Keeping Calm and Weaving On

Linda's Shawl on the Loom

I love my cats.  I really do.  Their terminal cuteness has saved their little rear ends more often than I can say.  Ming, the Siamese, doesn't get into much, but is insistent about getting us up in the morning.  At the moment, we don't have to be up at any particular time, but he has taken it as a personal mission to have us out of bed by 8.  There is no level to which he will not stoop in his efforts to get us out of bed.  When forced to it, he'll resort to what my husband calls the "B&B Run."  I'll let you, Gentle Reader, figure out the meaning, but suffice it to say that having a 12-pound cat run over your private parts will wake you up in the morning!  Calliope, other than having disappeared for almost three interminable days, doesn't get into too terribly much.  Unless, of course, you count digging up African Violets, stealing rocks out of the Lucky Bamboo to use as Cat Hockey Pucks, pulling up the carpet and generally being demanding.  Then there's Myst.  She's the littlest.  She's cute and sweet.  She has the most winsome face and shy little mannerisms.  My son took one look at her and reminded me that it's always the quiet ones you have to watch out for.  How right he was!

Happily Tying On

I got Linda's Shawl warped onto the loom last night.  At one point, I thought I was going to scream and throw things across the room.  Then I realized that I'd been working on it for too long and needed to take a break. After making pizza and feeding the family, I came back to it and poof!  It all went on beautifully.  I tied on to the front apron rod and ran through the sheds.  Oops!  One pair of crossed threads.  Easy-peasy to fix.  I tied back on, checked the tension and threw the first shots to spread the warp... and discovered two more threading mistakes.  Okay, no sweat.  I fixed those and did one last tension adjustment.  And we're off for real!  About 8 inches of weaving later, I admitted to myself that the right selvege just wasn't right.  I can't imagine how I could have been so consistently loose, but it was bugging me.  I went to bed.

This morning, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as my father would say, I sat bravely down at the loom and pulled out all eight inches.  Surprisingly, it came out easily and re-wove perfectly.  I absolutely adore this shawl.

Okay, so what's with the cats?  Well, after lunch, I decided to deal with the latest round of medical bills from my daughter's surgery and all the insane regulations restricting the use of HSA's.  This is enough to put me in a cranky mood right there.  Uber-governmental regulation has cost myself and my husband our jobs as well as pretty much destroyed the company for which we worked and the bank to which the company was attached.  Then to add insult to injury, insane governmental regulation has made it so using OUR money to pay for our daughter's surgical expenses is time-consuming and fraught with... let's just say stupidity and leave it at that.  You, Gentle Reader, will not be surprised that I wasn't in the best of all possible moods after dealing with the latest round.  And then I heard it.  Noises from the loom.  Except that I didn't know it was from the loom.  The cats love to play in paper.  Why, I couldn't tell you, but they do.  They're especially fond of paper I use as warp separator.  If I leave any on the floor, it gets used as a cat toy and pretty much shredded and destroyed.  I'm getting better about picking it up.  But I knew there was one sheet that needed to be put away.  I assumed Myst was in that sheet.

Wrong!  She had discovered the paper hanging from the warp beam, unrolling as the warp was advanced.  When I got in there, I found the paper shredded and a small grey and white kitten on top of the back beam and the warp with a guilty look on her face... and a broken warp thread.  I won't say there was cat spit on the broken thread, but I won't say there wasn't.  Little rat!

So I hauled out the hooks, the T-pins, and a length of yarn left over from the warping.  It wasn't all that big a deal to repair.  And then... I caught her on the loom again!  She hopped down when she saw me coming and batted innocently at the paper.  So then, my friends, I did an awful thing.  I sat at the loom and began to weave.  When I got to the treadling where three of the four harnesses are in the air...  I let all three of them drop with a BANG!!  She shot out from under the loom like a bullet.

That'll teach her!

For probably the length of time it takes her to get in her afternoon snooze.  I anticipate a running battle.

But it's still a gorgeous shawl!

Shawl Detail