Unemployment Towels

Not long after my last day at work, I started planning this set of towels. They're the most complicated project I've woven yet! The pattern was in an old issue of Weaver's Craft magazine (Issue 19, 2006), and it's called "Crocus in Snow". The original pattern was blue instead of pink. I have no idea whether pink croci exist, or whether they'd pop up out of the snow. But I like the pink; it's cheerful. Do petunias like snow? Probably not.

Yesterday afternoon I had a job interview, so while I was waiting for 1 pm to arrive I sat down at the loom, finished the last few pattern repeats, and cut the towel fabric loose from the loom!

I have now finished my unemployment towels, so I suppose that means I am ready to go back to work.

They started as a warp, or 423 pieces of cotton yarn that will run the length of all four towels.

Up close, the pattern doesn't look like much.

From a distance, the pattern appears: pink circles with yellow centers! Like magic!

Four neatly folded towels, resting on the loom that created them.

Please judge this Nook by its cover.

This week I joined the e-reading millions when I bought a Nook Simple Touch e-reader (is "Nook" supposed to be capitalized? I don't know...). I couldn't very well let it run around naked when I have scraps of fabric, batting, and interfacing stashed away unused, so I threw together this cover for it. This first attempt looks a little rough, but I plan to make a "real" one based on what I like and don't like about how this one works. I already don't think I'm going to try rounded corners again. What do you think?

The nook itself is a lot of fun. I am already persona non grata at the libraries in Fairfax and Loudoun counties for my tendency to hang onto library books longer than they would like. Reading e-books frees me up from having to make trips to the library, and it reduces the weight on the the end table on my side of the couch. So far I'm not excited by the selection of e-books that are available for loan from the library, but I hope that will change with time. For now I've loaded up on a few e-books that I have purchased and some others that are out there on the interwebs for free (yay, Sinclair Lewis books!).

Without warp, there can be no weft.

The first post-planning step in weaving is to make a warp, or a collection of threads into which the weft will be woven. These can be all one color, many colors, or a repeating pattern of two or three colors, but they need to be the same length and they are often quite long.

The easiest way to create a warp is to use a contraption called a warping board that allows string to be wound around a series of pegs. My first couple of warps were wound on the warping board of my co-worker who taught me how to get started, but if I was too impatient to wait until I could go over to her house I would create a warp using a combination of dining-room chairs and pegs clamped to tables. That gets rather tedious when I need 400+ ends that are about 5 yards long.

My first unemployment project was to make a warping board for myself. I used this pattern from All Fiber Arts:
http://www.allfiberarts.com/library/graphics/gallery/wrpbrd_pln.gif. It's a bit hard to read, but the pattern was good enough. I modified it slightly (of course) because I don't see myself ever needing a 16-yard warp.

Here's the end result! It's not beautiful, but it works.

Whole lotta weaving going on.

I'm making progress as a weaver. I'm working on my first set of dishtowels, all the while asking myself why I'm doing this when they sell perfectly good towels at the store. My conclusion is that it's challenging, satisfying, and (most importantly), while I'm weaving there is not a single glowing rectangle anywhere in my line of vision unless Rob is trying to play "Words with Friends" with me on the iPhone. It's also good to be a total beginner at something once in a while, and to be reminded that impatience will only get me broken warp threads that will cause even more frustration later on.

I decided to tackle a log cabin pattern as my first real project, a project that has a pattern and everything! As so many other weavers have said, log cabin weave does seem magical since the weave structure is just plain weave (one over, one under, one over, one under ... rinse and repeat). The magical pattern blocks of stripes that appear to be rotated comes from the order of the warp and weft threads. That means I have to attentively count weft threads while I weave, or the pattern will switch on me before I am ready.

Those are 457 individual warp threads, each 5.5 yards long, to give me four dish towels.

The work in progress

See the magic!

The last picture is of the fruits of my impatience, also known as broken warp threads. Since they're not connected to the back beam anymore they have to be weighted in order have the same tension as the rest of the warp. The key works well, and so do pill bottles with a couple of screws in them. These bobbers fascinate the kitties, especially when I am actively weaving and the threads dance a bit. All the more reason to keep it all covered up when I'm not around.

Gratuitous Cat Post

It's time ... as "totes adorbs" as the kitties always are, it's always good to put more cat photos on the internet. Cat photos, as we all know, are what the internet is made of.

I took this picture of Mr. Pumpkin napping in the sun while I was home resting after a bad day at the doctor. Someday I want my own sunning basket, complete with handles to facilitate my being moved to a better spot without even having to ask.


Shortly after Rob and I moved into our new apartment last summer, Miss Giselle terrified and amazed us by jumping 13 feet from the loft railing down to the living room floor below. Rob says she bounced, but I didn't see her hit the floor. She shook her head, shot us a "What??" look, and sauntered off. Realizing that 1) she has concluded that stairs are for clumsy bipeds and 2) as a cat, she is going to do what she is going to do, we decided to install wall ramps so that she can climb up and down from the loft in a species-appropriate manner. (Landlord be damned!)

Now that she's mastered climbing up and down, she likes to pace on the railing and sometimes she'll just sit on the railing and watch us. I call her my tree-trunk kitty, but she's not very well camouflaged in this explosion of apartment-white. She doesn't seem to mind.

My first woven scarf

Only 4 days after starting, I finished my first scarf! It is a coarse and plain weave, much like a peasant might wear. Or a hippie. :-) I couldn't even wait to cut the starting end free of the loom to try it on. It went quickly, and weaving it was really fun. I can't wait to start on something else!

Weaving 101

A couple of weeks ago I got the idea in my head that I wanted to learn how to weave. Good thing one of my co-workers at Audi knows how to weave! She invited my over to her house so she could show me how to get started. I'm working on -- what else -- a starter scarf. I used some of Deb's tencel yarn for the warp and some of my stash for the weft.

She told me she had a small loom that I could borrow which was pretty generous of her. I was picturing a table-top loom but she was kind enough to let me borrow a 4-shaft floor loom! We had to use the top-down-top-up procedure to get it into the back seat of Das Beetle, and even then I had to drive home with the passenger seat folded forward. Yay for convertibles!

Anyhoo, here it is all set up in our living room. It's a good thing that we had a big empty spot where that solstice tree was. The kitties have been little angels about it, although at first they thought I brought them the best cat toy ever. I keep it covered with a sheet when I'm not using it just to deter the right combination of curiosity and a skillfully-wielded paw.

I weave. I have woven. Weaving has been done.

The cat's pajamas

Pumpkin had a big day at the vet this week. He badly needed his teeth cleaned, and he had a cyst on his side that was probably harmless but getting bigger. So while he was zonked out after his dental work, the vet removed the cyst and left five stitches behind.

When I picked him up that evening, they told me that he had managed to chew or scratch out his first set of stitches and had to be resutured. He would need to wear a cone or a shirt, preferably both. When we got home the cone seemed to be making him panic, so I quickly made a shirt for him out of an old green t-shirt of mine. As soon as he was feeling better, he just as quickly squirmed out of it.

Shirt number two turned out a lot better! I made the neck narrower so it would be harder for him to get his arms through the neck. And it looks much better on him. I also reinforced the armholes since his escape strategy is to lick and bite the armholes until they are stretched enough that he can somehow get his arms out and slither out of the whole thing.

With all of the weight he has lost, the shirt makes him look very svelte!


Poor little guy -- the vet also found that he has bone spurs on his elbows. That means that he has arthritis. It doesn't seem to be slowing him down at all!

A Storm at Sea

Remember this?



Now it looks like this!


I really wanted to get this quilt top pieced before I move, since I had all of the pieces layed out just the way I wanted them. Now it's pieced and it's time to decide on a border fabric, and what batting to use, and whether to quilt it by hand myself, by machine myself, or pay someone to long-arm quilt it. Decisions, decisions...

I'm very pleased with how it turned out, as long as I don't look at it too closely and see my mistakes. But I've always loved this "Storm at Sea" pattern. Every time I look at it, I see something different.

And now for an important message

I'm Giselle the Cat, and I approve this scarf.