Everything's Better with Lambs

My weaving and spinning guild meets once a month, in various locations.  Today we met at a farm north of Reno, just over the California line, where a woman named Doris raises sheep.  She had a twenty-one-baby lambing season this year, and had promised that we’d be able to bottlefeed lambs if we wanted to. (Note: click on any picture for a larger image.)

My friend Sheila picked me up in her Prius and we set out; the farm’s a little remote, on a dirt road with tricky directions, so she was glad to have a navigator and I was glad to have a ride.  She’d picked up a bag of gluten-free bread mix for me, which was very thoughtful and much appreciated.  As we jounced over one of the dirt roads to Doris’ farm, we stopped to admire a goat.  There were other goats: in fact, there were many baby goats, who hop and skip just like those adorable videos you always see of baby goats.  I’m sorry I got no pictures of them; a dog was herding them and drove them away from the road and our car, which was a sensible, protective kind of thing to do.

After several more – and progressively rougher – dirt roads, we got to Doris’ farm and saw our first lambs, who were indeed adorable.  The babies came in various sizes and colors; some were in fenced fields with their mamas, but the bottle babies were in a barn. The adult sheep wore canvas coats.  We thought maybe they’d been recently sheared and this was to protect them from sunburn, but Doris explained that it’s to keep their wool clean.  They wear the coats all the time, and as their wool grows, Doris has to take off the smaller coats and put on larger ones.  Each sheep has four coats.

I didn’t get a picture of the grown-up sheep in their coats because I was so focused on the lambs.  I loved the lambs.  Of course I saw lambs in petting zoos when I was a kid, and probably even bottlefed a few, but I don’t remember being this enchanted with them.  I wanted to take them home.

The littlest lamb came when we called her and tried to nurse on our fingers.  During the guild meeting – held outside, in a circle, as people knitted or spun – I sat close to the barn door, and whenever the littlest lamb came to the barn fence and baaaaed, I got up and gave her a bottle (Doris had left several in the barn).

Sometimes when I came into the barn she’d just look up at me, with an expression that said “Feed me!” but would refuse both the bottle and stroking.  She was testing me, I guess.

Sheila and I both especially admired the black sheep and lambs, many of whom had white blazes on their foreheads and were even cuter than the white ones.  This lamb was a bit pushy, as you can see, and as befits the reputation of black sheep.

It was really hot outside, so Sheila and I each took a few minutes’ refuge in Doris’ wonderful weaving studio, which I wanted to take home with me (with several lambs inside), and which Sheila called a “womancave.”  Sheila did take home the guild’s seven-foot triloom.  She’s going to use it to weave a shawl and then lend it to me so I can weave a shawl. This will be much easier than weaving smaller triangles and trying to sew them together in any attractive fashion, a task which has proven beyond me.

It was a lovely morning, although all that outside time has kicked my allergies into overdrive, and I’m very sleepy and sneezy.  Completely worth it, though.  If you ever get the chance to bottlefeed a lamb, do.

And my, didn’t the cats think I smelled interesting when I got home!

Handwoven Two-Pocket Shoulder Bag

Here's my latest craft project. I used lengths of wooden dowel to reinforce the top of the bag and the bottoms of the two pockets. The body of the bag's one length of fabric, folded and sewn. Fun!

Outcomes

The surgery went fine, thank goodness. Our friend will be in the hospital for about a week; her husband will be staying with us, since they live a bit too far away for commuting to be practical. I'm grateful we have a guest room to offer.

Still no writing today, but I am wet-finishing two pieces of weaving I'm pleased with. Tomorrow the car goes to the garage and I'll be stuck home most of the day. Will. Write. Then.

Honest.

Later: Got a little writing done after all. Ha!

Monday

Hella original post title, what?

I didn't write today, alas. I wove a bit, swam a bit, wasted entirely too much time on Facebook, and wound up going to the hospital after all (to visit a friend, not to volunteer). The friend will have surgery tomorrow. I can't be more specific here for privacy reasons, but let's all pray for everyone facing surgery, shall we?

Meanwhile, my friend Inez flew back home to discover that a hailstorm had destroyed her car's windshield while she was gone. So while we're at it, let's pray for everyone dealing with severe weather. Also, car repairs.

Which reminds me that I have to take our car in to the shop, so they can fix my perpetually illuminated "check engine light" icon (which has already been fixed at least four times) long enough for the car to pass its smog so I can renew my registration. My mechanic assures me that the CEL issue doesn't interfere with the actual operation of the car. What he needs to do to fix it this time, though (since the other fixes have lasted about ten miles each) will cost about $400.

Gack.

Today the loom I want (used and discounted) was advertised on Ravelry, but someone else snatched it up ten minutes before I saw the ad. Just as well, given the car situation.

First Woven Scarf

Actually, it's the second, but the first was so ugly I'm not counting it. This one's not perfect, but I'm still happy with it. It's 7 inches wide by 61 inches long; hard to tell scale from this photo. Weaving it took less than two days!

Lotsa Stuff

Hi, everybody! Sorry not to have posted in a few days; I'm spending a lot of time over at FB these days. It really is a fun way to keep in touch with people.

A few items of note:

* For those of you in Reno: On Saturday August 13 at 2:30, I'll be giving a talk and reading at the Nevada Historical Society. This is part of a Worldcon promotion. The curator says that after my talk, "we will show the bad sci-fi movie 'Godmonster of Indian Flats' for Nevada-themed sci-fi." Mark your calendars! Bring popcorn!

* I now have 71,000 words of the rough draft, with completion of same estimated around August 10.

* I love weaving on my new Cricket loom and can't wait to try different techniques. My first scarf was short and ugly; the second, currently in progress, is longer and less ugly.

* It's really wonderful to be going into August without having to worry about prepping fall classes. I needed this sabbatical!

* Caprica is well; she goes to the vet for her FIV/FLV tests tomorrow, and, we hope, will be "released to GenPop," as Gary puts it, soon thereafter.

* Last night we watched a TV special about the Serengeti. As a baby elephant and mom traipsed across the screen, James Earl Jones praised the devotion of elephants and said, "The bond between mother and daughter can last fifty years." My first thought was, "Lucky elephant. I only had my mother for forty-nine." I'm doing better, but still miss her.

* There was a wildfire across the street two nights ago, about half a mile away. We watched it from Gary's study; when someone started pounding on our front door, I thought maybe we were being evacuated, but no, it was two friends who'd come over to watch the fire. Summer sport in Reno! (Cars lined the street, too.) Luckily, they got it under control quickly, and there was never any threat to structures.

I think that's about it. Hope you're all well!

Woven Scarf in Progress

It's far from perfect, but I still like it!

An Extended Metaphor

Greetings from sweltering Albuquerque, where the locals are praying for rain and those of us staying at this hotel are praying for reliable wifi (which I think I've finally found in a public area) and decent coffee (the acquisition of which required a hotel shuttle ride to a Starbucks this morning). The conference is great; the hotel's more than a little wonky.

I've been doing some knitting here -- finished a pair of socks for Gary's mom -- but I miss weaving, as much for its psychological and cultural resonance as for its physical pleasures. Weaving's been a very potent symbol since people started doing it, of course, so my thoughts on this subject probably aren't remotely original, but I wanted to get them down anyway.

My novice understanding of weaving, or at least of the weaving I've been doing, is that a cut or broken weft thread is no big deal: you just use another piece of weft and keep going. In fact, the fabric's more interesting the more varied the weft is. But if one of your warp threads breaks or is cut, you're in big trouble, because that's the structure that holds everything else together.

On an individual level, the weft is the variety of our life: the different things we do, the different places we go, our varied friendships. The warp would be whatever we consider our bedrock, the things it would be crisis to lose. For some people, that means job or career; for others, it means social status; for most of us, it includes both our core beliefs and our most significant relationships.

On a larger level, the weft is the huge diversity of life and cultures through time; the warp is God, gravity, thermodynamics, whatever we think of as the glue that holds everything together.

Often, though, we don't think about the glue. In weaving, there's a style -- often seen in rugs and tapestries -- called weft-faced weaving,, where the weft is so closely packed together that you can't see the warp threads at all. This would correspond to a life or creation so full of day-to-day processes and routines that the warp -- the underlying structure or ordering principles -- never gets thought about, and effectively becomes invisible.

We become aware of the warp in two circumstances; either when a warp thread breaks (when we lose one of our foundations) or when the weft thins out, becoming less densely packed and revealing the underlying structure.

In chaplaincy, it's axiomatic that people facing The Big Stuff -- disease, disability, death -- are usually engaged in some kind of theological reflection (even if they don't recognize it as such) and welcome company and guidance. The Big Stuff, losing your health or your mobility, or facing the end of your life, or watching a loved one die, can feel like the breaking of a warp thread. Everything's falling apart. A good chaplain (or any other friend or advisor) can try to help the person re-envision this: No, your warp threads are still there, but you have to work with different weft now.

That quintessential chaplain's question, "So how are you getting through this?" asks the person to examine and name warp threads: friends, family, faith, whatever. The warp is what keeps us going, what allows us to continue into the future, or to imagine a future at all.

Hospital patients also engage in theological reflection, though, because they're lying flat on their backs and, often, have so little else to do. Their daily routines are temporarily absent. They aren't going to work or school, doing housework or gardening, chatting (as much) with friends. In other words, their weft threads have thinned out to the point where they start asking, "Hey, so what're those other things under there?" For some people, illness is the first opportunity they've had or taken for this kind of exploration, for the examination of their lives' deep structure.

That's as far as I've gotten with the metaphor, and people who know more about weaving than I do can probably say more about how one repairs broken warp threads. But I do think this metaphor shows why weaving has always been such a powerful image.

Thoughts, anyone?

Advancing the Warp, Part 1

So here's the scarf freed of the bottom notches in the cardboard, with ends tied off to compensate. As you can see, the scarf gets narrower further up -- I tried to prevent that, to no avail. It's a crooked little scarf, but it's my crooked little scarf, and I'll wear it happily when I finish it.

Advancing the Warp, Part 2

Here's the warp held (reasonably) taut by the chip clip. I use a thick wooden ruler to adjust tension when I need to. I gotta say, although this Rube Goldberg loom is working, working on it's a bit like trying to build a car with my teeth. After this project's done, I'm getting a real -- but inexpensive -- loom!

The Scarf So Far

It's a little rough around the edges, but I'm having great fun with it, and in general, I'm pleased.

I'm going to sign up for our art museum's two-day course in tapestry weaving, in September. That should help with edges!

Warp Thirty, Mr. Sulu

Here's the warped loom, finally (although, as you can see, I haven't gotten much actual weaving done yet). Today would have been Mom's 86th birthday, and in her honor, I decided to spend extra time on handicrafts today. As far as I know, weaving's one of the few she never tried, but I think she would have been fascinated.

The Engines Canna' Take Much More of This

Here's the back of the warped loom. Keeping all thirty warp threads sorted out was definitely a challenge, but it would have been worse if I'd used the clothespins! The cardboard roller works pretty well and is easily secured with binder clips.

I wouldn't want to do anything longer, though. (This warp's about seventy-two inches.)

Yarn on the Hoof

Driving to church today -- a route that takes me through a flat, ugly part of town, with lots of dismal strip malls -- I happened to glance to my left and saw, standing at a fence . . . two llamas! I goggled at them for a minute, thinking maybe they were huge, misshapen dogs, but quickly realized my error. I think maybe they'd been sheared recently; one reason they looked so weird is that large swathes of hair were missing.

I wonder if somebody around here is making llama yarn. Although, given the recent heat, they might have needed a shave to cool off, poor things. Anyway, they were grazing in a nice little enclosed meadow which, when I scrutinized the area as closely as I could on my drive-by, included some barn-looking outbuildings. I've never noticed this before. A lot of Reno used to be farm or ranchland, and there are still pockets of grazing land where you least expect them: a herd of cows munching away next to a bottling plant or self-storage place, say.

On my way back from church, I drove by the meadow again to see if I could get a photo of the llamas (llami?), but I didn't see them. I'll keep looking.

I turned the heel on my mother-in-law's first sock today. I'm afraid I may have made it a smidgen too long, and the thing looks huge anyway because it's made from relatively inelastic yarn, but I've learned that socks that look too big often fit fine. I hope to have them finished and mailed off to her by the time I leave for Albuquerque in twelve days.

The socks have created a delay in the scarf-weaving project. However, last night I had an epiphany and realized that instead of using thirty different bobbins for the warp (talk about a headache!), I can use a smaller notched piece of cardboard as a roller for all thirty warp threads at once. If that works, it will greatly simplify things. The moderator of the small-looms group on Ravelry thinks it should work, so that's heartening.

I'm still toiling away on the book, of course. For some reason, my left hip's been killing me for the last two days -- usually my right one's the culprit -- and I think that too much sitting time may be part of the problem, so I'm trying to get up and move around (limping like Quasimodo) at least every half hour. Swimming and using the elliptical has helped somewhat. I've also temporarily traded in my backpack for an extremely tiny pouch purse to lighten my load. I have to lug a fairly heavy backpack around when I go to Albuquerque (which I'm determined to do without checking, and paying for, luggage), so I want all the muscles rested and healed before then. I'll also have a rolling bag, of course, but I can't fit everything in there, and the backpack's the next best thing, as long as I'm walking okay.

Ah, aging. Remember when you bounded out of bed in the morning with no thought as to whether your joints would behave themselves? I'm infinitely happier now than I was in my twenties, but I could still do without the achy-creakies.

Back to Knitting

Two years ago, I think, when I was completely infatuated with knitting socks, I distributed sock questionnaires to everyone I know. Yesterday, my mother-in-law's completed questionnaire arrived in the mail. She'd just found it on her desk. Luckily, I already had some sock yarn of exactly the weight, type and color she wanted (orange cotton, sport weight), so that worked out very well. I started her first sock this morning.

I'm continuing to research weaving; today I was tempted to buy a small, inexpensive loom, but then my clips and clothespins arrived and I decided to go back to Plan A for the scarf, mostly because I'm curious about whether it will actually work. I'm not going to start with the Sedona scarf, though. I'll do at least one other first, and will tackle the red rock scarf when I feel like I have at least a clue about what I'm doing.

The hospital was very slow today, but after last Friday, that was relaxing. I came home, took a long nap, and then wrote a bit. Now Gary and I are going to watch some television on DVD (True Blood, one of our favorites), and I may have a smidgen of my Kahlua.

Oh, speaking of over-the-top genre narrative, last week we saw Super 8 and thoroughly enjoyed it, although the image of a truck causing a train derailment was a bit too close to recent events here in Nevada. We highly recommend the movie, however: it has a solid story and believable, interesting characters, something of a rarity in these days of yowsa special effects. (It has those, too, but they're secondary to the story and characters.) I'm always grateful and relieved to see any film that doesn't make me leave the theater shaking, or scratching, my head and asking, "Why did anyone decide to spend the GNP of a small country on that?"

Today's Effort

A little crooked, but it was fun to make. As Gary said, "Hey, you're only using a cardboard loom."

Today I started planning an insanely ambitious scarf, which is probably beyond the reach both of a cardboard loom and of my beginning weaving skills. Everything I've read says that to make a scarf on a cardboard loom, either the cardboard needs to be as long as the scarf, or you need to make the scarf in loom-sized sections and sew them together. Seems to me that if you have your warp on bobbins, and have a way to clamp the finished cloth to the bottom of the loom as the project advances, you should be able to weave a scarf in one piece on a workably-sized loom.

So today I ordered clothespins to use as bobbins and some kitchen clips -- the kind designed for bags of potato chips -- to use as clamps. Since we're talking about thirty bobbins, rewarping the thing whenever I need to weave a new section is going to be a hefty piece o' work. But looms with fancy rollers and whatnot cost approximately my annual salary (okay, that's a slight exaggeration), and I think cardboard and tapestry looms are better for freeform weaving, anyway.

So, the scarf: Longtime readers will recall that last July, my sister and Gary and I drove through Arizona's red rock country on our way from my cousin's funeral in Flagstaff back to our hotel in Phoenix, where he and his wife lived. We stopped in Sedona, where I bought some gorgeous orange laceweight yarn that reminded me of the color of the sandstone formations. I've since tried to knit with the stuff, but it's just too fine, and keeps defeating me.

But if I weave with it, especially in conjunction with other, thicker reddish-orange yarns, I think the results could be really pretty, and might even look something like the layers in the rock formations.

Or, I could just make a giant mess of expensive yarn. It's a toss up. But what's life without risk?

Tomorrow's the formal beginning of my sabbatical, and also the first day of my state-mandated paycut, and also the first day of our new, drastically unimproved health-insurance package, with its huge deductible.

I gotta say, I've been in better moods (although I'd feel infinitely worse without the sabbatical).

And on that note, back to work on the book.

Diagonal Lines

Today's challenge was to weave cloth with diagonal lines, otherwise known as twill. The white portions of the cloth here came out nicely, I think, although the fabric isn't reversible. The twill pattern I used with the brown yarn is reversible, but the yarn keeps it from being very visible (even when, as in this case, I kept the weft yarn farther apart than I normally would). For any stitch I want to show, I need to use very plain, non-fuzzy yarn. In this group, that means the white: the brown and orange both do best with simple tabby stitch (one over/one under).

This morning I tried a piece alternating groups of white and brown warp threads, as per mbj's suggestion, but I was also attempting twill and did it completely wrong, so alternate warp threads on the reverse side wound up completely outside the weft. This looked like the macrame project from hell, so I didn't take a photo of it. I did bring it to tonight's church knitting group; the only other person who showed up said she liked it, so I gave it to her.

The knitting group's going to be very slow through the summer, I think, but I'll just hang in there and hope it eventually catches on.

Better

It would look better if I'd left longer fringe, but now I know that, and it will be a perfectly respectable coaster.

Tomorrow I'll start experimenting with patterns that show the warp.

Such fun!

A Little Woven Thing

Last night we finished watching the second season of PBS' Craft in America, which regularly makes me cry because everything the artists are making is so beautiful. One of the artists they featured was a weaver, and I became intrigued, so last night I read an article about how to weave on a homemade cardboard loom, and this morning I made one and produced the above object, a 2.5"x4.5" bit o' fabric (rug for a mouse?) which won't make anyone cry except in pain: but hey, it's my first effort, and considering that I have no idea what I'm doing yet, I think it could have turned out much worse. It's no object of beauty, although I had fun playing with the different colored yards, but it's an honest-to-goodness piece of dense, solid, tough fabric.

Anyway, making it was fun, and I think I'm going to try to produce more objects (coasters? placemats? maybe even scarves?), because among other things, it's a nice break from knitting -- I love knitting, but other ways to play with yarn are nice too -- and it will help use up scrap yarn. I realize that everybody else in the world went through their cardboard-loom phase in elementary school, but I seem to have missed that class.

Obviously I don't already have enough hobbies.

Equally obviously, I have a lot to learn, like what to do with the warp threads. Oh, mbj, turns out that scratchy wool I bought at the art store makes a pretty decent warp, and I bet the yarn there's for weavers.

Our local art museum school is offering a weaving class in September. If I'm still interested then, I may sign up for it.

Oh! And speaking of yarn, there's going to be a knitting panel at Worldcon! And I'm on it! What fun!