Weaving With Cousin Sam, Yet Again

We're back from the General Sam Houston Folk Festival. We have a breather now between the rush of spring demonstrations just past and the Texas Folklife Festival in June. The demonstration loom was finished just weeks before the beginning of the season.  Overall, it's been a resounding sucess.  It's a four-harness, counterbalance loom which can be warped at home, collapsed to fit into the back of our SUV and set up at a demonstration site.  As much as we previously looked like a modern-day covered wagon, we look even more so now!

The Covered Wagon

Here's the loom in the SUV with the tent alongside and the spinning wheel tucked in as well.  Once these things are in, the rest of everything is tucked in as best we can.  The display table which used to go underneath the loom now has to be strapped to the top of the car, but we're a self-contained unit!

Once the loom was finished I warped on a "maiden voyage" project - a overshot scarf.  The warp was a space-dyed sock yarn.  The tabby weft was sewing thread while the pattern weft was sock yarn in tonal purples.  Overall, it looks good.  It was mostly a "iron the bugs out" project.  Here's the loom with the first project on it.

Maiden Voyage

We've had an ongoing problem with the shafts staying horizontal. In the end, I used Joanne Hall's suggestion of elastic loops keeping the upper shaft bars horizontal. It seems to work just fine.

The loom's first outing was to a 3-day workshop with Joanne.  A counterbalance or countermarche loom was required for the Opphämta sample and I had the only one available.  I loved the workshop and I need to take photos of my samples.  The Opphämta is interesting in that it gives a great deal of flexibility in the pattern design, although it is some slower than traditional overshot.

The St.-Francis-Upon-The-Hill Renaissance Faire was the loom's second outing and first demonstration.  Although we were without Cassie this year, I decided to try a "worm to ecclesiastical stole project.  Well, I didn't spin the yarn nor did I dye it.  However, I wove the fabric for the face of the stole at the Faire (mostly).  I chose Gothic Cross from Marguerite Porter Davison's A Handweaver's Pattern Book, and wove it in two shades of purple silk. What a joy silk is to work with!  Gothic Cross is a beautiful pattern but I had trouble keeping track of where I was while demonstrating.  I probably won't try that again!  But I did finish the stole (at five o'clock in the morning!) in time for Elizabethean Mass the following morning!

The Stole

Next up was a one-day festival at Camp CAMP, a camp in the Hill Country set up specifically for children with developmental difficulties, who can't attend a regular camp.  What wonderful work they're doing!  They wanted a mini-Folklife Festival, so we found ourselves in company with a blacksmith and a flintknapper.  I'd never seen flint shaped into spearheads or arrowheads before.  It's fascinating!  And to me, a blacksmith is a magician.

I chose to do a traditional overshot pattern in very untraditional colors for the Fest.  It turned out beautifully!  I don't have any photos of the piece on the loom, but the piece is still in my possession and I'll get photos of it soon.

Our next outing was the San Antonio Highland Games.  Sadly, the piece we chose to weave didn't make it through the transportation process.  Something happened, either in my setting the loom up or during moves, that caused the tension to go completely crazy.  Once I had the tension corrected, I had breakage problems in the warp.  I finally had to give up on the piece.  I'll weave it again this summer as it was a beautiful sash in the MacLean Hunting tartan.  The sash was intended for Cassie, so it hurt doubly bad to lose it.

And now for Cousin Sam's Festival!  The Festival was only two days this year instead of three.  Friday was still School Day, but with maybe 2/3 the number of children we saw last year.  The loom covered itself with glory.  I tried Barleycorn, a structure I've never tried before.  I was scared at first because Barleycorn is based on huck lace which is an unbalanced weave. Counterbalance looms want to move two shafts at a time.  Huck lace puts three shafts against one.  However, huck has been woven for centuries and must have been woven on counterbalance looms.  The loom, of course, did just fine.

Barea Linen (Barleycorn) Towels On The Loom

I warped four towels on the loom, intending to weave off two during the Sam Houston festival and the last two during Folklife. However, I was well into the second towel by the end of the first day and into the third by the end of the second day.  I'll weave these off and choose another project for Folklife.  The first two towels used a pale willow green as the pattern weft.  I was getting a little tired of it by the end of the second towel, so the last two are being done with a periwinkle shade - kind of a purple-blue.  They're turning out very well.

Here I am in my prairie regalia weaving away at the Festival.

And one last shot of the entire booth with George demonstrating drop spinning.

And it's not like I'm doing no weaving in between festivals.  I have another Atwater-Bronson lace shawl on the Glimakra.  George upgraded it to a 10-shaft countermarche loom and this is its maiden voyage.  I've designed four overshot scarves, one of which is one the loom now.

But that's all for now.  More later!

Weaving Scarves (and Spa Cloths)

It's funny when you feel as though you're not making any progress and then you start counting up the finished items... and realize that you've gotten quite a bit done indeed!  I'm feeling much more cheerful about my weaving.  Not much is being done on the floor looms, but my rigid-heddle looms, especially my little Cricket, have been working their heddles to the bone!

Spa Cloths

I've finished nine spa cloths.  They're all hand-finished, washed, dried and ready to find new homes.  The four in the photo above are destined to leave here in the next few days.  The three in the bowl... well... we'll see what happens with them.  I have lots of yarn just waiting to become more spa cloths.  There's more of the lavender, lavender linen to make a different version, a set of natural colored yarn for yet another set and much more waiting in the wings!

Scarves and More Scarves
I usually don't like making scarves.  I seldom wear them and don't often give them as gifts.  However, they're great as samples.  They typically don't use much yarn and they're a finished project.  I've been working with my Cricket, developing projects that could be woven on a narrow loom and still be attractive.  Here are two scarves that depend on the color of the yarn to make them work.

Autumn Scarf

This scarf, while technically woven on the Flip loom, could easily have been done on the Cricket.  It has very subtle color variations that don't really show in the photograph. The warp is striped in stripes, alternating wide stripes of forest green with narrow ones of brown.  The weft is the autumn-colors Kauni Effektgarn (color EV).  It's easy to see the gradual shading of the Kauni, but the warp stripes give a depth to the scarf that's more subtle.

Faux Ikat Scarf

Now this one is just fun, and I mean fun!  You take a handpaint sock yarn with shorter color runs (this isn't the time for Mini-Mochi or Kauni) and arrange it on the warping board so that the colors pool together.  You can't wind the warp "out-and-back" style as you usually do, you have to wind it around in large circles.  The diameter of the circle depends on the repeat of the colors.  I used Great Adirondack's Silky Sock for this scarf.  A single color repeat was a bit over a yard, so the finished scarf with two color repeats was.. very long.  Not The Fourth Doctor long, but long.  The interesting thing is that it's not as easy to get the colors to pool as you might think.  Sometimes, I think they had been caught in a skein backwards or something because the winding would be going along well and then would come a thread that didn't fit at all.  I finally realized that those threads would have to simply be cut out.  Things went better after that, until I saw that one rogue thread made it into the warp, dead in the middle.  I pronounced it a design element and off we went!

The scarf is woven off with Malagrigo Sock in Violeta Africana, a beautiful tonal purple in Malabrigo's cushy-soft merino wool. I am really proud of this scarf!

Lace on a Rigid-Heddle Loom
But tabby weave, while pretty, was getting a bit boring, so I decided to play with weft floats.  In multi-harness weaving, this is how laces such as Atwater-Bronson and Huck laces are done.  The same thing can be done even more easily with a rigid-heddle loom.  All that is needed is the addition of a pick-up stick.  The pick-up stick is placed such that every other slot warp thread is caught.  Then when the pick-up stick is used in place of the down heddle position, only half of the threads are lifted, which means the weft thread skips over all of the hole warp threads and half of the slot warp threads.  This draws the warp threads together just close enough to make a normal down heddle pass stand apart from the weft float section.  And this gives us lace!

Bamboo Lace Scarf

The first lace scarf was woven in a fingering weight pure bamboo, Midori by Fiber Lady. I met the Fiber Lady folks at KidNEwe this year.  Their yarns and rovings are beautiful - hand-dyed in luscious colors.  But the natural color is beautiful, too, and I thought it would make a lovely lace scarf, as indeed it did. I bought WAY too much yarn and roving from them, but I probably won't see them again for a year, so I had to have enough to tide me over!  The next ones will probably be woven on the floor looms... maybe.  Again, this scarf was technically woven on the Flip, but could easily have been done on the Cricket.

Aqua Panda Silk Scarf

And here's the last scarf in the collection, a lace scarf woven in Panda Silk.  The warp is the subtly variegated Blue Lagoon color while the weft is the solid Aquarium.  The Blue Lagoon gives the scarf very subtle warp-wise striping. While it was on the loom, I thought it would have been better to have woven it with the colors reversed.  Now that it's off the loom and finished, I think I prefer the way I did it.  I'm working on another Panda Silk scarf with the variegated in the weft and the solid in the warp.  We'll see how it compares.

So back to the looms and more weaving!

O Come, O Come

Advent Wreath 2011

We've made it through Thanksgiving and into the Advent season.  This year, I decided to make a new Advent wreath. The old one was too big to fit anywhere, so I took the purple decorations from it and put them on a large candle wreath. Then I put the candle wreath of evergreens inside a wood-looking (resin) Advent wreath/candleholder I've had forever. With new candles, it's ready to go. All I could find this year were blue candles and the pink one. I prefer purple candles, but the blue ones looked rustic and were so pretty, that I used them. Maybe next year I'll actually start well before the Advent season!  (It would be a first!)

In the center, in place of the white Christ candle, I put the Madonna and Child icon given to me by my friend from Turkey. As I recall, the icon is from Ephesus, traditionally the last home of the Virgin, as she was taken there by the Apostle John.  It's on my Bucket List of places to visit.

The Christmas wreath is on the door and another on the wall beside the garage. After St. Nicholas' Day (December 6th), I'll start putting the "candles" in the windows and begin the Christmas decorations.

Making Spa Cloths

Blue Spa Cloths on the Loom

The Cricket rigid-heddle group on Ravelry is doing a spa-cloth weave-along. I thought they'd be really good gifts for Christmas this year, so I decided to participate... well, as soon as I could free up the Cricket loom.  This is a difficult thing as there's always a project on the Cricket!  But I did find some linen yarn at Yarnivore as well as the Grass yarn (hemp and cotton) for the weft.  The first warp I put on was a bit over a yard in length and was a slate-blue linen.  The weft was a marled blue Grass yarn.  I used a #8 knitting needle to form the loops. I have one finished cloth and three others waiting to be hand-finished.

The linen yarn was awfully hard on my hands, so I used Hempathy - a hemp / modal blend - for the warp on my current set.  Again, I'm using the Grass in the weft and will get four cloths from this warp.  Wrapped with a lovely bar of hand-made soap from a local soap-maker, the cloths will make wonderful gifts!

Wax On / Wax Off or The Big and The Little Of It

It's been a busy time around here. While we've been getting ready for the Austin Celtic Festival, I got a crazy desire to look at Glimakra looms. We've been talking about building a small reproduction loom for demonstrations and the most authentic loom we've seen is the old Swedish loom at the Institute of Texan Cultures. We went to closely examine their loom and then looked at modern Glimakra looms. They're so close! We toyed with the idea of getting a smaller Glimakra, but George is sure he can build one, and I know he can.

See the small Cricket loom on the bench of the Glimakra??

I've always wanted a Glimakra, but the Standard, their workhorse loom, is big.  I mean BIG.  Although how would I know since I'd never seen one??  Something made me browse Craigslist and what should I see but a Glimakra Standard loom for sale. It was 45" wide and supposedly 4-harness, 6-treadle countermarche.  Well, I wanted a countermarche, figuring that it would be more useful than counterbalance.  However, I already have two 4-harness / 6-treadle looms so why this one?  I got in touch with the Glimakra USA representative and found out that Glimakras can be upgraded.  She gave me tips on what to look for in a used loom and information on setting up a Glimakra.

When we went to look at the loom, we found that it was counterbalance, not countermarche, and had been sitting in a garage for years.  But it was in pretty good shape, had tons of accessories, and since I'd found out that Glimkras can be almost infinitely upgraded, we decided to make an offer.  By the end of the day, my birthday present was a pile of lumber in the garage and no place to put it.

Right after getting the Glimakra home, we were up against the annual insanity known as Yarn Crawl - the 4-day event held among 9 area yarn shops. Working Yarn Crawl leaves time for nothing else, but I did manage to do one thing... actually four things. I wove three scarves on a rigid-heddle loom and bought my own Cricket loom.

The Cricket Loom

Why another loom, especially a loom that some consider "toy" looms? Well, it isn't a toy, it's a very well-designed small loom. It's compact enough to take with me, I can warp it in less than an hour and it's a great adjunct to my larger weaving life. I keep it downstairs and weave while I'm enjoying my morning coffee. No sitting at the computer, no working on something else, just sit and weave and sip coffee and look out the windows.  (It's time to feed the birds again!) A great way to start my day!

The Chakra Scarf

The Chakra Scarf

So first off the little loom was this Chakra scarf!  It's made with Noro's Silk Garden Sock in the warp and Mango Moon's Chakra yarn in the weft. The stones and beads in the Chakra yarn are hand-tied by women in Indonesia and Nepal. Mango Moon is a Fair Trade company and sales of their products benefits these women. I wasn't pleased with the scarf on the loom, but I really like it off-loom. The stones and beads in the Chakra give it a weight and drape.  I like to wear it with a black dress or top.  It makes a statement!

There are two more scarves off the loom from the same Silk Garden Sock yarn as the Chakra scarf.  They'll have to be photographed and posted soon.  The scarf on the loom right now is a "let the yarn do the work" scarf. The warp is a handpaint lace yarn - Ella Rae Lace Merino and the weft is Capra, a silk / mohair blend also from Mango Moon.  Mohair doesn't work in the warp as it's almost impossible to get a clean shed, but it's lovely in the weft.

Dyeing My Own

But the next project will be a color project to the nines!  Twelves, actually... This involves a confession. I'm afraid of color. I'm afraid of making a mistake. I don't know what goes with what nor do I know how to add that spark that makes things really glow. But I figure I can learn, so I'm going to learn. I'm starting the learning process by working through Gail Callahan's Hand Dyeing Yarn and Fleece. Last night's project was dyeing 12 small skeins of sock yarn in 12 colors of the color wheel.  All the dyes were mixed from three stock solutions - red, yellow and blue - made with McCormick's food colors.  Yep, this is a kitchen project.  When all the skeins were in the dyebaths (small Mason jars) and arranged in a wheel, I got a crazy idea. I'd mis-measured and made 40-yard skeins when I intended to make 20-yard skeins. However, 40-yard skeins gives me enough to do a color gamp scarf project on my trusty Cricket.  As soon as the mohair scarf is off the loom, I'll warp on the color gamp project with each shade set off with black yarn.  This should be pretty!

The Finished Skeins

Pinwheel Towels

And yes, I finally finished all six towels of the pinwheel project.  Four will leave for the towel exchange, but two are staying here.  George refuses to use them, but I love them... hanging on the stove handle... not being used...


The Autumn Leaves Shawl
But wait!  I didn't leave the poor Glimakra as a pile of lumber in the garage! Last week was the project of starting to clean out and rearrange the upstairs.  Now that both kids are more or less moved out, it's time to rethink how we use the house. This is their home, too, but it's time that old stuff leaves to make room for the new. So after hauling and moving and giving away and throwing out, there was a spot for the Glimakra in the loft. Wax on / Wax off??  The wood was so dry that every bit had to be conditioned with our favorite Ashford Spinning Wheel wax. If I ever leave the Cricket unwarped for five minutes, it'll get the same treatment.


Setting up a counterbalance loom requires having a project on it. I tried to think of something that wouldn't be too much of a challenge to weave and finally thought of a chenille shawl project kit I've had laying around for years. I hauled it out and warped it onto the Glimakra. At first I was wondering why anyone bothers to put on anything less than 10 yards, but the shawl is fine.  It didn't take but a time or so around the warp beam, but everything got on and tensioned correctly. Then came tying up the loom and setting everything up.  After only a few mistakes the old girl was weaving again.

Which caused the biggest surprise. I like counterbalance looms.  I'm going to leave her that way for a while before I upgrade her.

Leave it as it is.

Never mind the turpentine.

Just leave it as it is.

It's fine.

-- David Wilcox

Weaving with the Bionic Eye

Okay, back to the looms! I finished the shadow weave scarves after the surgery, but didn't consider that the real test of my vision. I AM pleased with how they turned out, so before telling the tale of warping with new vision, here are the finished scarves!

Shadow Weave Scarf - Tromp as Writ

The first scarf is "tromp as writ," meaning that it is treadled exactly as it's threaded. In this case, it forms little boxes of alternating design. Shadow weave tends to be complex and this one was no exception. It's one of the few where I've had to keep the draft beside me to remember the treadling sequence. Having said that, I must say I love this draft!

Shadow Weave Scarf - Alternate Treadling

This is the alternate treadling for the threading I used. It's a simpler treadling and gives a kind of striped effect. It should have gone faster than the first treadling, but the surgery interrupted its progress, so it took longer to complete.

After twisting the fringe and wet-finishing the pieces, the chenille turned out soft and slinky. Very nice!  Chenille isn't my favorite thing to weave, especially in the warp. Several warp threads broke - some from Cat Assistance - but it wasn't a big deal to fix and they turned out well. I may tackle chenille again sometime.

Pinwheel Towels

Thread for the Towels

I'm participating in a handwoven towel exchange in the Warped Weavers Ravelry group. I came across the draft for color-and-weave pinwheel towels in Handwoven Magazine's  Winning Towels - an e-book with the drafts of the winning towels from their recent competition. The original towels were done in teals and white with a specific yellow accent.  I liked the colors, but I couldn't match all the colors the designer used. When I did finally choose colors - not quite as teal, more to the blue - I really wanted the specific yellow accent she used.  It's not too eye-bending yellow, but does provide a good contrast.  I finally found one supplier with a mini-cone of the yellow. After quite a search, I found the other colors I needed from the same supplier and so finally got the yarn ordered.

And now to warp!  Because of the color sequences, measuring the warp was a challenge, but it let me think out of the box and think how I use my warping board. This is the first time I've used the warping board for a long warp since we redesigned the weaving studio. I'm still not really happy with how it works, but it will do until I think of something better. Once the I started measuring the warp, it was time to sley it into the reed. In some ways, I was kind of scared, not being sure if I could see. The good news is that since my intermediate and close vision is improving in the "bionic" eye, it wasn't as difficult as I thought. I sleyed most of it without reading glasses.

Of course, threading the heddles is the tricky part, but again, no problems. I used reading glasses... and then found myself looking over them as I was threading.  So I took them off for part of the process.  I think I can say that my vision isn't hampering me in my weaving any more than it ever did, and in some ways is much better.

Pinwheel Towels on the Loom

These are turning out very well! The interplay of the colors with the pinwheel pattern is very interesting. When I was warping the loom, I wondered if it would be possible to see the pinwheels. Traditionally, pinwheel alternates 8 light colors and 8 dark colors. No contiguous eight colors are the same in this draft. But it works and you can see the pinwheels in areas where the weft color sequence is the same as the warp color sequence.  Hopefully, it can be seen in this detail photo:

Pinwheel Towels - Detail

The pinwheels are easiest to see in the lower left corner. I'll get more photos as the process continues.

I think I can say... I'm back in the weaving room!

Seeing on the Other Side

Such an Interesting Time!  Early in the year, I noticed that my 6-month-old glasses weren't working.  Everything was blurry out of my left eye.  I went to my optometrist.  He tweaked and tried and couldn't get a correction that worked.  At one point I asked why I was seeing the letters doubled.  He got real quiet and went out to get his father, an optometrist with many more years experience.  Of course, the worry was that I 1) had a brain tumor, 2) was having a stroke, or 3) something else.  The older optometrist was able to get a prescription that worked, but it was a worrying thing.  Within less than six months, my vision was blurry again.  For other reasons, I thought I might be having a detached retina issue in that eye.  (My first detached retina was 20-plus years earlier in the other eye.)  This time, I went to the ophthalmologist. The good news was that no, there was no retinal involvement.  The bad news was that I was developing a pretty sizable cataract.  I'm in my mid-fifties, which is young for this sort of thing, but there we are.  I had a mild infection in that eye, so he prescribed drops and told me to come back in two weeks.

Within the two weeks, I started seeing rainbow halos around lights.  The good news was that the infection was gone.  The bad news was that the cataract was getting rapidly worse.  He referred me to the cataract doc.  A month later, I went to see the cataract doc who took one look and pretty much scheduled me for surgery.  It was a bit more involved than that, but it really came down to two choices, a distance-only implanted lens or the newer multi-focal implanted lens.

After hours of research and long talks with my doctor and his surgical assistant, I opted for the newer multi-focal lens.  I knew going into the operation that it might not solve all my vision issues in that eye, but it should help a good deal.  The surgeon had two openings in his schedule.  The first was the Monday after we moved my daughter back up to college and the second was two weeks later.  I opted for the second option.  Unfortunately, that gave me time to worry about the whole thing!

Cataract surgery is supposed to be one of the quickest, easiest surgeries available, with a very good record of positive outcomes.  That may be true, but it's MY eyes!  I managed to worry anyway.

Having just dealt with insurance and hospital / surgical expenses for my daughter's recent surgery, I finally figured out that it's almost impossible to forecast the expenses for a surgery.  Why it's taken me this long to realize that, I don't know, but I was tired of hidden expenses I didn't know about until months later when I'd get a bill from someone I'd never heard of for services I had no idea were rendered.  This time, darnit, I was going to be prepared.  Especially since the multi-focal lens is considered by most insurance companies to be elective surgery.

The short version of the story is that I still have no idea who did what or what I owe.  I got the name and contact information for the anesthesiologist and the surgical center.  After bouncing around a few people, I did finally get an estimate for the anesthesiologist - a first since I've never been able to get one before.  I got an estimate from the surgeon.  The surgical center wouldn't talk to me until the Friday before the surgery when I was out.  So I've yet to figure out what I owe them.  And are there others?  Pathologists?  (That's a big one, by the way.)  Lab fees?  Fees for sitting in the waiting room?  God alone knows what I'll be faced with.  I could get no information from the insurance company as to what they'd cover.  All I got was a form letter with a repeat of the policy.  That much I could have read for myself.  I got no help at all as to what they would cover and what they wouldn't.  We're two weeks out from the surgery and I still don't know.

So why does this happen?  I don't know, but I think it's a combination of factors.  Most patients don't know to ask questions and the information is seldom offered and never completely covered when it is.  Each doctor, hospital or surgical center, lab, etc. does their own billing and there is no central organization that coordinates them all.  Or if there is, I've never found it.  Since patients aren't awake for most procedures, they have no idea who was in there doing what or what went where or much of anything.  Most of us don't want to know.   Most of us us pay every bill presented and never question the insurance coverage or whether the bill is even valid!  There is a huge disconnect between patient and the medical community and no apparent way to bridge it.

Gentle readers, if you're about to tell me the recently enacted healthcare legislation will solve all this, please save the electrons.  It won't.  It hasn't.  If anything, it's made it more difficult to get information, not less.

And that's just the financial part of it.  I've been waffling about outlining my experiences, but I think I'll go ahead and do it.  Just remember, this is MY story and these are MY experiences.  Your mileage may vary.

First of all, let's be clear about one thing that never came up during all my research.  I was awake for the surgery.  They tell you you're going to be put under conscious sedation and you assume that means out for the count.  It doesn't.  What it means is that you'll be sedated for about five minutes while they numb up the eye, but you'll be awake for the procedure itself.  I didn't find this out until five minutes before the anesthesiologist walked in.

Next, they put a drape over my face with only the affected eye uncovered.  Standard procedure and I understand why they'd do it.  But again, I wasn't warned of this.  I'm claustrophobic.  So in addition to the deep breathing / relaxation exercises I was doing to deal with watching my eye being rearranged, I had to cope with the claustrophobia.  Well, it gave me something to do, I suppose.

On the up side, the surgery is very fast and totally painless.  The anesthesiologist was with me the entire time keeping watch over me (that's what they do).  If I felt anything, I was to tell him and he'd take care of any pain issues or anything that came up.  Happily, I didn't need anything special at all.  I got through the procedure fairly easily.  Recovery was very quick and I was able to walk out of the center and be driven home.  My poor husband!  I was even able to backseat drive all the way home!  And that was with one eye bandaged up and no distance vision correction in the other!  Woot!!

Then came the next day and the discovery of the wrong eyedrops.  I went in for the follow-up appointment and discovered that either the surgeon's office or the pharmacy messed up my prescriptions and I'd been using the wrong eyedrops prior to surgery.  As it turned out, I don't think it was a big deal, but it added to my post-surgical worry factor.  That all got corrected, but still.  It could have been very bad.

And the lens?  Well, there's one thing that, with a degree in psychology, I should have known, but didn't and again, nobody warned me about this going into the procedure.  With the multi-focal lens, at least, I'm having to re-learn how to see out of that eye.  For six months or so, my other eye had been taking the load of all vision.  Now with the new lens, my left eye needs to take up its load again, but how?  I literally have to learn to use it.  It's coming along, but not as fast as I thought it would.  We're two weeks out.  Distance vision, which I thought would come back fastest is still blurry.  I'm wearing a distance contact lens in the other eye, so my distance vision is decent, but the new lens is not quite there yet.  Intermediate vision is surprisingly good.  Close-up vision is dicey.  It's good for most things, but tiny print is hard for me as is reading in low light situations.  I keep reading glasses for when I absolutely need them, but am trying to work with the new lens only in the left eye.  But this is a work-in-progress so we'll see where we are in a month or so.

So my advice to you?  Ask questions.  Ask a LOT of questions.  Don't be shy and don't let anybody make you feel that you're imposing by doing so.  Very few people in the medical and/or insurance business will tell you everything you need to know.  Ask.  It's up to you.  If you can't think of questions during appointments, call the office later and ask.  Keep lists.  Make spreadsheets.  Just do it.  If something doesn't seem right, ask.

If you get a bill and don't know what it's for, call 'em up and ask.  I think the more consumers ask and pound on providers until we get answers, the more the culture will change and information will be more freely given.

But freely given or not, it's your body, your eyes, your experience and, let's face it, your life.  It's your right to know and you're in charge.

A New Kind of Weaving

Wow!  It's been forever since I posted.  Still going through crazy times and trying to make it work.  I think ultimately it will, but I'm still trying to find balance.

Shadow Weave
The latest Weave-a-long (WAL) on Ravelry's Warped Weavers group is shadow weave.  Years ago, I made the Shadow Weave Bamboo Shawl from Handwoven magazine.  It's a great shawl, but kind of hard to find the rhythm. While wondering what to do for the WAL, I stumbled upon Marian Powell's 1000(+) Shadow Weave Patterns for 4, 6, and 8 Harnesses.  Figuring out her drafting notation takes some doing, but it really isn't hard and the drafts are so beautiful, they're worth it.  I chose a four-harness draft to use for a couple of scarves. Webs had 1900 YPP rayon chenille on sale and they had some beautiful colors available. I chose a soft rose and an ecru to make up these scarves.  The first one is still in-progress.  Here it is on the loom:

Marian Powell's 4-40-1 Shadow Weave draft

Smaller Weaving
But while I've been working on the shadow weave project, I've decided to try my hand at some smaller weaving. I got interested in tablet (card) weaving, inkle loom weaving and pickup weaving. All are used to create narrow bands of fabric, many highly decorated.  Here are the three projects I've recently finished:

From left to right: two sections of the inkle-woven band, a section of the pickup band and a section of the tablet-woven band. Of the three, the inkle-woven band came out the best, I think. I "got" the concept of warping for the inkle-loom more quickly than the others and I was able to keep it a decently even width with good selvedges.

The first project was the tablet-woven band.  I used the rigid-heddle loom frame to hold the warp. Unfortunately, I used a DK cotton knitting yarn.  It was smooth and pretty, but way too thick, I think.  I'll use something much more fine next time.

The pickup band was the most recent project. Instead of using a backstrap loom, I put about a yard of warp onto my smaller rigid-heddle loom. I threaded the warp through double 12-dent heddles for an EPI (ends per inch) of 24.  That worked fine with 5/2 perle cotton, but I must say that using double heddles made the pickup a bit more interesting.  The double heddles cause one level of warp to lie in two planes instead of one. It's okay because I flattened out the warp in my hand, but still...  It's something to look out for.  Here's a side view of the warp:

Side View of Pickup Warp

You can see the upper and lower plane of the warp as well as where the warp threads cross for the pickup (and dropdown). In pickup weaving, designs are formed by picking up heavier warp threads so that the ones necessary for the design are on the top.  Half of the threads will naturally be at the top because of the shedding mechanism of the loom.  Here's a photo of the shed formed, before the pickup stick is inserted:

Okay, the pickup stick is inserted into the plain shed to highlight the threads!  But you can bet that some of those threads shouldn't be showing and some that aren't showing should be.  So you take your trusty pickup stick and pick up those that should be on top and push down the ones that should be hidden.  Here's what it looks like with the pickup stick inserted and turned on its side:

Easier said than done at the beginning, but it becomes really logical soon enough.

I made more mistakes on this than I care to admit to.  The worst one was misreading the instructions and thinking that the weft had to be the same color as the outer border of the piece.  That's quite true in tablet weaving and inkle weaving, but the weft shows a little bit in the pattern area of pickup weaving, so I should have made the background color, the outer border and the weft color all the same.  I'll fix that for sure in the next project, but that's why there are green speckles in the background of the hearts.  I probably shouldn't have started with anything quite as complex as I did, but hey, it was fun!

And that's what it's all about - having fun!