Saturday 21 January 2017

Whoops! I blinked and it's 2017!

This year has been a year of contrasts.  There has been enormous amounts of travel, we bought a house in France (or rather finished buying a house in France), we started learning French (dear God!), I graduated (finally), number one son married the love of his life (we're pretty fond of her too), a dear friend left this world far, far, far too soon, and life generally trundled on (actually I'm still pretty much in denial about Michelle's death and I think our first visit to Canberra is going to be quite confronting.

The most fabulous thing that happened in 2016
I actually write a lot of blogs in my head.  There seems to be a running commentary inside my head while I'm doing things and I take photos to sort of punctuate the commentary.  Unfortunately it very rarely comes out of my head and into the aether.  But maybe today will be different.

We have just come back from Europe.  David had meetings in Brussels and I stayed for a in Sept Forges.  David of course is straight back into work, but I have the luxury of actually starting the year in a more relaxed manner - except for French, that is never relaxed.  You know, they say that when you dream in a language you're getting the hand of it, but I'm not sure that nightmares about conjugating verbs is quite what they mean.  However, I was able to return the wrongly packaged ink cartridges in France, in French and no-one laughed - well not to my face anyway.

Where was I....whoops, the wind has just started barrelling about and blowing pillows off the bed.  Maybe it will actually rain.  Oh dear a crow just got blown off the electricity wires......

One of the things that I've really enjoyed this year is weaving.  I've played around with my little saori loom and had a great time.  Then I decided to weave curtains for Sept Forge.  The windows in the house face the road.  Now, the road is just outside the front door, literally. It is a private road and there are very few houses on it, but people do walk down it and can peer inside and see what we were doing, if they were so inclined and if we were there.  In my head the windows are quite small, but they're not really, in fact two of them are doors.  But I made my plans anyway.

Right on the road.

Our kookaburras laugh at people walking past.

Things were going swimmingly.  I decided on a pattern (Swedish Mosquito Lace - very nice and windowy), ordered the thread (a lovely 20/2 white unmercerised cotton from Halcyon Yarns - which arrived almost immediately), planned the warp (this is when I began to question my sanity), spent a week winding a 15 metre warp (with 537 ends - which is a squidge over 8000 metres in case you were wondering), and then went to wind it onto the loom.  David was helping (he's very brave) and it went pear-shaped almost immediately.  The raddle leapt to it's doom and suddenly I was hanging on to a whole lot of out of control threads.  The inevitable happened.  Two warp threads broke and all the others decided to do something else that evening.


First there was the eight threads that had glued themselves together with fluff from the green linen.


Then there were these lot who decided to party on together.  Notice the lovely smooth, untangled right hand group?  

Two days later I had untangled the mess and managed to get it on the loom.  I didn't throw anything or scream even once.  David very sensibly left the room and then fed me wine when I came out.  See why I married him?  All was well.  Mostly

That was when I realised that when I had made adjustments to balance the pattern I had neglected to remember that my loom was only 60cm wide.  The warp was wider.  Okay, so now there are threads being wound off the back beam and onto little knitting bobbins as I weave - or through the brake, or under into the warp, or where-ever it wants to when I'm not looking.  I finally tied everything on and started weaving.  Cool, it looks like it's going to work!  Except for the selvedges, the tension at the selvedges came loose, horribly loose.  Sigh.  I battled on and kept the selvedges sort of okay by shoving bits of cardboard and chopsticks in as I wound on.

Last night I got to just over two metres of fabric and the right selvedge went out on strike, it was time to declare selvedge defeat.  I decided I had enough to make a pair of curtains for the smallest window, so this morning I cut it off.  There were some pretty ugly bits.



So about those selvedges.......

Whoops, that's where a chopstick missed.

But on the whole it was looking okay



I gave it a little wet finishing and things started looking even better.  After I pressed it gently with my awesome 6kg dry iron a small miracle had happened.  It looked just like it was supposed to, except for the green bits, the original was all white.





The all over look


The lace.  These little windows just magically appear during the wet finishing.

And just look at those selvedges. 
Tomorrow I'll tie the warp back on and continue weaving.  Next time we go to France I'll be able to take curtains with me!  Cheers everyone!!


This is the best way to learn French, drinking wine with the neighbours.