe plants - Petit Gris, I think.

A pair of Sugar Baby watermelon plants. I've never tried growing watermelon before!

Some of the tomatoes are happy transplants:

And some are not:

An unhappy-looking Sungold tomato plant. I'm giving it a little fertilizer to see if it helps.

I decided to get ambitious with vining plants, and planted butternut squash:

With these little devils, I know their propensities, and so the spearmint and peppermint come jailed in planters:

the ominously happy spearmint (peppermint in background)

When I tell you the spearmint in the above photo was mostly only about half an inch tall a week or two ago, you’ll understand my terror of unleashed mint. Much better in planters.

And, finally, some plants I am determined to keep going:

Transplanted violets, looking a bit stressed.

We planted and drip irrigated these at our current location, and they did OK, but they’re looking a little stressed after transplanting. Too much sun?

We transplanted some into a pot earlier, and those are looking much happier:

happy violets - at least until transplant time!

I love violets (I have fond memories of them as a child on the East Coast) but for some reason they are not at all common here. I’m guessing it’s either too warm or too dry. But our front lawn is part shade, not really suitable for vegetables – a wallow of violets, perhaps? They would be beautiful in the springtime.

And that’s it for now! Stay tuned, we’ll be back to fiber arts in the next post. I am collecting an embarrassment of swifts (three already, a fourth on the way, and building a fifth) in my continuing experiments with winding off fine threads.

June 1, 2012 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

New page on handling fine threads

Just thought I’d let you know that I’ve created a new page about handling fine threads during the dyeing and unwinding process. (It’s also accessible via the How Tos–>Weaving menu.)

Fiber-wise, nothing much has happened, but there has been great excitement at the new house as we watch the flooring go in. They are now almost finished with putting in the flooring and are starting work on installing the baseboards. The house looks SO much better now! The walls are a nice clean white and the floors (natural color stranded bamboo) are honey-colored, with enough visual texture to be interesting (and hide scratches!). It feels light, airy, and clean – quite a difference from the ratty old carpet!

We’ve also put in timers for the sprinkler on the front lawn (installing the actual sprinkler system will happen later) and made a few plumbing changes. And I’ve officially scheduled the movers for June 23.